Global Media Apocalypse: Pleasure, Violence and the Cultural Imaginings of Doom

239 Pages·2013·1.8 MB·English

by  Jeff Lewis (auth.)

Global Media Apocalypse
Also by Jeff Lewis
BALI’S SILENT CRISIS: Desire, Tragedy and Transition (w ith Belinda Lewis )
CULTURAL STUDIES
CRISIS IN THE GLOBAL MEDIASPHERE: Desire, Displeasure and Cultural
Transformation
LANGUAGE WARS: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror
and Political Violence
Global Media Apocalypse
Pleasure, Violence and the Cultural
Imaginings of Doom
Jeff Lewis
Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, and Director of the
Human Security Institute, RMIT University, Australia
© Jeff Lewis 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-00544-1
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First published 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-43474-9 ISBN 978-1-137-00545-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137005458
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
To Mary Whiteside,
And all others in the human family who have
suffered through the violence
of sovereign power.
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Contents
Preface v iii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Out of the 9/11 Decade 1
1 New Media – Old Empires: Celebrity, Sex and Revolutions
of Knowing 37
2 Under the Volcano: The Cultural Ecology of Nature 75
3 Hyper-Pleasure: Consumer Rituals and Transactions
of Desire 1 00
4 Menace: Westernism, Media and the Cultural Ecology
of Violence 1 30
5 After the Apocalypse: Refugees, Human Rights and the
Global Media Future 1 63
Conclusion: Peace 2 02
References 2 07
Index 227

vii
Preface
In L anguage Wars (Lewis, 2005 ), I argued that the events of 9/11 could
only be fully explained through an examination of contemporary
media, culture and cultural politics. Analyses of US global interven-
tions and resistant forms of religious terrorism, I argued, should be set
within a broader reading of the mediasphere and its promulgation of
contending discourses and modes of knowledge. The 9/11 wars were
fostered principally around cultural contentions and an underlying
crisis of knowledge.
This is not to say that these organized acts of violence are not being
waged over material and economic interests. It is, rather, to locate
those interests within a broader sphere of reference – one that links our
contemporary conditions of crisis to a genealogy of desire and fear that
is generated through language, the imaginary and competing human
knowledge systems.
As I outlined in Crisis in the Global Mediasphere (Lewis, 2011) , the
media marshal these dual dispositions of pleasure and displeasure
in terms of particular cultural and political claims. For scholars who
analyse these claims in terms of policy and international geopolitics,
the media are frequently seen as a tool of corporate, government and
military hegemony. My own studies have sought, rather, to treat the
media as a complex of social and cultural relationships which are gener-
ated through the confluence of genealogical and contemporary cultural
conditions. In this context, ‘crisis’ represents a cultural resonance, the
manifestation of deeply rooted modes of human thinking that are ulti-
mately expressed and amplified through contemporary processes of
mediation. Crisis, in this sense, represents a cultural trope which draws
together specific events and conditions into a mode of consciousness,
an episteme that connects human thinking beyond the specifics and
phenomena of the historical moment.
Extending these arguments, the present book proposes that a ‘cultural
ecology of violence’ has evolved through the interflow of these histor-
ical and contemporary crisis conditions. These conditions are associated
with the emergence of particular sensibilities and modes of thinking
that imagine pleasure as the contingency of loss, displeasure and fanta-
sies of doom. This eschatological consciousness amplifies our desires
viii
Preface ix
and pleasures through a more dire imagining of ultimate loss. This is
more than our own personal occlusion, but the loss of all things: the
social collective, life, nature, the universe. From the perspective of this
book, therefore, ‘apocalypse’ is a deeply etched cultural and epistemic
condition that is immanent in the emergence and evolution of our civi-
lizational progression. Apocalypse, that is, represents much more than
a media motif; it is a mode of consciousness that is ‘mediated’ through
the cultural ecology of violence.
Emerging through the genealogical roots of agricultural civilization,
the cultural ecology of violence is rendered through various forms of
apocalyptic imagining and narrative. From their beginnings in reli-
gious myth to the spectacle of contemporary film and video games,
such narratives articulate the hyperbole of human fantasy and pleasure
cast within the shadow of eternal doom.
In the cultural ecology of violence, these ‘eschatological sensibil-
ities’ narrativize the profoundly human capacity for harm – not only to
other humans, but to all other life forms and systems. The purpose of
this book is to elucidate these sensibilities and modes of harm, particu-
larly as they are expressed through the contemporary mediasphere and
specific zones of crisis.
In this regard, the mediasphere is not a specific category of industries
or media texts, but is, rather, the ‘interflow’ of mediated knowledge
systems and socially organized meanings that comprise a given cultural
sphere or mode of consciousness. Indeed, in keeping with my broader
approach to language and mediation, ‘the media’ are best understood
as a set of interactive relationships that generate language and mean-
ings. As outlined in Chapter 1, which problematizes ‘the media’, the
industries that have specialized in these practices of cultural produc-
tion are only a part of the cultural processes that are formed around
mediation. All contemporary knowledge systems – including science,
law, government, family, education and everyday popular communica-
tion – engage in mediation and meaning exchange. These knowledge
systems and their mediational practices overlap with the specialized
and commercial modes of mediation which are frequently categorized
as ‘the media’. This book will examine these forms of specialized,
industrial mediation in terms of the broader sphere of relationships
and knowledge systems that comprise the mediasphere. As we will
explore in this book, it is these processes of mediation that constitute
the mediasphere and its complex rendering of the cultural ecology of
violence.