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March 25, 2003

Correspondence with Thomas Keenan: Reflections on the Media War

by Nader Vossoughian

Dear Professor Keenan,

In 1994, you published "Live From.." in Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio (eds.) Back to the Front: Tourisms of War. For me, the article was a prescient statement about the "theming" of the battlefield, that is to say, the Disnification of war: the scripting of armed conflict and the growing tactical importance attributed to image production.

But there's significant shifts taking place that I was hoping you could comment on. During the early 1990s, the dramaturgical distance between actor and audience was relatively great. Like most conflicts before it, Somalia was thousands of miles away from our television sets at home. Today, on the other hand, the so-called "fight against terrorism" is being broadcast live from inside our living rooms. The "screen directors" who are our military planners are beginning to do their “shooting” at home. Everyday, for example, as I return home by subway, I pass by U.S. soldiers carrying M-16 rifles on their backs. They walk the subways in the name of "Homeland Security," but they're also (I believe) policing their own people: the spectator is now the suspect.

Which brings me to my question for you. Do you believe that this merging of art and life -- the "scene" of conflict and the vantage point of spectatorship -- will eventually restore a sense of "reality" (and ethics) to the situation at hand? What is the future of "live" television in a decade where the gap between what's happening "over there" and "over here" is quickly vanishing? Is there still a "here" to speak of? Is there a vocabulary of experience that transcends the television screen?

I look forward to hearing your response.

Best regards,

Nader Vossoughian

And here is the response I received…

To: Nader Vossoughian

From: Thomas Keenan

It seems hard to believe that more than a decade has passed since the American-led U.N. intervention in Somalia (it began in December 1992). On the other hand, perhaps a little too much has happened during the intervening decade (and I’ll only list the obvious metonyms): the Rwandan genocide, the siege of Sarajevo and the bloodbath at Srebrenica, Chechnya; Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and the second intifada; September 11th, the fall of the Taliban, and now the war in Iraq.

When I wrote about the televising of "Operation Restore Hope” and the images that accompanied it, both before and after, I was interested in the way the treatment of the battlefield as media space (or vice versa) seemed to have something to do with tourism. I am not sure that I drew the analogy to "Disney," though, and it's one that I am tempted to resist, at least to the extent that it suggests a lack of seriousness or gravity. My point was simply that the stakes of this 'touristic' scenario were very high; indeed, that we couldn't understand or have a properly political relation to military operations in the future if we didn't attend to the centrality of image production and management. And the imagery was not just tactical -- the very strategy of the operation depended on reporters, cameras, uplinks, and the rest.

The effects, though, were unpredictable. Somalia seemed to demonstrate that images did everything: 'pictures in, pictures out' was the phrase that summed up the literature on the so-called “CNN effect.” But in Bosnia, where cameras entered a functioning concentration camp in the summer of 1992, and watched the shelling and sniping of Sarajevo for a good three years, things seemed to tend in the opposite direction: doing nothing. One New York Times reporter, writing on the front page about what the headline called 'postmodern war,' claimed that TV induced 'paralysis': "live images of suffering, distributed worldwide, sap whatever will or ability there may be to prosecute a devastating military campaign.”

Then came September 11, a media operation if ever there were one. A camcorder swings up toward the sky, following the noise, just in time to witness a commercial airliner flying directly into the side of the World Trade Center. Minutes later, the world's television networks are broadcasting live images of the first burning tower as another jetliner crashes into the second one, behind the backs of television anchors reporting from rooftops. And the events trigger a feedback loop -- the unfolding event, because it unfolds globally in real-time but nevertheless takes time to unfold, is transformed by the very coverage it aims for: passengers in a third plane, hearing the news on cell phones from spouses watching television, decide themselves to attack the hijackers of their aircraft -- it crashes into a field.

Around noon on that bloody Tuesday, a Washington Post reporter asked an official at the National Security Council to explain what was happening, and was told: "We don't know anything here. We're watching CNN too." The events of September 11 were not just events: they were media events. The people who flew those airplanes into those buildings did it -- not to trivialize the events but to identify precisely what's at stake -- they did it in order to get on TV. They did it for the images, the sounds, and the stories. Think of the iconic status of the targets, or the timing and duration of the attack. Scripted from the movies, it had from its inception the ethereal irreality of fiction turned true, and as it played out in the ether of our shared experience. It addressed us all as witnesses, together: wherever we were, we were watching too. Not understanding -- it short-circuited the frames of comprehension -- but watching, because it was a publicity operation of unprecedented thoroughness, and required no shaping. The killers wanted nothing more or less than exposure, and they knew where the contested terrain of their combat was located. They knew they could count on the camcorders, the live coverage, the cell phones and the Internet to make this event happen, and happen around the world in real-time: they aimed not just at the buildings, but at our television screens.

Getting to your question, about the home front and the collapse of space. September 11 happened 'here,' and on TV, and at the same time. It didn't only happen on TV, but it only happened the way it did because it was on TV. Today, there are not only soldiers on our streets but military aircrafts overhead, and all sorts of other things that we don't see with our own eyes but nevertheless experience. They are images too. Do you think it makes a difference, from the perspective of the 'image,' that something happens here or there? I am not sure. The developments we are following tend already to induce that collapse (at least on this point Virilio is right). The erasure of the gap, as you call it, between "over there" and "over here," or the displacement of geographic space and time by media space and time, doesn't mean that experience goes away. Likewise, isn't the implication of the argument here that the distinction between surveillance and entertainment is a bit tenuous as well? We are still experiencing things (just as tourists do), but the point is that our experiences cannot be dissociated from representations, images, soundtracks, scripts, and all the rest of the mediating apparatus. If your definition of 'here' can include within it the dislocating effects of mediation and the image (or, if you want to be deconstructive, of writing or the trace), then sure there's a 'here' to speak of. But if you want to purify that here by protecting it from the drift of the image, then there isn't (and there never has been). Why would you want to transcend the television screen? Today, there would be 'speaking of' anything without it. (You understand, of course, that I use the synecdoche "TV" or "screen" to designate the effects brought on by mediation; they can just as easily happen on the radio, in the newspaper, email, rumor, tourism, etc.) Rather than transcend it, return to the bliss of immediacy, we need to learn to watch and read it, and intervene in or on it, just as carefully and critically as we do in what you call "the vocabulary of experience."

So I am both less optimistic and less pessimistic than you. I don't share your hope (at least I think that's what it is) that images from "here" will have an epistemological force sufficient to restore nothing less than reality or ethics to our situation. It already seems all too real. And the ethics is up to us, not the images.

But I am not so worried about those soldiers on the streets of New York. Nor was I worried about those jet fighters over Manhattan in the days immediately following September 11. Of course they are policing America, but that is not entirely their fault. One of the defining characteristics (and most troubling features) of terrorism is that it blurs the distinctions between military and civilian, combatant and non-combatant, domestic and foreign, here and there, overt and covert, along with many others. "Terrorism," in the strict sense, is an assault on these distinctions. The fact that counter-terrorist operations repeat this erasure, at least in part, only confirms the efficacy of the terrorist operation. But I am not sure that it's avoidable, just as I'm not sure that the distinctions are tenable. We may want to defend them, but they certainly offer no guarantees. So it's up to us to challenge those erosions, when they start to undermine political values without which we cannot go on.2

There is a lot more to say. The Pentagon policy of "embedding" reporters with the military units now operating in and around Iraq seems to mark a return to the developments I thought I saw inaugurated by Operation Restore Hope. And the images are just as "touristic." CNN's Walter Rodgers reports live and at 50 kilometers per hour from the middle of the desert, through a videophone and quite impressed with what he and we are seeing: "The pictures you're seeing are absolutely phenomenal. These are live pictures of the 7th Cavalry racing across the deserts in southern Iraq. They will -- it will be days before they get to Baghdad, but you've never seen battlefield pictures like these before." Firefights, hundreds of cruise missiles and satellite-guided bombs hitting Baghdad, and lightning tank assaults, covered live and not only on CNN.

Aaron Brown, CNN Anchor [23 March, 2003 01:27 AM] : David, please go ahead and take that full [screen] if you can. What you're looking at now are live pictures in Umm Qasr, this port city we've talked a lot about. This is, I think, a British feed of some sort and there is a firefight going on as we speak, and we'll just stay with this for a bit. And I can tell you that my heart rate just went up, because this is the kind of thing as we've talked about how we're going to cover this we do worry about a little bit. [...] Just to give you an idea of the point we were making before, about this is being seen around the world and across the Arab world. These are all three on the left [of the screen] -- are all different Arab language television networks, Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV is one. It is early in the morning across the Arab world. It is on a Sunday morning and no doubt people with TVs are seeing this live.

What difference does it make, here and there? Only time and force will tell. The time and the force of those images will surely have something to do with it. That is why we have a responsibility -- ethical and political -- to attend to them.

Thomas Keenan is Director of the Human Rights Project and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College.