Popular Culture and War on Terror: Role of United States in International Relations | Sunita Samal

Popular culture is interesting to IR (International Relations) theorists in so far as it can naturalize or normalize a certain social order upon which dominant ideologies are founded. Here, the myths serve as a silent, sub-textual pillars of the real. Gestures of naturalization are phenomena of political power in so far as such power works through myths by appearing to the political out of ideological [1].

Introduction:

Marshall McLuhan famously puts it in 1964 as ‘The medium is the massage’. We can tell within the parameter of a given medium. In my view, all knowledge which is bounded by space and time are politics. To be human is to inherit a culture and politics cannot be understood outside the culture. We can only tell the stories we know and the problem is how to tell within the parameter of a given medium. That is proved from Ronald Reagan’s classic campaign film ‘A New Beginning’ in 1984 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign ‘A Man from Hope’. Politics like journalism have gone visual. The visual mass-media today from film to TV to internet are similarly changing the practice and consumption of politics and culture [2].

In order to be relevant to the theorists of international relations, reading the artefacts focus not only on the political order on display in the artefact itself, what might call the ‘in-show’ political order but also on ‘in world’ political order. Relations between ‘in world’ reality and in world political order, will among the other things depends on genre. Here, genre carries with its own memory.

How then, we can understand these links between popular culture and world politics? Popular culture unites us through narratives that delineates who ‘we’ are and what separate ‘us’ from ‘others. There is a bourgeoning body of literature that examines the popular culture-world politics continuum [3].

Empirical and Imaginative:

Following Cultural Studies, theorists like Darko Suvin recognizes that science fiction is a literary genre where necessary and sufficient conditions are presented. Interaction of estrangement is formal device which is an imaginative framework [4]. By contrast, cognition refers that which enables the text rationally account to the way this alternative reality actually works. It performs this operation by posing explicit differences between the inner working of its narrative world and those of our won.

Texts are oriented more towards estrangement such as Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ [5] can be read for all intents and purposes as ‘fantasy’. The texts that focus more on cognition and tends towards realism at the expense of imaginative difference, thus potentially stretching the limits of the genre too far that somewhat difficult to nail down. But even though actual science may someday supersede the cognitively rational elements of a particular science fiction text. It should remain a part of the genre because the author originally understood what he or she is writing have a potential cognitive validity.

Indeed, taking into consideration the older literary traditions and noting that religion is a social phenomenon that by definition operates with more than one reality. We would argue that the existence of what Suvin refers to as an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment, is the historical literally rule. It was only with the coming of modernity that the possibility of a wholly disenchanted literature emerged.

In order to refute the idea that all literature is science fiction, we would turn to another defining trait of modernity namely acceleration of technological innovation. It is after all the ‘science in science fiction’. For us, there is a risk throwing the baby out with bath water. Studies of science fiction have performed normalizing functions on the cognitive side. Julia Kristeva in 1960s described this tendency for crossing back and forth between science fiction texts and our world. As she notes science fiction texts repeat and rework generic conventions to their consumption of any particular text [6].
Such repetitions thus speak the reflexivity of science fiction and as such its potentially constitutive role in world politics. These are altering in diverse ways in which the ‘real’ world in which actually live in itself a produced, textual affairs. Importantly, these repetitions are necessary are vital element in making a work of popular fiction recognizable and therefore capable of grabbing and sustaining the attention of audience.

There is no need to separate ‘in-show’ and ‘in world’, for they are both part of the same general text. Studying a popular culture artefact is already studying our own in world reality because the popular culture artefact springs from the same general grammar as does any other social phenomena. However, our approach has its forerunners within political science where certain scholars like Murray Edelman see the study of cultural artefacts as a stepping stone to understanding political outcomes. Since public world views are one of the factors constraining what politicians can do to the popular cultural artefacts that contribute to shaping them are indirectly important political outcomes [7].

But Bakhtin (1984) considers that culture artefacts and social life be different phenomena and reserves his focus for their relations between them. Intertexts must therefore be studies in their specificity. It is not satisfactory simply to postulate that they exist some latent structures that secures homology between a certain social world [8].

United States and War on Terror: As scholars, what we are looking for are specific instances where we might see a circulation of socially constitutive energies between artefacts of science fiction and our own social world. Numbers of social phenomena that have come to be seen as problematic. But energies do not emerge if something is not seen as a challenge or a problem. For example, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a plethora of home-grown terrorist acts perpetrated by underground groups hit the United States.

These events certainly created a spark in police activity, but they did not create much energy, because terrorism on American soil was not considered a ‘public’ problem compare that with the situation post 9//11. Today, the merest rumor of an attack may set off a widely publicized alert system and spark wave of emotional energy. This change can be observed in science fiction culture, too. Contrast the original ‘Star Wars’ series it is in which did not feature terrorist attacks. If it had, the potential for creating a sensation would have been low, for there were no social energies to spark. The post-9/11 world certainly sported the social energy for them to be an immediate circulation between what we may call in ‘artefact’ and in-world realities.

A shocking video depicting the beheading of kidnapped journalist Stephen Sotloff appeared in Sept. 2014, uploaded online by Islamic State (ISIS). This beheading video ‘A Second Massage to America’ displayed striking parallels with the popular TV series ‘Homeland’. What President Obama stated ‘We must and will remain vigilant at home and abroad’ [9].

Terrorist experts suggest that the visual mimicry of ISIS videos serves as both a recruitment tool and an attempt to intimidate the American public. The disjointed style of opening sequence of TV serial ‘Homeland’ presents the post 9/11 world as one of uncertainty, misinformation and violence. By mirroring the format of those images, the ISIS video plays on same feeling of doubt to generate a viewer’s mistrust in authority--- a fear that the US can no longer protect or provide security for its citizens.

Using the example of US national identity. We start by outlining briefly how popular culture in film and television in particular--- can sustain prevailing political narratives. If we consider the role of ‘superheroes’ in US popular cultural, then we see that Hollywood is using stereotypes and glorify national values: narratives of national cohesion are visualized in films and emotional pull they create for the audience helps to strengthen particular conception of identity. ‘Super heroes’, represents stereotypical American values by dramatizing the personality traits of rugged individualism, courage, love of nation etc [10]. ‘Captain America’ is a good example of a popular superhero that embodies US state Identity and provides idealized figure symbolizing America dream [11].

The war on terror has become a particularly prominent term in popular culture like films such as ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ (2004), ‘Syriana’ (2005), ‘The Kingdom’ (2007), ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012), and TV shows like ‘Homeland’ etc. The visual engagements with American values are reinforced through both media coverage and an increasingly large number of personal films made and circulated through ever more sophisticated and widely available technologies [12].

Among these prominent are visual metaphors associated with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the theatres of War in the Middle East. Images of captive submissiveness, the paternalism of community engagement and cultural differences confront the viewer as parts of the increasing trauma of witnessing the ‘war on terror’. Instead of keeping American values the above visuals met with anger, disbelief and resentment. These reminds us that the increasingly homogeneous American identity is much more fractured and delicate than the uniform certainty that was upheld in traditional popular culture narratives.

Action and Reaction of Non-Western Culture: Popular culture can engender positive emotional responses that trigger feelings of national togetherness, but it can do opposite. We now tale further steps and illustrate how non-Western popular cultures resist and challenge prevailing identities. Rather than being set up in opposition to traditional film-making style, non-Western movies often follow a similar narrative structure. However, this structure is resistance to hegemonic Western discourses about non-West.

A key part of this narrative strategy is emotion including shame resentment, humiliation and love. Many times, they try to triumphing these emotions to re-assert identity. It can be found in popular Turkish film named ‘Vally of the Wolves’. The film visualizes the Turkish experience of overcoming shame in the face of greater US power. Turkish identity is then positively reconstituted through visually defeating feelings of shame and resentment that had been tied to US-Turkish relations. It emphasizes Turkish identity rather than blindly follow US.

The colonization of individual self-consciousness be hegemonic cultural forces such as the dominance of mass-mediated popular representation is never total. The reality of lived experience remains and constitute itself a new cultural form of expression. Post-modern politics prefers narrative and popular culture favors story-telling. From Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The God Father’, or Oliver Stone’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ of course intermingling of truth and fiction in legal discourse is nothing new to politics.

Images, therefore, do not simply add to the persuasive force of world, they transformed argument and in doing so, have the capacity to persuade all the more powerfully. Unlike words which impose linear messages that must be taken in sequentially, at least some of the meaning of images can be grasped all at once and gives meaning to culture and politics. For both reasons, the visual message generates less counter-argument and is, therefore, more likely return to our belief.

In reality, today is increasingly being perceived as effect of the sign and visual image have come to be seen as more real than the world. Then this anesthetization of real in actual sense of political practice also is coincided with rapid development of litigation of international relations. Growing tension associated with globalization and homogenization of culture as a result of reconfigured international trade patterns extend beyond markets competitions. The development leads one to speculate whether the transnational appeal of adversarial political melodrama— a genre prominently featured within Anglo-American popular culture that might be re-constituting global common-sense.

The spirit of law is not just invented at the top but is transformed, challenged and reinvented in local practices that produce a plural political culture in contemporary period. If we see politics is not autonomous than boundary between politics and culture is quite porous, its scholarly method follows that theory to touch down by bringing to bear a broad array of analysis within specific contexts. The work of Alice Walker in ‘The Colour Purple’ similarly provides an element of distance from people’s own pre-conceptions and perspectives to allow debate to be formed in a way with which people are like to be less threatened. By looking through the eyes of character, the issues are no less real but personalized.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who famously observed American society in 1830s that there is hardly a political question in United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one. Through films with legal nature, we confront great moral dilemmas of the day whether it is the intractable racism at global level depicted in ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’, (1962) or legitimacy of capital punishment in films like ‘Dead Man Walking’ (1995) confront viewers with troubling question about relationship between violence and rule of law in international civil society.

The concluding Observation: The consensus here is that popular culture is far more than an escape from everyday life, a brief respite from the reality in which ‘the political’ traditionally takes place. There are also opportunities for dissent and rupture. Film and television can offer subversive messages when the prevailing identities are challenged and new form of political narratives emerge. Colonization of individual self-consciousness be hegemonic cultural forces such as the dominance of mass-mediated popular representation, is never total. Popular culture matters to world politics. It is a significant that identity marker that tells us ‘Who we are’ and how should we feel about both ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on an increasingly bourgeoned and sophisticate body of literature and visuals, we have highlighted not only how film and television shows can entrench political identities, but also, we pointed out how popular culture can destabilize and even challenges these identities. Here, United States’ moral virtues are reaffirmed through narrative and are presented as both universal and at the same time exceptional that gives little space for dissents.

(Author: Sunita Samal, is the author of ‘Politics By Other Means: Domains of Body, Objectivity and Audit Culture’ (2024) Published By Asian Press Books, Kolkata)