Comrade Fear: A Strategy for Shifting Truths

The Sociological Quarterly, 1999

Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word "fear" pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or "travel" from one topic to another. The use of fear and the thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a "discourse of fear," or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the Los Angeles limes, and ABC News) reveals that the word "fear" appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a "problem frame" and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy and reliance on formal agents of social control. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. Edmund Burke Nearly everyone knows how to read the news of the day. But using news as a resource for everyday life is different from treating it as a topic to understand how social reality is ordered, maintained, and repaired. On the one hand, news reports as resources serve to set emotional tones for the rhythms of life and reminders of ideals of the order and disorder that threaten peaceful neighborhoods and the cosmologies of "normal order." On the other hand, news reports as topics provide a window into organizational frameworks of reality maintenance and their relevance for broader societal definitions of situations, courses of action, and assessments of a lifeworld. News reports, as a feature of popular culture, become intertwined in everyday life, political speeches, and other entertainment forms such as movies. This article reports on the way fear is being used to provide entertaining news that also benefits formal ________________________________________________________________________

Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of Right-Wing Populism, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2018

To artists and cultural workers, the present task is to research and understand the processes in which propaganda and propaganda art construct our current reality. Propaganda is, in essence, the performance of power, the employment of various infrastructures—in the realms of politics, the economy, media, and the military—to construct a new normative reality. Considering that there is no reality absent from power, one has to question whether there is ever a politics without propaganda. But not all powers are alike, and thus propagandas in the plural might differ and conflict as well. The powers of the War on Terror and Bannon’s international alt-right are fundamentally different than those of popular mass movements, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, pan-European platforms such as DiEM25, or the stateless democracy of the Rojava Revolution in northern Syria. They might not be able to avoid performing a propaganda of their own, but theirs is one that proposes an egalitarian narrative about the reality we live in and the world we can create collectively

Warburg's Atlas methodology, used in his unfinished work Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927Mnemosyne ( -1929, sought to analyse different human aptitudes -such as dance, ritual or religion -by comparing images that represented these phenomena in order to find a common way across different fields and disciplines. His aspiration was to not only portray human emotion but also identify, through figurative forms, a common thread within history. We use Warburg's Atlas methodology as a foundation for this chapter, to further his aims. We asked the authors and editors who were originally selected to participate in this book to choose an image they thought represented fear and the visible or invisible ways of its induction. We then employed these images to create a canon, or table of images, that embodied different ways of seeing the topic of fear in order to produce our Fear Atlas. Our purpose in producing this Fear Atlas was to find possible correspondences and analogies between this book's different chapters and the images chosen for this research. Our overall aim is to give this book an interdisciplinary conclusion by making visible points of contact and correspondences between apparently distant forms and disciplines. history, its intensions and distinctive features, its construction and how it has been subsequently used. The next four sections describe the Fear Atlas we have mounted in this book. These sections also discuss the interdisciplinary reflections and insights drawn from the chapters and their theme of visible and invisible fear. The final section draws the book to its interdisciplinary conclusion.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016

This volume addresses the juxtaposition of the visible and invisible in Fear, Horror, and Terror. When addressing the visible and invisible we must ask ourselves what is it that we are encouraged to see, what are the processes of image production, and what powers underlie the image? The production of image, both visible and invisible, is a privileged space where the state, world order, security issues, military engagements, social issues, culture, identity and ideas are managed in, and through, a specific discourse. Within this discursive space, a variety of ideas – both the action and the concept – is consistently managed. It is politicized and made instrumental even while eliding and obscuring important determining contexts. This discursive space is also an ideological space that refigures and represents specific ideas within managed conceptualization that affirm authority. Thus, this volume will examine the ways in which Fear, Horror, and Terror are intertwined in the production of power and knowledge through what is made visible and what is kept invisible.

[Back cover] How is affect produced and how does it create meaning within the aesthetic experience? In what manner are aesthetic and affective strategies, tactics and techniques used in order to legitimate or counter-legitimate the hegemonic discourses that claim the protection of society? In this study, the role of the visual in relation to affect and the cognitive in meaning-making processes is considered through four separate articles. In particular, four cases which in one way or another are related to security, defined here as a series of praxes that officially aim to preserve and protect society. The first article analyses the Swedish legal system, specifically how audio-visual images are used as evidence and how they participate in the legitimisation of punishment. The second article analyses the state military use of YouTube and mobile games in terms of selfpresentation tactics to attract military recruits, which, as the author suggests, circulates within a narrative of adventure and identity beyond the official discourse of democracy and threat. In a third article, the author discusses how affect runs through the political aesthetics of social movements and is cultivated as a counter-hegemonic strategy. Here, the Anonymous movement in particular is studied, which, through image practices, works to engage and mobilise collective resistance to the politics of mass surveillance and control. The final article examines the Spanish political movement, Podemos, in relation to how the group makes use of symbolic and affective strategies in order to contest political hegemony and the wave of cuts to the fabric of social safety nets implemented by, in a broader security framework, the politics of austerity which are said to lead to macro-economic stability. Important in the author’s argument is that one cannot analyse individual visual events without simultaneously looking at the social, political and economic context in which these events and practices take place. He also shows that an in-depth understanding of the way in which visual perceptions and affective sensations interact in the mediation of the social imaginary is crucial. Especially, it seems, when we move within contemporary representations and promised realities of the (in)secure.

2017

Global terrorism has presaged the emergence of new security states accompanied by heightened levels of social anxiety and irrational fear. This thesis investigates how contemporary screen and digital cultures have fuelled a collective sensibility of paranoia since the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre towers—a catalyst from which spectacles of irrational fear have emerged through global media networks. I contend that the escalating culture of paranoia, animated by the screen and digital media circuits of post 9/11, has resulted in a fixation with the repetitious potential of disaster as media events, which in turn becomes part of public consciousness. The thesis considers recent work by artists alert to this dynamic such as Gregor Schneider, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, and Jane and Louise Wilson, all of whom are increasingly conscious of the power of contemporary screen and visual cultures in escalating societal fears.

Third Text, 2019

The article is intended as a broad contextualisation of the political concerns that underpin the special issue Anti-fascism/Art/Theory (Third Text 2019) as the second decade of the twenty-first century is drawing to a close. Over a decade after the global financial crisis, we find ourselves confronted with a complex, transnational ideological and material reality where identifiable traits of fascism command fringe and mainstream milieus and where anti-fascist militancy is raising our consciousness about strategies of resistance. Our main aim has been to highlight the need for critical research in the art field that aids, and indeed becomes part of, such resistance. In acknowledging the ongoing debates about how to name the conditions of urgency that necessitate anti-fascism as a material practice but also a way of thinking against a prefigurative counter-revolution and actual supremacy politics, the article opens with three narratives around fascism, prioritising the latter’s relation to capitalism. We then address totalitarianism, populism, and liberalism as terms often implicated in relevant discussions, while we also consider the (dis)continuities of fascism and anti-fascism across the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, including reflections on postmodernism and the Cold War. We weave in the contributors’ analyses on technology, the art economy, colonial violence and fascist violence, the fraught question of heroism, concerns on how politics enter the art institution, the inconclusive if essential lessons of the avant-gardes, women’s art and anti-fascist consciousness. Finally, we consider anti-fascism in terms of a political education that can reveal the constituent parts of an enduring, systemic reality of oppression defining ‘business as usual’. Considering the dilemma of alliances that anti-fascism brings forth, and the possible concessions these require, the analysis concludes with a warning against seeing the contemporary move towards fascism as a mere historical accident.

Re-visiones, 2015

Images of social control. Fear and shock in the viewer of a world under threat I S S N : 2 1 7 3 -0 0 4 0 p a p e r

Journal for Cultural Research, 2018

In the primordial scene, which Girard (1986) describes, the society is constituted on the basis of the lynching mob, whose mimetic desire, whose envy and egoism, culminates in sacrificing the scapegoat. Likewise, Serres (2015) shows that violence and murder are constitutive of sociality. With terror, though, we confront the opposite situation in which the mimetic desire and murder do not establish but rather destroy the 'society.' Importantly, the spatio-temporal process at which self-destruction and destruction merge is also a process that produces fear. In this particular sense, terror is productive despite its spatial destruction and radical detemporalization. Indeed, with the becoming rule of exception, with the move from 9/11 to the politics of security, terror (and the war against terror) has today already become a factor of sociality, which sustains, rather than shatters, the business as usual. Terror is no longer merely an exceptional (real or imagined) catastrophe but has become a dispositif, a technique of governance which imposes a particular conduct, a new model of truth and normality, on contemporary sociality by redefining power relations and by unmaking previous realities. We start, against this background, with explicating the significance of fear as a political instrument, relating this to terror. What is crucial in this respect is the virtual dimension of terror, its potentiality, which is not reducible to an actual spatial setting or a linear chronology (see Shields 2002: 211-2). Then we turn to Kierkegaard to distinguish fear and anxiety. We associate this distinction with the notion of securitization as the dominant political response which terror attacks initiate. Next, we focus on how the threat of terror and the fear it provokes affect the spectator. This is followed by the discussion of a key aspect of anxiety, its decisive relation to an amorphous object. We examine this formlessness by focusing on the anatomy of terror. Then we turn to the question of how one can relate to terror in terms of reason. We outline and differentiate between three approaches to the threat of terror in terms of rationality, foolhardiness and paranoia. The problem with this exercise, however, is that terror, as a radical catastrophe that per definition transgresses given spatio-temporal boundaries cannot really be domesticated. There is no rational way to deal with catastrophes. Why this is the case is the theme of our concluding discussion where we elaborate on ethical-moral aporias engendered by terror. Finally, we juxtapose the monstrousness of terror and a sense of politics as demonstration.