Page 210 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 195
And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more – contrary to what
Mr Bush is telling the world – part of the ‘true nature and
heart of America’.
(Sontag 2004: 3)

Although they would seem unlikely bedfellows, Baudrillard’s notion
of the ecstasy of communication was implicitly acknowledged by Donald
Rumsfeld who complained that it was much harder nowadays to
control the information sent back home by soldiers serving overseas.
Unlike conventional letters in which the censors can black out the
offending parts, Rumsfeld bemoaned the fact that US soldiers were
‘running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable
photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the
media, to our surprise’ (cited in Sontag 2004: 5). Rumsfeld’s
complaint provides a practical politician’s insight to complement
Baudrillard’s theoretical account of a society in which signs circulate
for their own sake and which gave rise to the trophy-seeking
behaviour of the Abu Ghraib photographers which so dramatically
undermined the Coalition’s attempts to brand itself as Occupation-
Lite.
The images of prisoner abuse reflected the West’s ongoing narcis-
sistic obsession with the screen and it is perhaps this unhealthy
obsession which fuels much of the misguided nature of its neo-
Orientalism (Said [1979] 2003). A culture premised upon the
tautological circulation of signs thus struggles to understand one in
which symbols are privileged over signs – as illustrated in October
2005 by the controversy caused by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-
Posten’s printing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. A keen
awareness of this process arguably marks the malevolent acuity of
Bin Laden. He is the latest in a string of iconic Islamic hate-figures
that previously included the Ayatollah Khomeni, and who share the
13
status of being bracketed within a discourse of evil . Bin Laden
fulfils the role portrayed in Baudrillard’s work of the Manichean
demiurge who creates the evil illusions against which God and
goodness avail themselves. The biggest danger for the West, however,
is that Bin Laden and others play this role self-consciously. They
know which buttons to press in order to produce effects that go
right to the core of the West’s own deeply embedded social porn, of
which Abu Ghraib was but a particularly shocking example. An
alarming implication of this chapter’s analysis is that the media’s
role in facilitating America’s increasingly myopic separation from the
Islamic Other has been incorporated as an integral part of the
terrorists’ game plan.

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