Abstract
Media events have become important sites of political activity, affective engagement and cultural struggle. They involve (often spectacular) visibility, the articulation and circulation of meaning, and the formation of powerful discourses and counterdiscourses. The imaging technologies at the heart of media events shape our encounters with place and our geopolitical imaginaries. This chapter explores the realm of visual media events through the lens of the attacks of September 11, 2001. These attacks were profoundly mediated, and they generated complex reactions and ongoing political contestation across a diverse array of media realms. I aim to use this event to demonstrate the complicated and contingent politics of visual media at a time when media apparatuses have multiplied and saturated the world as never before. In the age of global visual cultures and media convergence, images and discourses spill interactively across digitalized, networked platforms and a multitude of screens including televisions, computers, tablets and smart phones. The new media geographies to which they give shape become invested with affects and meanings as different groups and agents struggle to promote particular modes of sensemaking and political interests. These geographies define a terrain upon which dominant forces and interests work to establish and stabilize discursive control, but encounter image insurgencies and alternative knowledges that disrupt and contest such control through the disarticulation and rearticulation of its visual and narrative elements.
It matters profoundly, we are convinced, that the horrors of September 11 were designed above all to be visible . . . .
September’s terror . . . was premised on the belief (learned from the culture it wishes to annihilate) that a picture is worth a thousand words . . . .
At the level of the image (here is premise number one) the state is vulnerable; and that level is now fully part of, necessary to, the state’s apparatus of self-reproduction. Terror can take over the image-machinery for a moment—and a moment, in the timeless echo chamber of the spectacle, may now eternally be all there is—and use it to amplify, reiterate, accumulate the sheer visible happening of defeat.
(Boal et al. 2005: 25–8)
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Notes
- 1.
I intend “articulation” in the theoretical sense this term has acquired within cultural studies, where the simultaneity and conjoint productivity of its dual meanings (contingent linkage and expression) are given emphasis. When signifying elements or agents are contingently linked (articulated) to one another, this linkage generates particular meaning effects (articulations) and mobilizes particular actions and agents (to which these meaning effects are in turn articulated or contingently linked). See Grossberg (1996).
- 2.
The CNN footage containing Fig. 18.1 is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3nLbc_8wfM.
- 3.
- 4.
Operation Northwoods was designed to involve terrorist attacks by the US government on major US cities and the false attribution of the attacks to Cuba as a pretext for the invasion of that country; the operation was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 but rejected by JFK. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods.
- 5.
Mos Def, Immortal Technique and Eminem are hip-hop artists; “Bin Laden” is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ4iZE2yoLk. Farenheit 9/11 is a film by Michael Moore that won the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and went on to become the highest grossing documentary of all time.
- 6.
- 7.
“Vidding” involves the production of music videos through the appropriation of material from media sources such as TV shows and news reports. By recontextualizing music and media images in this way, vidders comment on the music, the imagery, or both. Vidding (the production of “vids”) has become a common practice within contemporary fan cultures and has had an influence on practices of political remix videomaking: the appropriation and recontextualization of media source material to make political or critical arguments (see McIntosh 2010).
- 8.
See, e.g., Geraldo at Large (13 Nov. 2012), available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pFPobKeSzKQ.
- 9.
See, e.g., Richard Gage on Fox TV affiliate KMPH’s breakfast show (May 2009), available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO2yT0uBQbM.
- 10.
These were arguably the two key moments of high media spectacle in the US in 2008. Obama’s speech at Mile High Stadium on 28 August was delivered to an estimated crowd of 84,000 people in attendance, and his 4 November electoral victory speech was delivered to a Grant Park audience estimated at 240,000. Countless millions around the world watched both events on TV.
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Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, grant number MAU1108.
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Glynn, K. (2015). Visibility, Media Events and Convergence Culture: Struggles for the Meaning of 9/11. In: Mains, S., Cupples, J., Lukinbeal, C. (eds) Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_18
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