Kevin Glynn

"9/11, Media Spectacle and Image Insurgency in a Global Visual Culture"

The 9/11 attacks constituted a media spectacle engineered for maximal and instantaneous visibility that delivered a two-billion gigawatt jolt to the global image circulatory system and enlisted “in full force” the “multiple discursive modalities” (Parks, 2005: 176) of the world’s convergent media cultures. They generated, as Jean Baudrillard (2002) would argue, the “‘mother’ of all events” by tapping a phantasmatic terrain that had been endlessly explored in “countless disaster movies,” and whose resonance registers a widespread urge “to reject any system . . . as it approaches perfection or omnipotence,” an all-embracing “allergy to any definitive order” or power (pp. 4-7). In Media Matters, John Fiske (1996) explores the characteristics of media events and their relationships to the complex currents of meaning that comprise contemporary media cultures. Updating Raymond Williams, Fiske argues that a media culture can thus be likened to a river of discourses that includes dominant, residual and emergent streams that jostle, contest and unsettle one another. A calm surface may at times mask and belie the churning forces and complexities below, though unexpected turbulence may suddenly bring to the surface deep, powerful and well established currents that had previously been all but invisible.

Spectacular media events become focal sites of discursive activity, maximal turbulence, and competing bids and counterbids for meaning as they resonate powerfully with a culture’s deepest fears, desires and anxieties; the most powerful media events may therefore lead to significant shifts in a culture’s overall structure of feeling. In the contemporary US, struggles over the necessarily unstable and indeterminate meanings of spectacular media events and their radiant subsidiary events unfold in a social climate with strong proclivities and tendencies toward what Fiske (1998: 69) calls “democratic totalitarianism,” whose core attributes include rampant technologized surveillance, “intensified policing,” and “appeals to moral totalism.” Fiske characterizes this social environment as “democratic totalitarianism” because its capacity to exert control depends upon the extent to which its key techniques of power can be operationalized “underneath the structures of democracy.”

This paper builds upon Fiske’s work through an examination of mediated struggles over meaning around the 9/11 attacks and the attendant seismic shocks that have characterized the political culture of the US over the past decade. Such struggles involve at their core the mobilization of tools available in a culture of media convergence (Jenkins, 2006) to facilitate the articulation of images to one set of discursive practices or another as a means of advancing particular sociopolitical interests and identities, claiming political space and visibility, and expressing desires, anxieties, fears, and refusals. Thus, vidders and other popular cultural consumer-producers such as the “9/11 Truth” movement have generated image insurgencies, counterspectacles, and alternative popular knowledges by appropriating technologies of visualization and mediatization. The affective energies generated and expressed through these insurgent practices of articulation contributed diversely and collectively to the formation of transformative popular imaginaries whose most salient expression was the transmediated Obama movement.