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294
pages
English
Ebooks
2005
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Publié par
Date de parution
20 octobre 2005
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9781849644631
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Language Wars is a fascinating account of the relationship between the media, culture and new forms of global, political violence. Using an innovative approach, Jeff Lewis shows how language and the media are implicated in global terrorism and the US-led reprisals in the war on terror.
Through an examination of the language of terrorism and war, Lewis illuminates key events in the current wave of political violence - the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Beslan siege, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bali bombings and the ongoing occupation in the Middle East. He argues that the language used to report incidents of violence has changed, not just in official channels but in wider cultural contexts, and shows the impact this has on social perceptions. Lewis deconstructs these new discourses to reveal how Islam has been construed as the antagonist of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Ideal for students of media studies and cultural studies, this is a subtle account of the relation between language and culture that exposes a dangerous new east-west divide in popular discourse.
Introduction
1. The Media, Political Violence and Language Wars
2. Global Culture and the New East/West Divide
3. The Meaning of 9/11
4. The Invasion of Iraq
5. Bali and the Global Jihad
6. Occupation, Violation and the New Public Sphere
7. Conclusion: Meaning and Death
References
Index
Voir
Through an examination of the language of terrorism and war, Lewis illuminates key events in the current wave of political violence - the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Beslan siege, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bali bombings and the ongoing occupation in the Middle East. He argues that the language used to report incidents of violence has changed, not just in official channels but in wider cultural contexts, and shows the impact this has on social perceptions. Lewis deconstructs these new discourses to reveal how Islam has been construed as the antagonist of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Ideal for students of media studies and cultural studies, this is a subtle account of the relation between language and culture that exposes a dangerous new east-west divide in popular discourse.
Introduction
1. The Media, Political Violence and Language Wars
2. Global Culture and the New East/West Divide
3. The Meaning of 9/11
4. The Invasion of Iraq
5. Bali and the Global Jihad
6. Occupation, Violation and the New Public Sphere
7. Conclusion: Meaning and Death
References
Index
Publié par
Date de parution
20 octobre 2005
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9781849644631
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Language Wars
The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence
Jeff Lewis
P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI
First published 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Jeff Lewis 2005
The right of Jeff Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN ISBN
0 7453 2485 1 hardback 0 7453 2484 3 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
For Belinda
Acknowledgements
Cont
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Introduction Terrorism and Language Wars The Mediation of Terror Culture and the Political Signifier Cultural Politics and Globalization Government, Democracy and the Mediasphere Structure and Methods Key Concepts
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Mediated Terror and the Politics of RepresentationTerror Televisual Media and the Broadcast of Violence Representation and Violence The First Casualty: War and Truth Conclusions
2 Confl ict and Culture: Civilization, History, Identity Culture and Islam The Clash of Civilizations Thesis The Media and Cultural Division Division and Identity Politics History and the Roots of Islam Modernization and Civil Society in the Middle East Palestine and the ‘Jewish Question’ The Body Politic: Interface with Globalization Interdependence and the Formation of the Cultural Divide Conclusions
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The Meaning of 9/11: In the Midst of Infinite JusticeMeaning and the Aesthetics of Terror Divine Justice: Global Order Citizens, Consensus and Dissent Hero–Victims Public Opinion and the NotQuiteReal
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21 21 31 37 43 53
55 55 58 63 67 73 79 83 86 90 92
94 94 97 104 108 110
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The Meaning of America and the Twin Towers Freedom Surveillance and Control Conclusions
The Iraq Invasion: Democracy in the Field of BattleThe Purposes of War From Freedom to Democracy Coalitions of the Killing Democracy in the Age of Terror The Electronic Polis Bomb the World In Bed with alQa’ida AlJazeera and the Alternative Media Conclusions
Globalizing Jihad: The Bali Bombings at the End of ParadiseOctober 12 and Global Jihad Jamaah Islamiyah Paradise Defiled Clash of Imaginings: Global and National Context The Crisis of Contiguity The Bombings: Media and Political Discourses The Blind Puppeteer: Atrocity and Civil Society in Indonesia Development and Recovery in Bali Conclusions
The Occupation of Iraq: Rule of Law and the New Public SphereResolution The First Casualty: David Kelly and Trial by Ordeal The New Iraq Privatization and Occupation Ordeal and Execution AlJazeera and the Rule of Law Images of Violence: Photographs and the Transformative Public Sphere Ordeals at Abu Ghraib The Body Politic and Abu Ghraib
112 118 121 128
130 130 136 139 141 146 151 154 162 166
168 168 171 174 177 183 189
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206 206 208 214 219 223 226
230 232 238
Theatre of War Conclusions
Contents ix
Conclusion: Cultural Democracy, Difference and the End of Civilization Language Wars Here and Over There Democracy and Global Culture TheHijaband Global Politics World Government: Beware the Faithful
ReferencesIndex
244 246
248 248 251 255 259
267 277
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my profound gratitude to Belinda, Jay and Sian without whose support and friendship this book could not have been written. My thanks also to Liz Shuter, John Hill and Jordie Hill for providing such a conducive space in which to writeLanguage Wars. Thanks to the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University and to the University’s Research and Innovation sector for their direct financial support. Thanks to my colleagues at the Globalism Institute for their invaluable intellectual input and good humour. My gratitude is also extended to my many students and colleagues who have made my life as an academic so rich and rewarding. I would like to acknowledge David Castle and the team at Pluto Press for their considerable faith, enthusiasm and encouragement.
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Introduction
TERRORISM AND LANGUAGE WARS
During the threeday siege in a small school in southern Russia, international audiences became absorbed by a narrative of increasingly familiar dread. The Beslan siege of September 2004 resolved itself in bloodshed. Our worst fears realized, images of injured, dead and dying children were beamed into living rooms across the world. Governments, reporters and publics were forced once again to give expression to a sense of grief and horror that tested the extremities of our comprehension. The motif of terror seemed to nd a new level of depravity. Around 360 people, mostly children, were killed in the siege, and as many more were injured. Survivors described the brutality of the hostagetakers who, wearing suicide bombbelts and wielding sophisticated military weapons, had summarily executed anyone who spoke or moved without direction. But this was not a spontaneous operation. The Chechen rebels had laid weapons, ammunition and explosives in and around the schools gymnasium prior to the attack. The town of Beslan had been strategically selected by the rebels in order to maximize the symbolic force of their actions. Lying at the intersection of southern Russias ethnic divisions Ingush, Abkhaz, Ossetians and Georgians Beslan clearly represented for the militants the brutal hegemony of Soviet and Russian imperialism. Within the region of Ossetia, Beslan had been part of Russia since the eighteenth century; neighbouring Ingushetia was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1917. During the First World War, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin accused the Ingush and the Chechens of collaborating with Nazi Germany and forcibly deported the great majority of these people to the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. Tens of thousands of Chechens died in these purges and the survivors were only allowed to return to their homelands after Stalins death in 1953. Clearly, the cultural memory of the Ingush and Chechen militants, who are suspected of carrying out the terrorist assault in Beslan, identies the Ossetians with the oppression of Russian and Soviet imperial history. This memory, while constructed through various forms of tribal, linguistic and religious difference, has been
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2 Language Wars
more substantively generated through the political momentum of modernization including the volition of ideology, nation and globalization. Thus, the formation of this difference as wars over culture is profoundly political. The meaning of the siege in Beslan can never be disengaged from the historical, cultural and political circumstances that brought these players into conict at this particular place and at this particular time. It is not, therefore, sufcient to reduce this complex matrix of causes to simple polemics good against evil, the west against the east, Christianity against Islam. Rather, these agonisms are generated through the conuence of historical and contemporary cultural conditions that inevitably construct, deconstruct and challenge various modes of meaning and meaningmaking. Our principal term for describing this effect is language wars. These wars are constituted out of the human propensity for forming community, culture and meanings; these formative processes stimulate their own contentions both within particular social groups and between social groups. Tension, contention, dispute are all expressivities of culture, the most acute of which manifest themselves as actual bodily violence. While language wars may be sporadic and instantaneous, marking the conict between specic semantic moments, they may also be drawn through history and more durable social and cultural formations. A sporadic contention, however, can never be isolated from the broader dynamics of meaningmaking. As we will discuss in detail in Chapter 2, this interconnection of discourses and texts has been characterized by various theorists as intertextuality, a process by which all utterances are connected ultimately to each other (see Barthes, 1977, Derrida, 1974, Kristeva, 1984, Orr, 2003). In terms of language wars we will focus on the congregation of discursive tensions that are evolving around the current phase of global terror and political violence. These tensions, however, are connected to texts and discourses that reach well back in history and which have become conscripted into current discussions and debates. In particular, we are interested in those discourses that are contributing to the construction of a revivied cultural polemic which we are calling the new eastwest divide. For the purposes of this book, language refers to any meaningmaking system image, lexical and soundbased. While we will distinguish specically between the language systems of writing and imagebased broadcast mediation, we will nevertheless maintain a general view that language (discourse, text, semiosis) is the principal mechanism
