Digital Icons: Memes, Martyrs and Avatars 9780367445539, 9781003010319

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
1 An Introduction Digital Icons: Avatars, Memes and Martyrs
2 The Shoe and the American President: Ludic Resistance and ‘Gaming’ the Iconic
3 Martyrdom and the Mobile Phone: From Bystander to Martyr
4 Tank Man as the Unknown Icon: Revitalizing Tiananmen through Steganography
5 The ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a Media Icon: The ‘Other within the Other’
6 The Iconic Migrant Body: Necro-Aesthetics, Mimetics and the Dead
7 The Napalm Girl and Platform Capital: Facebook Governance of the Iconic
8 Digital Icons – Recombined With Speed in the Digital Age: Concluding Remarks
Index

Citation preview

Digital Icons

This book offers critical perspectives on the digital ‘iconic’, exploring how the notion of the iconic is re-appropriated and remade online, and its consequences for humanity and society. Examining cross-cultural case studies of iconic images in digital spaces, the author offers original and critical analyses, theories and perspectives on the notion of the ‘iconic’, and on its movement, re-appropriation and meaning-making on digital platforms. A carefully curated selection of case studies illustrates topics such as phantom memory, martyrdom, denigration and pornographic recoding, digital games as simulacra and memes as ‘artification’. Situating the notion of the iconic firmly within contemporary cultures, the author takes a thematic approach to investigate the iconic as an unstable and unfinished phenomenon online as it travels through platforms temporally and spatially. The book is an important resource for academics and students in the areas of media and communications, digital culture, cultural studies, visual communication, visual culture, journalism studies and digital humanities. Yasmin Ibrahim is Professor of Digital Economy and Culture at Queen Mary, University of London.

Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture

40 Free Software, the Internet, and Global Communities of Resistance Sara Schoonmaker 41 Gay Men, Identity and Social Media A Culture of Participatory Reluctance Elija Cassidy 42 Digital Gambling Theorizing Gamble-Play Media César Albarrán-Torres 43 Digital Interfacing Action and Perception through Technology Daniel Black 44 Women and the Digitally-Mediated Revolution in the Middle East Applying Digital Methods Chiara Bernardi 45 The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality Bradley E. Wiggins 46 Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life Jenny Kennedy 47 Digital Icons Memes, Martyrs and Avatars Yasmin Ibrahim

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.rout​ledge​.com

Digital Icons Memes, Martyrs and Avatars

Yasmin Ibrahim

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Yasmin Ibrahim The right of Yasmin Ibrahim to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-44553-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01031-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Dedicated to my daughters, Farzhana and Nabeelah. For keeping life grounded, always.

Contents

Preface

ix

1 An Introduction Digital Icons: avatars, memes and martyrs 1 2 The shoe and the American president: ludic resistance and ‘gaming’ the iconic 25 3 Martyrdom and the mobile phone: from bystander to martyr 40 4 Tank man as the unknown icon: revitalizing Tiananmen through steganography 57 5 The ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon: the ‘Other within the Other’ 74 6 The iconic migrant body: necro-aesthetics, mimetics and the dead 101 7 The Napalm girl and platform capital: facebook governance of the iconic 117 8 Digital icons – recombined with speed in the digital age: concluding remarks 134 Index

149

Preface

You could imagine things … as what is excessive in objects, as what ­exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols and totems. (Brown 2001: 5) In Greek, icon or ikon means likeness, semblance, image, representation and portrait. These acquired portability in the Byzantium era when images of Christ, the Virgin Mary or saints and their lives could be inscribed on wood panels or precious surfaces, such as ivory, metal, enamel, mosaic and steatite, then commodified as entities to be materially experienced, with the emphasis on the sensory and sensual (Pentcheva 2006: 631). This synaesthetic quality is a vital part of the iconic. Emerging as likenesses of divine and celestial entities, icons are not entirely perceptible in rational terms. They are experienced through realms of the visceral, affective and l­ibidinal. As a result the icon, as Pentcheva points out, is a mixture of absence and presence, bound through materiality and immateriality as mimesis or performance. The icon is also seen as a semantic extension derived from the word idol (Shapiro 2008). Veering from its material or corporeal origins, its mutations in the digital realm create innumerable possibilities for abstraction in a memetic culture in which the iconic morphs and mutates, shedding symbolic resonance or in acquiring new modes of meaning-making and signification. What happens when the iconic is folded with the code of the digital environment? If code is a generic term which encompasses a ‘wide variety of different concrete programming languages and associated practices’, it then is both an actor performing actions upon data, and a vessel, holding data within its boundaries (Berry 2011: 33). The code brings its own intrinsic logic, and in the process it reproduces the icon through its technological sensibilities. This book consolidates my writings on iconic images, entities and events through time as they become reassembled into a digital architecture. Digital space is an odd thing. It remains open to sustained human activity, showcasing our bind with machines, overt and at times subliminal. The digital

x Preface is not about the static; it is constantly remade through human energies and creativity enmeshing with the workings of digital platforms which are not transparently clear to us. Its opacity, mutability, fluidity and automaticity will not only plunge the iconic into new controversies but also resurrect the dead and corpse through its virulence and abject gaze. The iconic becomes the subject and object in such a configuration of digital mutation of form and substance. For Jean Baudrillard (1990: 11), ‘we have always lived off the splendour of the subject and the poverty of the object’ and, for him, where the object is shamed, made passive or obscene, the subject has a totalizing quality. But objectification of the subject or the dichotomy between the object and the subject means that the object has been perceptible as the ‘alienated, accursed part of the subject’. As such, the subject can be threatened through the object (Brown 2001) or, as I infer it, through its objectification. Through a space in which traffic can be tracked and popularity of content measured to discern its rates of exchange, the iconic resides as a troubled and disfigured entity. As a screen culture in which frenetic exchanges celebrating speed incubate the iconic through new modes of signification, this book understands the iconic through a Deleuzian notion of ‘difference rather than semblance’, as the constitution of the iconic in the digital realm provides a starting point and an underpinning logic in tracing the reconstructions of the iconic and journeys in which the symbolic may be plundered to reconvene new moralities. This notion of simulacra provides a means to assert the iconic through its multitude of reincarnations online, unveiling it as meme, martyr and avatar in the digital sphere. Its reconstitution is not something we can consign to fiction, as there are consequences to destroying or resurrecting the iconic as a configuration of the symbolic where we make immense moral and ethical purchase to it. If memes and martyrdom or the gameplays of the digital world remake them as avatars, what happens to our moral and ethical investments in these entities? It is not an entirely clear proposition as the travel of the iconic is constantly played out online, inviting us to review our stance on collective memory and projects of redemption. The iconic as a fatigued and beleaguered form yet re-vitalized constantly through its reverence as a cultural artefact calls attention to the sensorium produced through its reconfigurations online. Some unusual icons emerge in this collection, including the dislocated and stateless Jihadi Bride embodied through the West’s disavowal of her atavism and servitude to the monster terrorist. But the deconstruction of the ‘demonic iconic’ becomes a means to trace her desires through the screen, luring her into unknown and untamed lands. She is the malign entity in her ability to invoke chaos and destruction through her corporeality and disappearance. Her statelessness is also her transcendence into a hybridity between animal and monster such that she can be configured only through her repudiation. The unlikely icons emerge in this collection through an Orientalist gaze, such that both race and space are transcended but not

Preface  xi entirely eradicated to relegate them through an essentialism in terms of identity. The anonymous icon, the dead icon, the iconic event and the disappearing icon all convene in this book, enticing us to understand how the digital would remake them through the interplay with its architecture and governance or the code. The iconic through memetic invocations with human desires and fecund fantasies and equally projected anxieties acquires news forms, formats and signification, exploiting the sensuous libidinal energies of the human. Birthed through creative enterprise and lending to the ludic and its inventions of norms through play, they pander to new modes of image-making and sharing online, acquiring artistic tendencies without dispelling the political. Pledged through the autonomous and yet remade through the pathos of unfathomable grief and communion, the iconic straddles liminal spheres in which its sublimation and desecration call attention to the code of the internet in which new modes of governance await. The iconic prevails in its beleaguered mode to ignite communal imagination, to entice it through its fantastic narratives and to grieve through its pathos. Its digital tracks affirm that as an entity it remains a paradox elongated in meaning and form in the realm of the digital, re-domesticated through code. Yasmin Ibrahim

Bibliography Baudrillard, J. (1990). Fatal strategies (P. Beitchman & W. G. J. Niesluchowski, Trans.; J. Fleming Ed.). New York: Semiotext(e). Berry, D. M. (2011). The philosophy of software: Code and mediation in the digital age. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, B. (2001). Thing theory. Critical Inquiry, 28, 1–22. Pentcheva, B. (2006). The performative icon. The Art Bulletin, 88(4), 631–655. Shapiro, M. (2008). Is an icon iconic? Language, 84(4), 815–819.

1 An Introduction Digital Icons Avatars, Memes and Martyrs

Introduction The case studies that unfold in this book are not the result of chance. In fact, they reveal our fascination with entities which multiply with force. Or perhaps acquire a magnitude of greatness and power through a combined recognition by the masses as a cultural influence entering a celestial realm forged through collective memory. The iconic is not definable, possessing a quality that is in excess of its materiality, signifying meanings and values through its travel through time. Iconic is desire, fantasy and mutability unaffected through its bodily mortality. Many entities acquire power as social entities and the book traverses these dynamics, illuminating the power of social or collective ownership of cultural icons on the unstable sphere of the digital, enacting new ritualistic dimensions afforded through the code in a libidinal economy. The travel of the iconic online is about transcendence and transgressions of the sacred, the invocation of the sublime, the seduction of the grotesque and our psychic binds with the uncanny. In a libidinal economy, human psyche and its inner instinctual forces and energies interact and maintain relations with the outer world (see Cameron, Nesvetailova, & Palan 2011). In his book Libidinal Economy, Lyotard (1993: 108–121) asserts not only that every political economy is libidinal but that it is not enough to deconstruct these from rationalist paradigms or the ideational, discursive or representational but also through the desires and feelings which circulate and are transformed in them. Tracing the transcendence of icons in the digital architecture is also about illuminating this libidinal economy revealing our creative energies juxtaposed against the Thanatos, or the death instincts. My fascination with the iconic is about its transcendental journeys online in the digital realms, platforms which are saturated with cultural interventions and norms but yet underpinned through capital’s endeavour to organize us as data entities, as content and relays which push messages and align these through our desires with the market marking them through our rituals of consumption. What then happens to the iconic in such a configuration is that it performs through an interface with users yet is ordered

2  Introduction to digital icons through its machinic logic. If the digital celebrates the ocular accumulating image archives which destabilize and reiterate other archives then the iconic is bound with historic and popular machinations. Defined by turbulence as an immanent feature combining ephemerality with the ineradicable online. Further destabilized through the ferocious speed of viral circulation denoting what captures and conceives our communal imagination, as not all matter can achieve a virality of the popular, thrusting and leaking content through a networked architecture of social relations. Here form, format and speed recombine to mutate into entities in their own right in the digital realm. If time immortalizes cultural icons, the digital world imposes its own moral sensibilities onto them, releasing the iconic into a mass spectacular of image archives where they can be remade, curated and re-­appropriated to be imbued with multitudes of meanings, drawing on their collective resonance with the masses. Intertextuality, decontextualization, irreverence and subversion recode the iconic online. There is a sense that nothing can stay still on the digital sphere, particularly not the iconic transmuted through our communal lust and desire and the internet’s avarice in possessing content as its own and the machinic play of distributing images en masse through content archives as simulacra. The notion of iconic images being replicated or their simulacra as a form which threatens the very notion of authenticity is a recurrent theme in visual studies and art history. The deficit of visual representation or its limits is not the concern of this collection of case studies. In fact, the case studies leverage on the difference and differentiation from the model, the original or the real. The thrust is this. Replication produces new political paradigms in which the iconic is harboured whether as a re-invented avatar, the martyr of collective suffering or the subversive meme which draws visceral reactions in subverting the real. Replication in the digital economy underpins a whole human affectivity and sensorium which has been understudied, perhaps overlooked. The creative enterprise of the internet, its ocular centrism and our fascination to transmogrify through the fecund possibilities of the internet’s architecture become an arena of renewed scrutiny in this collection. The redistribution of the ‘replicated’ through a viral economy of human engagement and affective communication as well as curation is to restyle the iconic in its symbolic signification. Icons are propelled through a new speed of travel in the digital architecture; in the process they not only acquire new meanings and renewed symbolism but also encounter the iconoclastic. Effacement and re-rendering of format and form is a resonant aspect of the internet and it is played out in multitudinous forms, imbuing a richness to deconstruction for scholars and researchers. The instability and incessant mutation of the iconic invigorates our engagements while thwarting a sense of stability to understanding the iconic online. The replication of images through machines that duplicate or dilute the aura of art in the age of industrial and digital reproduction is both

Introduction to digital icons  3 about the horror of art’s effacement and its democratization, perhaps its machinic re-imagination and re-articulation. But what modes does this democratization take and how does it play out in platform capitalism? How do these monetized platforms deplete icons as our cultural resources or their standing as symbols of collective memory? This is a fertile and at times troubling space of perusal. Simulacra as a watered-down version of the real or as something diminishing the real may be a prevalent argument. But I want to view simulacra as a reproduction of the real or its mutability as memes or digital avatars online not as a loss of authenticity but through Deleuze’s notion of simulacra as inducing ‘difference through its difference’. This is particularly important in the digital sphere. Unlike a static canvas where artistic images can reside, the visual sphere is a canvas like no other. Projected on screen yet powered through ‘ghosts in the machines’ (Ibrahim 2018) within the internet architecture, digital images are malleable categories in their own right, ripe for multiple re-renderings and counter-gaze, as resting sites of depravity and reverence. As WJT Mitchell (2013) asserts, a lot of contemporary political conflicts live and develop as a war of images. As these transcend onto the digital sphere, they encounter modes of turbulence and modes of regeneration. As Arthur C Clarke (1964) famously asserted, technology may be seen as magic. But magic and myth foreground through a social dynamics and interplay with technologies, networked social relations and agentic play of capital through its backhand operations to mediate our cognate senses. The online becomes accessed through and associated with the supernatural, mystical and, at times, spiritual. For the lonely, the celebrity-hungry masses, the iconic as fetishism acquires a proximity through screen cultures to be possessed within a ‘personalized realm’. But invocation of this spectral visuality of the digital space is also about the ‘affective turn’, to not reduce body and mind through a Cartesian dichotomy. In fact, to enrich our senses and scholarship to renegotiate the divide ‘between the mind and body, and between actions and passions’ (Hardt 2007: xi). For Patricia Clough (2010: 224), ‘affect is the very indication of bodies forming in the transmission of force or intensity’ and hence the intimate connectivity of affect with subjectivity, sociality and technology. Within the transcendental aesthetics of the internet is the immanence of affect. What Deleuze and Guattari (1988a) might term a bloc of sensations reactivated through the spectator, moving away from representation and deconstruction to the molecular or the intensive quality parallel to signification which you experience or as Derrida (1987) might inflect as the ‘present experience’. Or what Henri Bergson (1991) might describe as ‘attention’ which enables other ‘planes’ to be perceivable in suspending normal motor activity. Bergson’s stance is that in switching our spatio-­temporal registers which (technology enables) one can alter our experience. New media technologies take on an aesthetic function through

4  Introduction to digital icons their deterritorializing qualities (O’Sullivan 2001: 127). Derrida (2005), in locating affectivity as intrinsic to the political, argues that common bonds cannot be established between subjects without it. Additionally, the political subject cannot experience affectivity without the structural mediation of technics (i.e. a concept intersecting with technology though not reducible to it) but referencing which enable a subject to bind themselves with an external world, which in has affective consequences. (Earlie 2017: 382) The external textural world also being through the technological is not only its unique somatic experience for the individual subject but also dimensions to replication. Derrida’s re-articulation of the notion ‘punctum’, which he draws from Roland Barthes, to describe a minor detail which cuts through the photograph’s objective quality abstracting that single referential particularity to create a metonymy is also about its recurrence. ‘As soon as it drawn into an assemblage of substitution, it works itself into objects and affect, irradiating a generalizability’ (Earlie 2017: 382). As such, affect can be structured through representation and is bound up with signification as techne.

The mimetics of the internet The salient terms in this book, namely icon, meme, martyr and avatar, are intensely implicated in mimetics or imitation constituted through performance and to a large measure representation through cultural artefacts and artistic endeavours, and equally the interplay of social relations with other humans as well as capital. They invoke human participation and subjectivity as well as affectivity. They entail collective meaning-making and symbolic interactions with material objects of cultural fascination, fetishism and obsession, objects of desire and suffering which arrest our attention. But another layer is added to this array of mutable terms through the architecture of the internet. When these entities leap onto digital platforms, strange and uncertain things happen – diverse phenomena and audiences interlock while infusing meaning through the intertextual. The mutability and the instability of the internet form a perverse relationship online without quite dispelling the offline relations and social attachments with the iconic. An idea which underpins these salient notions is the concept of mimetics. Beyond signifying imitation, it captures the resonance and re-representations to veer into illusions, fantasies and the ephemeral, and in so doing it evokes deep human emotions or engages our senses beyond the logical or cerebral. There is a primordial role of imitation in human life and our propensity to imitate has become more profound and revolutionary (Garrels 2005: 47).

Introduction to digital icons  5 Taylor (2002) argues that for both Richard Dawkins and René Girard imitation differentiated the human from the rest of the animal kingdom, envisaging the brain as an organ fundamentally structured by and for imitation. Pegging this imitation as a ‘viral’ mechanism over which there is no control and, as such, underpinning culture through an evolutionary genetics. While Dawkins (2016) propounds his ideas through the notion of memes as replicating ideas or ‘units of imitation’, Girard views it through human relations where ‘memesis’ is our imitation of the desire of others. Considered as a school of thought within socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, it signifies an endeavour to apply evolutionary models to the human sciences and has been popularly appropriated in internet and computer studies, in addition to being prominent in science fiction (Taylor 2002). The human brain, co-evolving with memes and possessing enhanced memetic capabilities, has the ability to select ideas which may be instrumental or beneficial in human terms without foreclosing and co-existing with dangerous or violent ideas and belief systems. If mimetics is about the cultural evolution in the transmission of ideas, the development of a technological ecology which permeates and saturates human life in postmodernity has the capacity to enable new modes of transmission which surpass the human ability to transmit ideas. Artificial intelligence and robotics which simulate human behaviour become integrated into cultural evolution through intelligent machines which colonize human environments while mimicking and studying our thought processes to cue us through our own modalities of actions and reaction. Mimetics then underpins the evolution of intelligent machines as these not only imitate ideas but improve them while downloading them directly into their progeny (Taylor 2002). In studying the human and ‘becoming human’, machines are the simulacra of human vulnerabilities. This will be a recurrent theme of human extractions in late modernity, centring human cultural production while infusing culture as raw materials produced through technical architectures reconfigured through capital. What equally foregrounds the importance in studying mimetics is how the human capacity to imitate can be the basis in forming sustainable communities through the transmission of cultural ideas and ideologies. Girard’s (1965, 1979) mimetic theory propounds that there is an underlying mechanism at work in human relationships and they operate socially through mimetic principles though not quite realized at a conscious level but existing at a subconscious intuitive level (Garrels 2005). Icons share some common traits, as signifiers of meaning and in encapsulating the symbolic. According to Gregor Goethals (1978), when we designate certain images or objects as icons we are in fact ascribing them extraordinary traits such that they embody salient values which can encompass residues of the sacred. In studying national icons, Albert Boime (1997) discerns the sacred inherent in Christian traditions and national monuments through consecration such as dedicated ceremonies and their status as sites of pilgrimage, reinforcing and enacting shared values in material

6  Introduction to digital icons terms. The residue of the sacred which icons are imbued with recodes even secular materiality with the element of divinity or reification. However, as Boime points out, national icons could also embody a compliance through a strength of loyalty and attachment. The symbolic readings and interpretation of the icon as such can be primordial, drawing on our primal senses to continuously worship and create new gods in popular culture, exuding reverence through fetishism and fandom and equally the possibilities for the profane in acts of iconoclasm. As such, icons can take on contradictory and multiple associations and as entities of polysemic reading they veer between the sacred and the profane, forged through the poetics of attachment or disenfranchisement. Produced as mutable entities conjured through allusions of popular culture and the screen amplifying their possibilities in a celluloid culture, icons acquire levels of meaning through the projection of their visibility across time and space particularly through the intimate bind of replication technologies which power them as symbols of wider capitalist consumption, supplanting desire but forming associations with other salient concepts like nation, femininity or masculinity as well as the notion of immortality in their manifestations. Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981: 12) depicts the world we experience as a symbolic representation of life, a virtual reality. The virtual in appropriating life and its symbolic realm equally repositions the simulacra of the iconic that must recombine the agentic tendencies of its consuming audiences with the instabilities of platform capitalism. Nicholas Constas (1997), in writing about icons and imagination, asserts that ‘image and imagination are mimetically linked’. Here imagination produces the images which in turn affectour imagination. The word ‘icon’ is used colloquially to refer to humans who achieve celebrity status. It is also applied to the tangible – logos such as Apple’s trademark and symbols such as the swastika – as well as to easily recognizable and widely disseminated images, mostly photographs that ‘made history’ (Hansen 2015: 267). Shapiro (2008: 816) points out that the American Heritage and Webster dictionary definitions of the word icon refer to ‘One who is the object of great attention and devotion; an idol’ and ‘an object of uncritical devotion: IDOL, esp.: a traditional belief or ideal’, respectively. Similarly, the adjective ‘iconic’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘designating a person or thing regarded as representative of a culture or movement; important or influential in a particular (cultural) context’ (Shapiro 2008: 816). In Debord’s (1967: 14) conception of the spectacle, ‘appearances saturate and proclaim predominance asserting that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance’. Images as the centre of modern culture, mediating relationships between subjects, with configurations of capital marking a general shift in modern life in which images appear, providing fulfilment through specular identification. As such the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point it becomes an image. For Debord, disparate

Introduction to digital icons  7 phenomena in society are brought together and explained through the notion of the spectacle. Unlike other scholars, Debord saw the spectacle not as a consequence of replication technologies per se but its saturation which produced forms of identification and alienation in society. For both Baudrillard and Debord technologies of replication become abstracting forces and, additionally for Baudrillard (1994), these become signifiers offering instability through their dialectical readings. Modern life, saturated with imagery as well as with immersions of the self within screen cultures, is both the mediation of social reality with and through the image. Image and imagery become part of our social reality premising the ocular while infusing it through affective communities of consumption (see Ibrahim 2019). Cities and architecture become entangled with brands and commodities, producing ‘brandscapes’ in which desires and fetishization form an intimate bind with capitalism and its ability to push brands and commodities as cultural icons. Humanity’s relationship with the iconic predates modernity and consumerism, projecting a trajectory in which the image seeks to create an intimacy with divinity and to reimagine gods through the human image. The celestial, ephemeral and symbolic often forge a relationship with the iconic. The icon connoted through its absence and presence recrafted through materiality but sustained through its indelible aura entails the sensorial and affective encounter. The icon thus goes through a process of becoming, changing and performing (Pentcheva 2006: 631). Hence, the icon entails a ‘mimesis’ or performance in its malleability and resilience through time. The etymological root of the word ‘icon’ is the Greek word eikon which refers to image, representation and portrait in a broad sense. In Byzantium, the word also acquired a very specific meaning as a portable portrait of Christ, the Virgin and saints with scenes from their lives on wood panels or precious surfaces such as ivory, metal, enamel, mosaic and steatite (Herrin 2007: 105; Pentcheva 2006: 631). Cornelia Brink (2000) points out the entwined relationship between the icon and the divinity in Byzantine times where pictures depicted the forms of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints or biblical scenes, and as such retained elements of the numen or Charis through the invisible divine. As such, they possessed an aura beyond their materiality and through these icons the believers visualized and, over time, personified the divine. Technological advances produced a relationship between the icon and the photography through their notion of the similarity with the original located through the semblance of authenticity. As such, the iconic as a material object exceeds in the limits of meaning condensing complex phenomena but also in reconfiguring spatial and temporal in exemplary form (Brink 2000: 141). History, collective memory, communion and fracture can be inscribed through the symbolic and in tandem the iconic is a site of both contested identities and reformulations over time, binding affectivity and euphoric

8  Introduction to digital icons human attachments. Pointedly, in Byzantium, the iconic object signified vision through a synesthetic experience in which the whole body is engaged. The term ‘synesthesia’ as employed in modern art theory and psychology refers to concomitant sensation: the experience of one sense through the stimulation of another, such as colour experienced as sound (Pentcheva 2006: 631). As such the icon could be related through the simultaneity of senses, this being a vital aspect of its production and consumption even today in digital platforms and consumer capitalism. The icon appears in other domains; Peirce’s (1998) sign theory constituted the icon as emerging through the trichology of icon/index/symbol capturing its promiscuous relationship between a sign and its object. Icons in modernity work to reproducibility and mass desire, as objects to be domesticated and acquire intimacy yet distanced through mythic qualities which make them part of a symbol of collective ownership and meaning-making. As highly visible, desirable and culturally malleable auratic entities, they are potent signifiers of complex cultural meanings.

Memes and memetics As Susan Blackmore notes, the Oxford English Dictionary contains the following definition of ‘meme’: An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation. Blackmore 1999: viiiBiologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) introduced the term, comparing it to the transmission of genes from person to person, seeking to apply evolutionary genetic theory to cultural change. Shortening the long form mimema which alludes to the element of imitation, Dawkins declared the word to be the ‘cultural equivalent of gene’ (Chielens & Heylighen 2005: 15), where ideas leap from brain to brain: we need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. (Dawkins 1976: 192) Dawkins’ meme is an abbreviation for mimeme, a cognate related to the Greek word ‘mimesis’ with its etymology overlapping the English words ‘mime’ and ‘mimicry’ or the French ‘même’ (‘the same’) (Cannizzaro 2016: 562). Memes manifesting in cultural settings through objects, behaviours and belief systems, such as clothing, vernacular terms, rumours

Introduction to digital icons  9 or even abstract beliefs, spread from person to person through emulation or repetition. Memes not only signify some form of cultural and social retention but equally their ability to morph and change, to attract the attention of hosts. Dawkins (1976), drawing on characteristics of biological evolution, listed copying, fecundity or number of copies made per unit and longevity as the elements which explained the success of a meme. Their success and retention are nevertheless very much dependent on conducive sociocultural habitats and environments. In perceiving memes as competing in a Darwinian sense for human attention, in a media scape they compete for time and memory as well as media space in terms of broadcasting, billboards, newspaper columns and library shelf space, characterized through their transmission tendencies and a successful meme likened to a ‘cultural virus’ (Chielens & Heylighen 2005: 15). As a cultural category lending its significance in comprehending the cultural behaviour of imitation in various fields from marketing to religion, memes also represent the enigmatic in what might attract and retain human agency to imitate. Spreadability, imitation and repetition as intrinsic to social media and its architecture of visual literacy and social currency reiterate this phenomenon as having a present and peculiar significance to the virtual realm. Within the framework of popular culture, memes can allude to appropriation by the masses and their infectious spread, infusing these through the notion of a contagion or some form of virality. Ewald Hering in the essay “Memory as a General Function of O ­ rganized Matter” (1895) and Richard Semon, in a treatise entitled The Mneme as a Principle of Conservation in the Transformation of Organic Processes (1904), conceived similar conceptualisations of memory as a transmissible biological source of group dispositions and behaviour. (Barash 2016: 18) For Hering through heredity the transmission from one life to another, embryo remembers its parents. Where the embryo is the recipient of parental information, heredity and memory become fused and, in effect, Hering enabled a way in which to understand heredity as the transfer of stored information. As form of encrypted message which only the embryo deciphered. His proposition was that ideas that disappear from consciousness could be held in some material form as unconscious memory (Forsdyke 2015: 135–136). As such, actions which were repeated many times were likely to be stored in memory. Memes as contagious patterns of cultural information that are transmitted from mind to mind then influence and mediate significant forms of behaviour and actions of a social group (Knobel  & Lankshear 2007: 2000). Equally memes can also be violent, dangerous if not delusional or self-destructive as Dawkins points out.

10  Introduction to digital icons Susan Blackmore, in expanding on the human species’ natural propensity to imitate, asserts: When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own. We might call this thing an idea, an instruction, a behaviour, a piece of information…but if we are going to study it we shall need to give it a name. Fortunately, there is a name. It is the ‘meme’. (1999: 5) Memes’ ability to spread indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or positively harmful to us is a point Blackmore raises (1999: 7). In so doing, she cites from American psychologist Donald Campbell’s (1960, 1965) argument that cultural evolution and creative thought share a resemblance as systems which evolve through blind variation among the replicated parts in which some variants might be selectively retained while others are dispensed. Sampson, in his book Virality – Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012), argues that the present is an ‘age of contagion’, thereby contending that the theories of imitation and neurosciences may provide an insight into communication processes particularly within networked cultures. Through the notion of ‘contagious relationality’, he contends that pre-emption strategies exploit emotions ‘creating conditions for increasingly connected populations to pass on and imitate suggestions of others’ (2012: 5), co-relating contagion as a phenomenon with the affective, the instinctual and the unconscious. With his conceptualization, Sampson extends his contagion theory to encompass intersubjectivity and relationality beyond the human. Lisa Blackman (2014: 365) points out that theories of imitation and crowds are aligned with broader concerns about the spreading and intensification of communication in the digital era and how contagion itself might be related to modes of sociality, revealing our relationality with others. Drawing on criminologist Gabriel Tarde, Blackman invokes ‘somnambulistic subjectivity’ premising an argument that suggestion rather than rationality or reason provides the basis for sociality, revealing Tarde’s interest in the contagious aspect of communication. Within the wider archaeology of the digital, power as a subliminal category refers to non-representational or hypnotic modes operating through the unconscious (Sampson 2012). Retention and spreadability as innate characteristics of the digital world install mimetics as a phenomenon in sync with its architecture of connectivity and assemblage. As still images and audio-visual material via videos and animations within the interactive web and economy of co-creation as well as the notion of passing on what amused or grabbed your attention, memes enter the realm of the ‘popular spectacular’ of acquiring values through their pass-on rate, popular consumption and entering people’s

Introduction to digital icons  11 frames of reference to an event or happening. This intertextuality accords memes social value while drawing on the creative enterprise of the web in utilizing open-source editing and remixing technologies and user-friendly applications which characterize the sharing economy online. These reassert the participatory economy of the web such that the value is accumulated through people sharing and enabling a virality to propel memes into popularity. If memes allude to mimesis they may not completely represent the intense creativity that can accrue through user-friendly technologies and the architecture of the internet designed to invoke the attention and amusement of the next user who is the recipient of the content. Metadata as an index of usage and flow of a meme’s journey are now captured and aggregated for public consumption, entwining memes as part of the quantified data of internet architecture. Memes remain as part of a popular genre often articulated through their virality as a form of contagion or through Dawkins’ discussions of evolutionary genetics collapsing them through modes of uncontrollable transmission while somewhat downplaying the agentic role of audiences as relays of information and the individual preference, and communal endorsements in enabling their success. It also underplays the social and political as well as contextual relevance which can elevate a meme into mythic status and its ability to retain a myth or be iconoclastic in dismissing it as a subversive device. Identifying both the autonomy of memes and their subversive qualities is also to bring to the fore their role as media artefacts, entailing participation, self-organization, free labour, amateur culture, networks and the esoteric qualities of virality which can defy logical patterns (Cannizzaro 2016: 562). Rene Girard (1979) presents the meme as the ‘mime’ in referring to the unconscious impulse to imitate others and as such this ‘mimetic desire’ is a potent human inclination through the brain, dubbing this organ as the ‘enormous imitating machine’. In constructing his memetic thesis, Girard takes on an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on theology, mythology, sociology and anthropology among others. In viewing memes not in strict terms as a unit of measure, he discerns it as a dynamic process ensconced through interpersonal relations which in effect become essential in the construction of the self and identity. Mimetics can also unleash delusions and conflicts, and produce anxieties and these are endlessly exploited by modern media and its attendant artefacts. This imitative impulse in Homo sapiens leads to another of a set of consequences unleashing discord and delusions in society, denoting its contagious appeal. The structuring of the brain, behaviour and culture through mimesis is then also to be scrambled or distorted by it. As such, Garrels (2005: 49) argues that imitation in human beings is viewed as a secondary rather than a fundamental part of human behaviour, playing a primal role in animating and sustaining the human psyche from the beginning of life in terms of both evolutionary and development perspectives. The conjoining of mimesis (i.e. imitation)

12  Introduction to digital icons with memetic theory infuses evolutionary genetics to cultural paradigms and within the architecture of the digital, this is further amplified through its sharing potential as a validation of mimesis and in engendering replication in popular culture in people’s psyche. Hence from ‘mimetics’ we see ‘memetics’ as binding human psyche with machinic dispositions to circulate and share, inducing it through the viral economics of the digital economy and governance through its code.

‘Avatarism’ online In Hindu philosophy, the Avatar ‘signifies the descent or condescension of god, from the higher celestial realm to the lower terrestrial regions’ (Mathew 2005: 52) and to transact in a material world through the appropriation of different forms. The ability to transcend spatio-temporal limitations is seen as appealing to the human psyche in its potency to conjoin bodily mortality with divine ephemerality to liberate the embodied human (Mathew 2005: 55). From its philosophical and theological origins, the term is now widely used in gaming studies and marketing to refer to the representation of the self in a different medium (Wuest, Hribernik, & Thoben 2015: 5), particularly in game mode where the player can acquire a renewed self through play in an immersive environment constructed through its own cosmology of rules and sense-making. This can entail both the abstraction of social reality of the world and abortive tendencies to procreate a new world through immersion and animation. Computer-generated visual representations or avatars are being increasingly used in social media and virtual environments as well as in e-commerce and popular consumer interfaces. As a digital personification of human presence and agency, the avatar is about personalization but also about its ability to retain duality of presence online and offline. At the heart of the notion of avatarism are questions about subjectivity and identity in the digital realm. As Stephan Webb (2001: 561) argues invoking Raymond Williams (1966) the need to be attentive to the interplay of forces enabling conditions of virtual worlds and their relation to pre-existing offline cultural phenomenon where the enmeshing of the two can determine movements of specific cultural formations. The early studies of the new media environment portrayed the virtual realms as a space of new-found freedom where one could reinvent oneself without the burden of embodiment. Disembodied through a technical architecture in which one could reinvent a sense of identity and persona, the virtual presented a realm of potential liberties dichotomized from the real. The idea of multiple identities and the reinvention of the self through a technologically mediated sphere produced a burst of euphoria and liberation from the constraints of the real world in its initial renderings (Donath 1999). It was a moment of unrestrained jubilation in imagining the possibilities and opportunities to assume new identities and to reinvent oneself without the constraints of

Introduction to digital icons  13 the offline world. These were the initial forays into the virtual where we imagined new worlds, played with the ideas and ideals of birthing new identities decentred from the material world and our embodied realities. A moment humanity imagined preserving its new-found liberation away from national boundaries, state governance and market mechanisms, taking over these vast wastelands made for human habitation and creativity (Barlow 1995). Though this utopian moment was short-lived, the ‘avatar’ as the moniker of reinvention of identities online took hold in our sociological imagination of the virtual. The term itself would become an immanent aspect of digital culture with relevance to identities one could appropriate online; nevertheless, the euphoria of liberation would soon give way to new forms of governance, surveillance and data extraction and the recalibration of the human as post-human within platform capitalism tightly welded to tracking technologies and data mining which would situate you through your geolocation, digging out your digital footprint and conjoining back these to your profile in the offline world. Virtual Worlds (VWs) as immersive 3D environments which enable large number of users to interact with one another over the internet can be further distinguished between game-based worlds and social worlds such as Second Life. The popularity of these attests to the fact that both the notion of serious play and the ways in which these mediate identity construction through immersive environments renew the importance of the avatar within differently configured social settings online. In immersive and simulated game environments, avatars being entities one can control open up questions about what this might entail online. Social Presence Theory (Short, Williams, & Christie 1976) examined how people experienced each other in different medium and the relationships which would unfold through them. Online presence entails how one is projected socially and emotionally in a mediated environment. Avatarism in the virtual environment entails the creation of new forms of identities through the intermingling of ‘biology, technology, and code’, hence enacting new selves through social interactions enacted through a ‘second self’ (Turkle 1996). Gregory Little (1999) defines the cyborg as the incorporation of ‘body and prostheses in the forms of mechanical, optical, coded, pharmacological, electronic, telematic, genetic, and biological agents, hosted by an original human consciousness to form a unified but hybrid lived body’. This very hybridity unsettles it as a category. Similarly, in ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ Donna Haraway (1991) births the cybernetic organism through hybridity of technology and organism existing between social reality and fiction. As part of the post-industrial culture, the union of the mind, body and technology is realized in the consummation of the player and avatar’s agency in videogame play. The breathing of life into the avatar and the automation induced by cyber life mix boundaries between being alive and dead within such a conceptualization. The libidinal economy of play juxtaposes the euphoria of game playing against coalescing of humans into the machinic.

14  Introduction to digital icons The self, constituted through its multiplicity and fluidity in the digital realm, marks the transcendence of the embodied offline self where it encounters new travels and experiences. Avatars as the invention of the virtual self and the transcendence into a world stripped of convention but reconfigured through new rules of play brings into sharp focus how immersive environments subvert and reiterate the real. These new forms of entertainment ‘absorb’ the offline world into the online one, transforming both in the process of realization (Van Loon 2010: 22). Through the concept of transduction, Van Loon (2010: 22) contends ‘game-play as an assemblage of energies and forces; manifest as virtual matter that act as interfaces, continuously multiplying desires and forms of being’. One’s avatar online is about emotional investments and attachments inscribed through imagined and mediated worlds. For example, the degree of engagement with an avatar in game environments where one develops an avatar from an unskilled character to one of strength and skill is about the investment of time and commitment from the player (Klang 2004). These avatars represent the accumulation of social capital in the gaming world and within a gaming community. Avatars become social beings in their own right. In its interplay with the iconic, avatars wrangle new rules through elements of play and, in so doing, recode iconic events and iconic signification through the ludic and the pulsating forces of the libidinal economy. The iconic will be abstracted into new reincarnations or avatars in their own right, rebirthed through the mirth and euphoria of game playing and game mode. Games, the notion of play, the ludic and the comic will recombine with force online and as such the avatar and avatarism acquires renewed complexity within the consumption of the iconic online.

Martyrdom Witnessing and martyrdom have an intimate bind and in the online world the idea of witnessing and the creation of the martyr can be a means to mourn but equally to convene a community of spectacle through the dead. The Roman Catholic Church, which defines martyrdom as ‘bearing witness unto death’, and the martyr as one who ‘bears witness to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine’ (Middleton 2014: 119), conjoins witnessing, death and spectacle through a theological bind through time. The symbolic political power of dead bodies does not reside in the concrete clarity of their meaning but rather through their malleability and ambiguity (Verdery 2004: 306). Despite its religious entanglement, martyrdom remains a political media event online leveraging on the public gaze, uniting communities which mourn with bystanders who partake in the suffering or the ‘jouissance’ it presents. The martyr becomes the rallying figure and a site of mythologizing to produce symbols and signification through which people can gain proximity to the dead icon. Martyrdom online is also about the creation of new rituals, modes of commemoration and production of memento mori while entombing

Introduction to digital icons  15 memorialization through a medium where matter floats and becomes ineradicable, locked into the mnemonic memory of machines. If death through the mortality of lives is a given in the offline context, the virtual is the liminal sphere of remaking the corpse and rebirthing it through the visual imaginary, to ordain through an immortality. Death rituals in the online sphere recombine the architecture of the internet as a cultural resource to mourn the dead, locking them into a sphere of not letting them rest but resurrecting them through the curation of image and text and enabling spaces for public communion through the martyr, as the sacrificed and the invocation of social justice through this communal commemoration. From Durkheim’s (1976) perspective, ritual is nothing short of ‘society in action’. Social solidarity is created and affirmed through the sacred meanings that people ascribe to the dead. As such, the notion of the sacred plays a vital role in the constitution of a shared moral sentiment, enacting rituals as performative and communicative. Media(ted) events provide new fodder for the internet to invent new rituals of martyrdom. They enable a public to convene online through the intertextuality of mediated spaces, providing significance for communion through a heightened emotional state to categorize a body or event that led to the death as sacred or, as Christopher Helland (2013: 27) observes, these rituals provide purposive engagement with the sacred. Rituals, emotionally driven and involving social interactions, are relevant for the social web and its creative architecture. If modernity banishes death through the disappearance of the corpse, the internet celebrates death in ways that reaffirm its performative role through its ambiguity and new modes of anxieties coalescing with the architecture of viewing without content and sharing through affective communities. Death can court a visceral realm to work through its meanings, and online death mutates through the slain icon providing spaces to enact new rituals which interlock a sensorium of imagery and imagination, in centring the dead as a cultural resource for both social justice and propaganda. The iconic dead retain power through their symbolic form to both unite and disenfranchise through the profane readings of the corpse where it is not fit for sacrifice. The iconic dead power communities as cultural resources and symbols of offline events. In so doing, it ignites an affective global community to comprehend both the death event and the dead icon through their contextual particularities and universalize them through their global status. Iconic death and martyrdom online entail the conjoining of contextualized local events with global communities which draw on the resonance of death to re-mobilize them martyrs online. At the core of the conjecture between the technological remediation of martyrdom is the legitimation through the spectacle and production of the ‘sacred’ through new ritual modes, penetrating the virtual as a liminal sphere where the sacred achieves transcendence from a mere mortal entity to the iconic, resurrected through an immortal tryst with the digital medium.

16  Introduction to digital icons

Deleuze and simulacra as difference In treating the iconic as leaping into the digital sphere and reconstituted within the terrain of this complex architecture, the book takes a Deleuzian approach to the iconic as simulacra in demarcating the difference and differentiation as an important aspect of studying its reformulation online. ‘Simulacrum’ as a term has gone through much rethinking over time. It builds both an association and rupture from Baudrillard’s (1994) notion of the ‘hyperreal’ in contemporary society or in Debord’s Society of Spectacle (1967), where the whole of the world is subsumed through it. Simulacrum reflects the speed in which technology can recalibrate the image and circulate it with renewed ferocity. Society, through its spectacular economy, finds a bind with simulacra. In philosophical thought its resonance as a prominent concept, particularly in the digital era, is affirmed through both its sustained reconfiguration with the technological and its disruptive qualities in thwarting the real and its representation. With his seminal idea of hyperreal, Baudrillard (1994) propositions that simulation as castrated from territory, referentiality or substance produces the notion of the real without origin or reality. Simulacra as signs become transacted and interlocked with other elements instead of the real for Baudrillard (1983). Hence, the contemporary world is experienced through this loss of the realm submerging our cognitive reality into the hyperreal. In superseding the real, this hyperreality highlights the ascendency of simulacra over representation and its significance for human civilization. In contrast to Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal, Frederic Jameson (1991) traces simulacra through Marxist paradigms to iterate the pervasiveness of consumer capitalism which becomes the very fabric of our cultural sphere and everyday life. Debord in Society of Spectacle (1967) resonates these ideas of the world being transformed into images and collapsed through spectacles, reifying the commodity and spectacle as configurative of modern life. As such the theory of simulation builds an intimate bind with technology to stand in for the real, effacing it while supplanting it with an unsteady world of materiality around us (Cubitt 2001). The simulated world as a disruptive and subversive world projects intense uncertainties in defining the boundaries of reality vis-à-vis to interactive technologies and their relations to the real (Haladyn & Jordan 2010). I take a Deleuzian approach that in deconstructing the simulacra what matters is the difference. Deleuze, in encountering the phenomenon of simulacrum not as a copy of the original but the enunciation of difference in intrinsic form and reality, opens new modes of enquiry into deconstructing a copy through its difference. Thereby Simulacra are those systems in which the different relates to the different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity and internal resemblance: it is all a matter of difference. (Deleuze 1990: 299)

Introduction to digital icons  17 Crafted neither in inferiority status nor as a copy of the copy, the internal difference despite its external resemblance holds centre stage with the simulacrum. Human civilizations, particularly with the advent of modern technologies, have been preoccupied with the notion of reproduction and authenticity. In the digital age, these discourses acquire renewed significance with the notion of ‘virtuality’ as a counter-force to the materiality of our lived world offline. The notion of real then competes with simulated environments in an architecture which celebrates reproducibility, enabling content to leap between platforms through convergent technologies. In the digital age, truth and authenticity become renewed concerns along with discourses of fakes and fraudulent enterprises which threaten not only the purity of the real but also the effacement of the authentic. For Deleuze, a whole differential economy is produced with simulacra, creating signification in its own right while retaining difference as a lens to deconstruct and discern it from the original. Difference is then vital in differentiating the difference. Deleuzian philosophy invokes difference as not only materially significant but in also providing a mechanism to deconstruct new modes of signification in instrumental and aesthetic terms which may not be alluded to by the original. In seizing immanence and internal difference as key characteristics of simulacra, Deleuze’s conceptualization of the term veers beyond Plato’s seminal notion of the copy and of the model as one of resemblance and the effects of simulacra as negative (1969: 294). In Deleuzian philosophy, if the copy is an image endowed with resemblance, ‘the simulacrum is an image without resemblance’ (1969: 257). The pejorative aspect of the simulacrum as a problem imbued with trickery or subversion is overturned, seizing difference as an internalized characteristic rather than enacting it as a contentious device through its resemblance. Drawing on Christian doctrine, he posits that if God created man in his own image then man through his own sin has lost the resemblance despite retaining the image where semblance replaces the resemblance to become a simulacra. By possessing an internalized differential nature, the simulacrum deviates from the copy. Simulacrum then has a quality which contests the notion of both the original and the copy, undermining the distinction between the two and in the process it can overturn, subvert and challenge the privileged position of the model (Deleuze 1968: 69). It then possesses the potential to unveil and deconstruct assumptions held about an ‘originary model, to reveal a truth beyond the apparent’ (Deleuze 1968: 106). In not operating in the remit of falseness in comparison to the original, the ‘power of the false’ (pseudos) becomes an instrumental and positive notion in its own right and as such has its own immanent economy. I draw on this as the main emphasis of the book. The digital avatars, the icons and memes become entities of difference in their own right and their deconstruction is about new processes, behaviours and modes of subversion which can accrue online. Simulacrum occupies its own truth through this disruption and fragmentation from the model. In so claiming, Deleuze’s argument is that

18  Introduction to digital icons through its internal characteristic of difference the simulacrum acquires power and modes of social capital through its autonomy (Smith 2005). In Deleuzian philosophy the simulacrum becomes renewed through its difference, acquires a purity and a means to examine its cultural signification and formulate new ideas through its intrinsic qualities, this being the central spine of the conceptualization, enabling one to look beyond the surface resemblance or identity. The simulacrum equally acquires an autonomous quality through repetition which ungrounds it from context enabling it to transcend and be formless. This invitation to think through difference and disparity rather than a priori identity sets the premise of this set of readings that ensue. As such it seeks to veer beyond the inadequacy of representation in modern thought (Smith 2005: 25). Deleuze in effect follows up and somewhat replaces the notion of simulacra with his concept of ‘assemblage’ to denote the modes through which things no longer simulate but actualize particularly through their virtuality. The replacement of simulacrum with the notion of the assemblage [agencement] reframes simulacra as amenable to multiple iterations. Thwarting the well-treaded enquiries into imitation and representation is also to negate the imposition of hierarchy or primacy to the model, scrambling any preconceived order in terms of its participation. This unmasks processes and ontological realities which reside within simulacra which would otherwise be subsumed through the primacy of the original. This unmasking and the discernment of differential machinery enable new ideas immanent to simulacra to emerge. Deleuze imbues contemporary art with a responsibility in providing a critical lens to the pervasiveness of mass production and replication even before the advent of platform capitalism. Through advanced consumerism or the standardization of objects of desire, accelerated production becomes part of modern life and art can provide a means to enquire into these frenetic modes of consumption but also our eventual demise from a material world, teasing out the ‘difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition’ (Murphy 2007: 165). Deleuze’s system of simulacra precedes and extends beyond the logic of resemblance relating it to a wider economy of processes where it acquires intensity through its intrinsic qualities and quantities. In approaching the idea of artistic forms and creative endeavours online, the Deleuzian philosophy of immanent difference provides a means to relate to other mechanisms and forges linkages, and in so doing thwart its particularity by these very linkages and movements. The theorization of simulacra as a system which eschews resemblance and its umbilical relations with the model focuses its decentring and divergence while illuminating its convergence with other systems and processes. As a differential machinery, it makes elements foreign to itself. In the era of the digital, the ubiquity of technologically mediated modernity has a promiscuous relationship with replication and duplication whether it be consumerism or celluloid cultures, reiterating a vast amount of criticism about modernity as a form of simulacra (Giddings 2007: 419).

Introduction to digital icons  19 The embedding of technologies into everyday life, art and science and the transcendence of cultural forms into technological platforms enunciatethe simulacra as a differential machinery, bringing forth renewed scrutiny as unstable and disruptive (Rheingold 1991; Turkle 1996). Deleuze, in releasing simulacra from the shackles of representation or inauthentic copies, imbues it with a politics of its own and thus conjoins to other processes which hitherto have been made invisible due to our obsession with resemblance. This unveiling of processes and relationships without foreclosing the insatiable bind with consumerism and capitalism is to also reveal human vulnerabilities and affectivities. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), creative thinking and aesthetic production become aspects which remake simulacra, as evident in the analogy of Christ’s face so joyfully depicted by painters which does more than only stoke creative aesthetic production. It in essence sets in motion a new politics, one in which the visual acquires primacy (Watson 2005: 257) and new modes of signification. In rearticulating the crisis with representation in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1988b) delineate the notion of ‘faciality’ as not only ideological in re-representing the world but equally in the production of subjectivity in wider humanity. Through their ‘schizo analysis’ of the psychological and social domains, they deconstruct the ‘desiring machines’ which break through the constraints of capitalist appropriations and thereby function as revolutionary investments of desire capable of exploding the fundamental structures of capitalist society (Stivale 1980: 46). The transgression from the compliance with the model is vital to Deleuze in inviting readers to cogitate and deconstruct through divergence and difference to break the surface chains of resemblance and to unveil ‘its phantasmatic or repressed power’ (Deleuze 1990: 261). Unlike representation simulacra are rebellious, unshackling themselves from representation’s zeal to conform and exclude difference or eccentricity. If the notion of representation leads everything back to the model of the human, simulacra perform as a phantasm scrambling hierarchies and releasing them through nomadic and autonomous tendencies which create both chaos and modes of decentring (Watson 2005). In drawing on a Deleuzian approach, the iconic in its online manifestation is about simulacra in which its difference is generated through the binding of the human with machinic forces centring the libidinal economy in which human psyche and its desiring machines perform with the agentic devices of capital. The emphasis is on the iconic as simulacra celebrating difference in recognition of its semblance as a means to cogitate new possibilities in resurrecting the iconic as euphoria of human fantasies and sublimation, and equally its effacement.

The inter-mingling of the offline and online context The case studies in this book collection need to be understood and interpreted through the offline context as well in approaching the online phenomena which unfold in terms of the simulacra and mimetics (or memetics),

20  Introduction to digital icons in the invocation of new avatars such as martyrs or memes. They don’t as a rule stand in isolation through the technological remixing of platform logic or the code. They evolve through the vitality of their offline socio-political context such that their effervescence online will mark the transcendence of how new life is projected onto these iconic entities to regenerate them. Equally in terms of the norms, values and our notions of the sacred and profane which will provide a strong counter-point to how memes, martyrs or avatars become ‘hijacked’ into subversive cultures which thwart authority or in imbuing these through the ‘sense’ and sensibility or governance structures of platform capital lapsing with people’s memetic capacities offering toolkits and user-friendly technologies online that abstract labour without labelling our efforts as labour, to pull and lull us into new sensorium in unmaking and remaking the image. The ludic, the carnivalesque, the sacred and the puerile will await new imagery, unleashing a parade of ocular jouissance as new content, thrusting into the popular vernacular through the viral and unleashing an avalanche of imagery where it will be processed without context or origin or be re-tagged and categorized through the logic of search engines and machine algorithms. Hence, examining human organisms through their immediate surrounds is also a call for new empiricism (Clough 2009: 43), a re-thinking of methodology through a ‘rethinking of bodies, matter and life’ reconciling a changing nature of governance and configurations of the economy online. This equally entails looking past the rational and conscious attention into the subliminal, contagious and automaticity referring to processes within networked cultures, mediation, cognitive capitalisms and pre-emptive strategies of control where power is seen to ‘get under the skin’ in ways which exceed cognition and the self-regulating capacities of distinctly human subjects’ (Blackman 2014: 366). In such a configuration, the iconic absorbs the residues of these forces morphing as an entity re-enacted between the mortal and immortal, and re-inscribed through the ‘liminoid’ (van Gennep 1909) structures of the virtual.

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2 The shoe and the American president Ludic resistance and ‘gaming’ the iconic

Introduction In December 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President George W Bush during a press conference in Iraq, with the gaze of the global media transfixed on this extraordinary iconic event. The global media as a material witness to the shoe-throwing incident, which would be broadcast the world over and repeated time and again, appropriated a moment of the ‘global spectacular’, pausing time and space through an encounter which could would capture the global imagination and mirth. A pair of shoes and a powerful president set against the discourses of the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ saw an intense reaction to the event as ironic, the symbolic role of the shoe tarnishing American pride on a global stage. In many ways, it was a ludic encounter rife for the internet, amplifying its fascination with the absurd. Equally, it provided a multimedia tool kit to remake the event for audiences recognizing genres of subversion online and to transcend into the liminal space of game play. This event shrouded through grand rhetoric of ‘Global War on Terror’ and ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which had provided the blanket and righteous justification for the invasion of Iraq struck a chord as the humble shoe unsettled these grand narratives during a planned media conference. From the context of Iraq, the journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi’s throwing of the shoe was representative of the anger and resentment felt by many Iraqis against the American military invasion and subsequent occupation of their country. Al-Zaidi in throwing this second shoe at the President shouted in Arabic, ‘This is from the widows, the orphans and those killed in Iraq’ (Myers & Rubin 2008). The status of a superpower against the direction of the rogue shoes almost hitting the President was a blatant act of subversion pillorying George Bush as a comic figure ‘laughed at by a million Arabs in Technicolor’ (O’Neill 2008). The global media gaze capitalized on the incident, creating a powerful media memory through its repetition the world over. As an act of political expression, it spoke at multiple levels including the right to freedom of

26  Shoe and the American president expression which the Bush administration proclaimed it had magnanimously bestowed on the people of Iraq with the toppling of the autocratic regime of Saddam Hussein. In terms of subversive humour, the act of forcing Bush (then the most powerful man on earth) to dodge the shoes becomes intertextual against America’s own propaganda countered through the innocuous non-weapon of the shoe. As an everyday object, the shoe appeared in stark contrast to the rhetoric of ‘lethal weapons’, emptying out the political propaganda through the commonness of footwear as a weapon against the might of the President of the USA. As an act which invited a global gaze through print, broadcasting and the internet, the event resonated with audiences in Iraq as well as worldwide. Crowds in Iraq marched in the streets joyously waving their shoes in the air and hailing Al-Zaidi as a national hero (O’Neill 2008). Al-Zaidi, dubbed the ‘Shoe Man’ after his brazen act of public defiance, provided a rallying force for a war-torn and fractured nation (August 2008). Protests as risky acts may become morally admirable for observers despite their futility in terms of correcting a social injustice (Hill 1979: 83). While Al-Zaidi was arrested and beaten after the incident for throwing the shoe, it also contributed to his heroic status in Iraq and elsewhere for highlighting the illegitimacy of the US’s occupation of Iraq (O’Neill 2008). The shoe-throwing incident as an iconic global media event entered the annals of media memory as an iconic news event, morphing into a viral phenomenon online. The internet found a means to replay the event not just by producing and circulating videos which would repeat the act on a loop but by coupling these with numerous creative responses around the world. Through digital games centring the protagonist of the shoe and the president, it would immortalize and democratize the event by inviting users to partake and emulate the experience of throwing shoes at the American president as a proxy for superpower. As an act of resistance invoked through an ‘injustice frame’, the event ignited a ‘moral shock’ leveraging on the spectacular economy of a global audience, inducing specific cultural readings of the event while co-locating it through a universal humour of pelting politicians to show resentment and disaffect. ‘For spectators a concrete political event simultaneously exists as drama while instilling its significant values’ (Sapiro & Soss 1999: 286). Drawing on Entman, Sapiro and Soss assert that politicians become symbols to others, standing in for ideologies, values and morals; they enact benchmarks of threat and evil and are equally a role model for redemption. Re-staged and remade for the internet, the event acquired an instability of associations online with web users mixing vintage film footage from US comedy trio the Three Stooges and combining these with George W Bush to create online games. On YouTube, images of the President ducking shoes became viral (Moses 2008). A Facebook page of the journalist became a popular site gaining a big following with fans (Wallace 2008). Hailed as an ‘instant pop culture classic’ by television anchor Terry Moran in the USA (Whitlock 2008), it gave rise to a number of creative artefacts convening

Shoe and the American president  27 around the event, immortalizing the symbolic act of subversion (Wallace 2008) and conjoining Bush with the iconic image of him perpetually ducking shoes. Amenable to endless circulation and manipulation, the virtual has a retentive and fluid memory affected through its creative travel, showcasing its proclivities to be morphed, and abstracted into a prosthetic memory equally committed to commemoration through effacement rather than veracity. The leap of this ludic act into mass culture and mass entertainment is important to mark in this case study, where the ordinary object of the shoe held court. The errant shoes being dodged by the President tap into the aesthetics of transgression and the ludic while inscribing them through the geopolitical power of America and its ability to impose a universal cartography of danger through the rhetoric of the ‘global war on terror’. Within such an articulation, acts of resistance can seep into mass culture to be appropriated through creative enterprise, underscoring the salacious link between culture and capital, and imposing their mutual symbiosis of influence (Ritzer 1999; Belk 2000). The ludic exploits through humour and mass appeal as evidenced through the shoe-throwing incident which invoked entertainment and play while subliminally extracting the fabular and mythic to install it as an iconic event. This chapter in interrogating the iconic through the ‘media event’ (Dayan & Katz 1992) examines the relationship between spectacular events as the manifestation of the iconic and its relationship with the ludic and subversive where these become abstracted into the virtual gaming environment to unleash the carnivalesque. Here the iconic prevails through the media event and equally through the political icon of the American president. Within such a configuration, the iconic becomes a means to elongate the media spectacle into a memetic phenomenon online not just through replay but in immersing the iconic figure of the president in a constant bind with the ordinary shoe as an iconic social memory. The chapter is relevant for examining the relationship between media events, acts of protest and protest cultures and the mechanism in which the global spectacle can be bound with the ludic game play online in expanding the realm of the carnivalesque and social memory.

The communication of protests Through time society has appropriated gestures and the symbolic to communicate protests. In modernity, the media and popular culture play a vital role in circulating cultural codes and symbols reiterated through our patterns of socialization. Protest cultures have over time appropriated and exploited a range of raw materials and resources in their immediate environments to enact disaffect. The diversity of protests in the so-called ­Battle of Seattle in 1999, for example, re-invigorated the need to understand ­protest cultures as forms of the spectacular, capitalizing on global media attention during international economic summits and conferences

28  Shoe and the American president where such events would be convened through a global gaze. The event also highlighted how the media gaze can further extend the theatre of protest, expanding it b ­ eyond its physical or spacio-temporal realms. Pelting with objects to show disapproval is a common cultural form to denote displeasure. For example, bad acting on the Elizabethan stage was punished with the throwing of rotten food, while coins were bestowed to actors for worthy performances. To fling an object with force as an act of protest can equally be read through its cultural particularities but what is resonant is the act of invoking public attention in doing so or in some ways defiling the pristine image of the public figure in question. Throwing pies, as a comic as well as a political act, remakes the celebrity figure in the public eye through an act of denigration. As such the iconic is made and remade with the spectacular on a public stage. Egg-throwing as a form of political protests was very common in Britain before 1914, declining from 1945 till 1952 due to rationing when eggs were considered too scarce to waste. They made a comeback after 1970, with Labour leader Harold Wilson being a repeat victim of such attacks (Watkins 2001). Other politicians have been targets of eggs including Bill Clinton and William Hague. In one such event in 2001, Labour deputy leader John Prescott landed a punch on his attacker and caused a media backlash against the Labour Party during an election campaign in the UK. The ritual of hurling pies and eggs on politicians and celebrity figures makes for media spectacle levelling the person on the street with the celebrity target through these encounters. Beyond eggs, a series of pastry attacks on high-profile targets including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to Michael Camdessus, who was then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were reported on in 2000 (Vinciguerra 2000). Bill Gates had a pie thrown at him in Brussels in 1998 and eggs were thrown at Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, in May 2008 in Budapest, with the court in the Hungarian capital subsequently ruling egg-throwing as an act protected by the right to freedom of expression and posing no danger. Pie- or egg-throwing as political theatre thrusts the average person on the street into an encounter with a figure who represents power, reflecting the increasing vulnerability of living in neoliberal politics where the state encroaches more and more into people’s individual rights. These are increasingly evident in anti-globalization sentiments and the theatre of protests that have ensued in protest sites such as the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 when the city became a staging site for protests convened through global gaze. Protest acts can encompass a diverse range of behaviours and activities and may be covert or overt, collective or individual. The Random House Dictionary (1967) defines it as an ‘expression or declaration of objection, disapproval or dissent, often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid’ (cf. Turner 1969: 816). An act of protest can

Shoe and the American president  29 encompass a grievance over an injustice, drawing attention to it, and protestors in being unable to resolve it through their own efforts set out to elicit a reaction from the target group (Turner 1969). Protest cultures are embedded within the symbolic. The symbolic as multi-vocal, open-ended and ambiguous makes it amenable to a variety of interpretations but without foreclosing its visual aspect as an important dimension of its communication and popular reach. Materials and practices of everyday life provide raw material for resistance (Routledge 1997: 361). But on the other hand, practices of resistance are countered against configurations of power (Routledge 1997: 361) and equally vested in some forms of rejection of the social order or lobbying for social change (Vander Zanden 1959: 312). In terms of the ethnography of everyday practices, transgressions and resistance are also dependent on the very rule they transgress (De Certeau 1984). Resistance can thus reside in the banal and the everyday whereby people can appropriate ‘popular tactics’ to turn the ‘actual order of things to their own ends’, thereby illuminating people’s acts of resistance as creatively located to that which already exists (De Certeau 1984: 26). Resistance can be communicated in various ways including the use of one’s body or everyday objects enacting resistance through a range of activities including marches, picketing, and subtle or explicit physical behaviour such as violence or wearing particular types of clothing. Beyond corporeal and material resistance, discursive modes such as narratives and silence can constitute protest. Dependent on the agenda, resistance can vary in the level of coordination or the extent to which they purposefully act together. The diversity of resistance can vary depending on the targets as well as the goals and can entail political action or be identity-based in challenging dominant stereotypes or social misconstructions. The notion of ‘moral shock’ was first employed by James Jasper and Jane Poulsen (1995) to refer to an event or information which calls on a person to ruminate on her moral values and their divergence from the rest of the world. The stimulus of this moral shock could either be an unforeseen event or an incident unfolding over time, provoking varying reactions in individuals. While some may react with passivity, others may reroute their indignation into political activity such as protest. William Gamson (1992: 32), in defining injustice, frames it through the phenomenon of expressing indignation over perceived injustice, and discerns it as ‘putting fire in the belly and iron in the soul’, motivating the quest for political agency and the need to find blame for the transgression. Focusing blame then becomes central to the politics of protest and outrage. This specification of blame becomes important as it can create ‘villains’ one can target (Jasper 1998). A vital aspect of resistance is the visibility of the act of resistance and the communication of this act to others and whether the public are able to readily recognize an act of resistance as such. Many acts of resistance are designed to court public recognition and gaze while others may seek to

30  Shoe and the American president shield their agenda or intentions. Some acts may fall into ‘everyday’ resistance, making these difficult to discern as distinctive acts of resistance, and may entail, for example, the use of humour by the less empowered against dominant groups in society (Hollander & Einwohner 2004: 539). Resistance can be understood through discerning the interactional modes within it, whereby the act is defined both by the perceptions and behaviour of those involved and the recognition and reaction of this by others including their targets (Hollander & Einwohner 2004). In resistance literature, the issue of public recognition to an act of resistance becomes crucial in raising a controversy or reaction and in tandem is the significance of cultural peculiarity as well as contextual specificity (Korovkin 2000).

Throwing as a political gesture Throwing objects represents dual articulation of shaming the target and enacting resistance as performative, enmeshing it into a larger ocular media economy. With convergence between platforms as well as broadcasting and digital media, the ‘symbolic’ can leap between sites endlessly, enabling new forms of voyeurism in repeat modes, enlarged through mimetics. Equally, it can be taken and consumed out of context in these platforms which truncate content through brevity and shortened attention spans. Platform capital manufactures new modes of replay and cues content through its suggestions culled from user profiles. As such, gaze is expanded and rechannelled through sites of monetization, re-assembling aesthetics through networked engagements and puerile pleasures. Datafication is then non-neutral, finding relevance and resonance through the significance by data of what it reveals to machines in terms of pushing content. The staging of events through economic and political conventions has provided a theatre for protest (Ibrahim 2007). Leveraging on visual communication, symbolic protest can evoke an affective response from audiences, seeking to invite empathy and compassion to a cause. For instance, the killing of a Palestinian boy in 1998 saw the creation of the ‘Child’s Play’ poster inviting the pathos of an audience unrestrained by national boundaries (Glaser 2006). Seeking a reaction from a mass audience would also entail using other devices beyond empathy and compassion, including humour, parody and satire enacting these as transgressive devices which can cut through boundaries and limits of restraint. Communicating through visual modes is also about image manipulation and intertextuality between different referents and events in building associations (Glaser 2006). Conjoining the acts of resistance with the media event presents new challenges for consuming resistance with non-stop media gaze and convergence of technologies. An act of resistance as a form of communicating dissent to the onlookers becomes remediated through the media event, enabling new and varied forms of gaze, consumption and engagement with the event to unfold. Privileging the image over the political facilitated

Shoe and the American president  31 through multimedia platforms is to acknowledge how the primacy of the visual decontextualizes the political in the act of resistance, re-delivering these as entertainment truncated from their historical and the social origins, repackaged for short attention spans. Here the ‘click and browse’ imagery repositories combine and thwart the political in absurd ways.

The shoes and its cultural readings Shoes as everyday objects proclaim the ordinary, evoking the familiarity of our day-to-day lives. For Henri Lefebvre (1975), the ordinary in fact unearths a human world which lies beneath a commodified world. As such everyday spaces and objects may be unwittingly folded into the routine and compliant without according these legitimate creativity (Bonnett 1992: 70) or the gravity to be transgressive. The hurling of the shoe at the President beyond being categorized through the ordinary object of the shoe did nevertheless yield diverse cultural readings into the event. In Middle Eastern culture, being hit with a shoe signifies an insult to a person as the shoe is perceived as an object that transgresses sacred and religious spaces. Within theological paradigms, the sole of the feet can be accorded a lesser significance associated with the ground it touches to be defined as ‘impure’ and labelling these as taboo in domestic and holy sites. Shoes as a form of defilement and resistance predate this encounter. One case in point is the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad in which a floor mosaic of George HW Bush was strategically placed at the front door to ensure foot traffic over the image, as a means to avenge the ‘war crimes’ committed during the 1991 liberation of Kuwait (Cockburn 2016) though subsequently removed in the capture of the city by American forces in 2003. Hitting posters and statues of Saddam Hussein was also reported following the toppling of Saddam’s regime in 2003. In tandem, a shoe-throwing rally was held in Tehran as popular entertainment where dozens of Iranians waved their shoes before flinging them at posters of Bush (Vennard 2008). While similar events ensued in other parts of Iran, the event as a mimetic act was repeated throughout the Middle East from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon and other parts of the Muslim world. Shoes and sandals were placed at the end of long poles and waved high in the air, as protesters demanded American troops to vacate Sadr City in Baghdad (Williams & Mohammed 2008). The world’s attention to the protest also prompted the manufacturers of the shoe worn by the journalists to be renamed the ‘Bush Shoe’ with sales increasing dramatically as a result of the incident (Demirbas 2008). The shoe having entered communal imagination produced a parade of the ‘carnivalesque’ on American television screens, saturating these with ridicule, parody and jokes on late-night television shows as well as on the internet, instigating newspaper cartoonists, talk show anchors and internet designers to create subversive and humorous renderings centred on the shoe (Walsh 2008).

32  Shoe and the American president The shoe and its mimetics of protest was sustained in other parts of the world. At the entrance of Downing Street more than 1,000 pairs of shoes were thrown to protest against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza in 2009 (McVeigh & Quinn 2009). Protests against government leaders in Bosnia were also inspired by the shoe with organizers lobbying citizens to greet government leaders with it and creating an online game to invite users to hurl shoes at the Serb leader, Milorad Dodik (De Castro 2008). The transcendence of the shoe from humble object to weapon of transgression was enabled through the visual dynamics of the iconic incident as the powerless having their moment against the superpower, this being enabled through repetitions around the world.

Intertextuality and viral appeal In late modernity, the banality of everyday life is enmeshed through the hyperreality of information and communication technologies, immersing people through play of images, projections of the spectacles and simulacra (Baudrillard 1998). As a result, there is such an intense level of fascination with the spectacle and cravings for the spectacular in postmodernity. Consumerism’s quest to transpose the world into signs is also to locate the power of the simulacrum in our everyday life. The ludic, as mentioned, binds the spectacular with the popular and is used by marketers to infantilize the consumer, whereby creative play becomes a vital device in drawing in the consumer (Belk 2000). The ludic as loaded with entertainment potential is also about tapping into human fantasies ingraining the mythic and the fabular. The ludic thwarts the banal while re-inscribing it, making it unhinged through modes of violence in terms of game play online. The ludic as transcending the sacred and profane, and in the consummation of pleasure, is also irreverently entwined with the capitalist agenda online, leveraging on trending and popular content, in distributing it and binding with its commercial agenda of capitalizing on advertising, internet traffic, as well as data mining. In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga (1971) argued that the evolution of the human happens through play. Characterized as a ‘a set of pleasurable activities that imitate the serious activities of life without consummating serious goals’ (cf. Wilson 1975: 164), the notion of play in the West is often dichotomized between productive labour, on the one hand, and non-productive activity, on the other. Similarly, Derrida (1987) offers play as an alternative to the rigid thinking and binary oppositions to concepts in Western metaphysics. By severing play from productive labour, it can be elevated to the sublime, even the sacred. By defining play ‘as a state in which actors’ ability matches the needs of the environment’, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) emphasis play as contiguous to the environment (cf. Malaby 2008: 5). Demarcations of leisure, labour and ritualistic encounters are collapsed in the

Shoe and the American president  33 digital terrain. The post-digital is in not in variance with the postmodern where adulthood is defined through its willingness to embrace the game as Zygmunt Bauman (1995: 99) posits. The notion of ‘play’ and ‘playability’ with the new media environment is also about lapsing into new consumption and production modes (Kücklich & Fellow 2004). In extracting affectivity, it is a primal demonstration of how play may be encoded in social and cultural practices online fostered through an assemblage of the sharing economy, premising visuality and entangling the salacious and sacred while luring the attention of users. As a dynamic aspect of cultural production, the aesthetics of transgression is forged through the rule of the convention it reiterates yet thwarts (Jenks 2003: 7). Modernity, in testing the limits and boundaries in creative practices, has a quest to go beyond conventions. Transgression in transgressing its limits can also be viewed as hybridization or the mixing of categories (Jervis 1999: 4) and as such transgressions can renegotiate the sacred and profane or remediate social governance (Foucault 1972; Douglas 2003). George Bataille (1986), in propounding transgression as an inner experience which entails exceeding the bounds of rational everyday behaviour, locates the experience of transgression as intimately entwined with the prohibition it violates while materializing this prohibition through the act of transgression (cf. Suleiman 1995: 316–317). It is equally an exercise of freedom of being dislocated from the social world proscribed through limits and constraints, and to own desires and longings without regard for their appropriateness (Kipnis 1996: 202–203). In drawing from offline political and social events or the iconic media event, multimedia platforms online forge explicit and subliminal connections to the offline context. The shoes thrown at George Bush’s farewell visit to Iraq encoded as an iconic image drew from its receptivity in the global stage, re-morphing through the affordances of the medium in the virtual. Coalescing with the effervescence of creative play and mimetics online, it acquired new forms propelled through the speed and virality of the internet, engaging people through uploads, downloads and memes, and infusing these through the consumption rituals of the internet welding the President to the shoe as a fixed memorial encounter. The circus and cornucopia of creative enterprise witnessed new digital games of Bush ducking shoes, inviting audiences to fling shoes at the target of the President who was by now consigned to a comic media memory. The transcendence of real events into the virtual is to cross into a replication machinery which reassembles imagery through creative labour, working with the resonance of the event with the global audience and their fascination with it. The bind of the real and unreal worlds of mash-up and simulated environments is the remaking of politics through the aesthetics of game playing and participation, cultivating repeat modes of resistance against authority figures through the shoe. Digital games as an aesthetics of transgression is about

34  Shoe and the American president the violation of boundaries while inserting the aberrant through the ordinary, in re-mixing moral codes as a means to challenge conventions. Offering a sensorium where the ordinary is countenanced through the subversive and unexpected, digital platforms harbour a politics of reinvention where image can re-attach to other modes of meaning. In view of the complex interplay of psychology and social reality entwined in game play, it cannot be reduced to issues of realism alone, encompassing spectral dimensions including the role of image in mediating imagination and realism (Galloway 2004; Shapiro, Peña-Herborn, & Hancock 2006). Creativity and experimentation define the spaces of cultural production and creative enterprise online, moulded through the consummation of pleasures which accrue with the aesthetics of transgression. Seducing consuming communities into a carnival structure in which people can partake through co-creation and taxonomy formation through tags and recommendations in pushing content to others. Bakhtin’s (1984: 7) ‘carnivalesque’ invoked through the interactional modes of connectivity and participation celebrates the subversive as a substrate of the digital. In encoding digital space as the hybridization through the online and offline, the virtual celebrates the carnivalesque by having the propensity to thwart norms and conventions, amplifying it through the viral, disseminating and commodifying the ludic through its disassociation with conventions. Subversion, game play and the popular as such recombine with force producing sacred communion through the shared joy of laughter (Bataille 1986). Humour dissolves boundaries and provides moments for unification and resistance. Religion, laughter and the ludicrous possess transcendental qualities triggering a sense that the world can be accessed directly rather than being filtered through ideologies (Gilhus 1991: 257). As Paul Duncum (2009) points out, popular cultures bind compliance and transgression and these tendencies apply to ordinary people as producers of their own cultural artefacts. Through creative play and subversion in the image economy, the aesthetics of transgression symbolize the communal pleasure of its users. The notion of game play, the luring of users into sites through neuromarketing or the adaption of the digital environment in sync with consumers’ attention spans and interest builds play through capital’s agenda to maximize traffic. Play and marketing are tightly entwined in seducing consumers into new rituals of consumption through the ludic in advertising messages and marketing communications (Sternthal & Craig 1973). Hypermedia facilitates exploratory behaviour among the users, and play is about enjoyable experiences including hedonic experiences (Holbrook, Chestnut, Oliva, & Greenleaf 1984). Capital, through its interactive modes online, forges a space whereby emotional labour, creative enterprise and hedonic pleasures are not in confrontation, facilitating immersive environments which can both mimic and subvert, offering play through the breaking of conventions while being cognizant of these being broken.

Shoe and the American president  35 Digital games as a mode of play invoke a multitude of paradigms in the residence of mimetics and in terms of its relationship to conventions: celebrating subversion, in suspending norms and in inducing rules through its intimacy with the real-world laws and their resistance. The violent, the primal, the uncivilized and the power of suggestion and enticement hold court in the realm of digital games and the creative enterprise of meme production. Morphing, re-mixing and the binding of the relationships of these interactive enterprises to the production of memes equally emphasize the exploitation and monetization of user-generated content (UGC) and the intensely serious business of the ludic in garnering traffic and attention. It showcases capital’s enterprise in embracing the ludic as part of its persuasive modes in extracting surplus labour and leveraging on the communal jouissance in consuming memes as part of the ludic and transgressive. The prominence of memetic theory, as revealing humanity’s evolutional genetics through our emulative tendencies and our bind with the aesthetics of visuality in the digital era as an ideological domain which structures the ways in which we construct our social reality and sociality, weaves the web architectures as lending to these propensities. In capital’s remodelling of its modes of monetization through game play and the ludic, whether in the creative enterprise of the masses or through specialist gaming environments, the human is configured through her evolutionary physiology and her immersive tendencies which shed the burden of embodiment, coding her through her affectivity in the online environment. The rituals of communicating dissent, their recombination with the media spectacle and their re-appropriation through the gaming environment online relentlessly renews aesthetic modes made for the screen and for the networked assemblages online underpinned through an invitation to partake and engage is an economy for both the ludic and transgressive. ­Voyeurism and the mimetic characteristics of the internet not only remake acts of protests as part of the game architecture; they are also about the renewal of affect through screen cultures where one can experience and forge new intimacies with authority by setting them up as troll figures and targets with game mode on. The transcendence of real-world happenings into the virtual is underpinned through an intertextuality remediating the political as spheres of mass entertainment and the ‘carnivalesque’. Objects of fancy and desire online become curated through users adding these to their social networking sites, conjoining public events through personal spaces. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer’s egg-throwing incident spawned a video game called ‘Egg Attack’ (Moses 2008) indexing spoof cultures on the internet which troll celebrities as a resonant and popular aspect of the ludic. Political campaigns have become a rich source of material which the internet ingests, producing new entertainment modes and enlisting spoof cultures as a residual but presenting aspect of the political and the notion of cynicism as an intrinsic part of the post-digital

36  Shoe and the American president experience. The movement of content in online spaces through trolling, spoof culture and political cynicism produce counter-sites, inducing memories as part of mediated archives online. In this instance, the shoe as a ‘weapon of mass distraction’ sealed the political legacy of the American president through the gaming and subversive regimes of the virtual world. Resistance, game play and the iconic media event conjoin with new modes of virality and visuality, socializing the post-human into a digital vernacular which places cues and suggestions through repetitive modes and popular imagination, premising an economy of image instability and manipulation, producing new rituals of commemoration and denigration in displacing the political. In drawing on media events, virtual game environments can offer liminal spaces to produce new rituals enlarged through the game mode inscribing and thwarting conventions. Such an environment celebrates the intertextuality of the offline and online, with the latter offering an architecture to consolidate the memetics within the human as a part of her genetic evolution. In the process it reconfigures political communication, drawing on the performative and subversive but inscribing the political through the notion of mass entertainment and creating a hybrid culture of engaging with politics through its ludic qualities of reinvention on the internet utilizing the multimedia architecture and its code. The reinvention of the political through the keyhole of image manipulation and its re-staging as parody online thrust the political into an interactive perceptibility to partake, co-create and become active distributors of content integrating our short attention span and expectations of pleasure, entertainment value and voyeurism rather than being anchored through issues for public deliberation. Acts of resistance decontextualized from their origins on the internet, privilege the ocular using it to fuel the social imagination and memetics of subversion online.

Conclusion In courting global attention and fascination, the shoe-throwing incident demonstrated how an iconic media event was re-appropriated in the virtual realm as a theatre of the carnivalesque where crowds can gain proximity to a political event through the ordinary object of the shoe as resistance. The mass reaction and public celebration provided a mechanism to re-imagine the incident online through an image-sharing economy utilizing the architecture of Web 2.0. Here images are extrapolated into new assemblages as memes and video games designed to invite users to partake in the event through game play and to enter rituals as a liminal space for both communion and resistance. The internet as a space for subverting the political plays out at different levels, particularly in its re-engineering of the political, rechannelling it as mass entertainment manifested through memetic artefacts which play on a loop and remake political memory through the retentive and voyeuristic cultures of the internet.

Shoe and the American president  37

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3 Martyrdom and the mobile phone From bystander to martyr

Introduction …there is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely. (Barthes 1973: 130) Roland Barthes (1973) perceived myths as a system of communication and cultural artefacts as bound through structural and relational networks. Myths as a particular register of ideology can be elevated to numinous status for Terry Eagleton (2007: 189). The iconic corpse as a media image is a problematic one. Death in modernity is superfluous in terms of media narratives and on celluloid, banalizing it as a recurrent encounter in the media landscape. In reality, the sanitization of death and the banishing of corpses renew our fascination and anxieties with death, forging new intimacies with it online. Images of suffering or the dead body transfixed through the notion of trauma and suffering can ignite an affecting community and elicit communal grief for the fallen. Dead bodies have power, but not all of the dead. The case study of Neda Agha-Soltan is curious for many reasons. As an ordinary person witnessing extraordinary events in Iran, she was catapulted into martyrdom through the temporal capture of her moment of death on a mobile phone, enacting her through a chronotope of being alive one moment and dead the next. The mobile phone images enacted through their modes of producing her through her dying moments interlock her as being between life and death. This freeze-framing of Neda works to a duality in terms of this liminal state. The communal gaze that will ensue will resurrect her as martyr, an immortal figure in the virtual sphere, trapped between life and death and resurrected as a virtual entity online. Neda is no celebrity to garner a global spectacle. Yet the socio-political landscape and the promiscuous notion of ousting information through mobile technologies will seize Neda as a sensorial corpse to embody her as the symbol of political dissent in Iran. The coalescing of the bodily processes of dying with the temporality of a media encounter assembles death for the screen through the

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  41 media event. Public death convened through media gaze can ensnare the corporeal body committing it to a dual temporality – fusing the moment of demise with the media event spatio-temporally to make death an unfinished encounter. Conceived through a rupture and separation from the normalcy of the everyday, the death event is derived through its liminality and ritual dimensions, affording spaces for convening the moral and therapeutic (Durkheim 1915; Turner 1969). A death event due to its disruptive tendencies is also a moment of creative agency or ‘communitas’, positioned through a liminality or anti-structure (Turner 1969). With relevance to social media platforms, this constitutes the possibilities for the formation of a euphoric collective emerging through the fissure of the death event. Celebrity deaths invoke the screen as a space of habituation. The death of Marilyn Monroe, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the untimely death of Princess Diana in a Parisian tunnel invited grief beyond the national boundaries, attesting to these figures’ iconic prominence. Princess Diana remains iconic through her controversial death laced with conspiracy theories about the British monarchy. She remains the phantom of media memory congealed through the events of her death and the commemoration beyond the nation-state. Through her public death, Princess Diana entered the private realm of the domestic household, transcending her status as royalty to be a figure of communal mourning. John F. Kennedy’s death, like Princess Diana’s, was a media event, captured through the pomp of the presidential procession and the bullets which would immortalize him thereafter. His assassination entered the annals of American history, disrupting temporality to be lodged as an iconic memory to narrate history through its temporal index of a ‘before and an after’. As an unscripted media event, it had a surreal and spectral quality of making history through the unfathomable. This death remade through the media lens produced a visual archive which would be extracted and abstracted through time. Death imposes its own moral codes. It possesses the ability to dwarf the media event and to metastasize across platforms, amplifying loss to be re-articulated through rituals of grieving and to transform a death event into an iconic memory. In so doing, an event of mortal demise becomes both a transformative and performative encounter in enacting communion with a wider humanity through the act of public mourning. Celebrity deaths as media events have been widely written about and death imagery inhabits an uneasy realm in modernity in our quest to make death clinical and dying a remote encounter (Ibrahim 2015a). What is notable about death events which ignite media gaze is that they can mediate distance and boundaries, enabling disparate communities to commune through grief.

New media technologies and the death event Dayan and Katz (1992) characterized the live broadcasting of events deemed historic or public ceremonies as media events. Today the ‘media event’ is

42  Martyrdom and the mobile phone open-ended with the convergence of technologies (Ibrahim 2009). While the broadcasting space was seen as imposing a sense of time and space (Scannell 1986), new media technologies scramble the spatio-temporal frames of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) fracturing its imagined oneness. The ability to publish on the move has also made the media event as something that can be unlocked through people’s vantage points and not restrained by media gatekeeping. Live witness accounts, imagery as well as social media platforms add to the immediacy and ecology of a media event in our contemporary landscape, adding temporal and spatial co-location of user-generated content in ‘unsettling the seamless narrative’ of broadcasting space with live events. User-generated content has expanded the notion of the media event, shifting accuracy in favour of immediacy of encounter and opening new vantage points of events as they unfold. The saturation of the imagery of the event as encounter imposes this vernacular of visuality as composed through human cultural practices on the move through mobile technology while underpinning the human and her technologies of vision as witnessing. The expansion of the media event through mobile technologies has led to the popular notion of ‘digital witnessing’ through mobile and convergent technologies (Allen 2014) as well as the interactive human as a witnessing subject and as part of event creation (Ibrahim 2007). Witnessing today is a problematic term, infusing the role of technologies which can extend the idea of watching, gazing, storing and surveillance such that vision as a notion can be disembedded from the corporeal body yet co-located through it. Technologies of sight add to the ecology of witnessing, capturing images and imagery not through the affective biopolitics of the body per se but also independently of it, imbuing technologies of sight with an objective insight into an encounter stripped of the bodily experience. Technologies of sight, as such, have become abstracted into the legal machinery to be reassembled as evidence in the legal process. The witnessing as the privileging of the ocular inevitably has implications for society, shifting the burden of witnessing as something perceptible and attested to through our modes of gaze and looking. Our postmodern subjectivity, shaped through this visual bias and the media event, renews the conflicted relationship of images to notions of truth, authenticity and representation, intensifying the doubts for its ability to stand in for truth yet glossing these over through our relentless obsession to view encounters ousted through technologies of vision which capture with and without the sight of the body. For Roland Barthes (1981: 19), images or pictures as a ‘witness to layers of meaning’ both affirm the role of images in producing insights into hidden and subliminal meanings without resolving their position as problematic as vehicles of representation. Image as representation has been in crises since the advent of modern photographic techniques for it not only invokes the emotive but has the ability to scramble and distort reality, having the capacity to engage the observer

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  43 without yielding the truth. Its ability to bear witness is an acceptable and integral part of our witnessing culture today despite its inability to be completely accountable to the truth or in representing the real. The visual turn in humanity is about our ocular centricism which continually reveals our affective pull and bias towards the visual as a postmodern subject placing inordinate power within this realm not only as a site of witnessing but equally in seducing our aesthetic senses, and in so doing dispelling the objectivity of the image as a witnessing tool. Technologies of sight, whether these be CCTV cameras or recording technologies on communication devices such as the smartphone, re-anchor the predominance of the visual and in the process impoverish our reified notion of the witness. In such an instance, testimony is not consigned to memory alone and our extreme reliance on visual artefacts and mnemonic memory powered through cloud systems which follow and trail us re-territorialize our sense of space and time through our engagements with technologies that sync through their production and creation architectures. Images captured through human vision and produced as visual artefacts by technologies produce a fissure. When the image is read without the somatic reaction of the bodily encounter or its cognition, it is reframed as an objective image to read and be interpreted by others. This visual artefact removed from the body of the subject which witnessed it can only be understand without the experience and memory of the body which witnessed and produced it as an artefact. While images stripped from the body can become pieces of evidence in their own right, the stripping out of the experiential index from the human witness is also about understanding the image’s history as evidence through time, where it is expected to speak and shed truth from its own composition. Its distortions and ability to misconstrue are equally part of this ‘visual turn’ in modernity projecting humans as vulnerable witnessing subjects through modernity (Ibrahim 2019). Witnessing, with its long theological and legal trajectory, is tangled with beliefs and practices. As such, it ‘raises the questions of truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying’, opening up ‘fundamental questions of communication’ itself (Peters 2001: 707). From a theological vantage, Peters argues, witnessing becomes an extraordinary cultural and moral force anchoring the practice to life and death. Witnessing while tightly entwined with a long history of truth-seeking and evidence gathering in legal trials is equally about psychological therapy and entertainment (Humphrey 2000: 10). The co-location of the martyr as witness is deeply rooted in early Christianity as it is in Islam (Peters 2001; Ibrahim 2015b). Flesh witnesses recording the encounters of their ordeal in wars and conflicts zones has seen a proliferation of literature and trauma as a cultural form. The giving of testimony has taken various forms in society, speech, literature, poetry, drama, art, music, photography, etc., with the dominant form being storytelling or narratives. Invoking Milan Kundera, Humphrey

44  Martyrdom and the mobile phone (2000) situates narratives as shaping experience while being borne out of them, constructing narratives as a product of recalling as well as forgetting. Borrowing from Engels’ conceptualization of memory, spoken memory can be constructed as a conversation (Humphrey 2000: 11). Within the premise of the mediated screen culture, the audience as witnessing subjects in some ways becomes responsible for the events they bear witness to and hence witnessing through the television or other screen also domesticates the act of witnessing (Ellis 2000: 32). The coalescing of witnessing, with the intrusion of the screen, has made ‘the event’ a key phenomenon in contemporary culture, constructing historical moments as current events commemorated through media spectacle, centralizing such rituals as touchstones of memorializing and remembrance (Ebbrecht 2007: 223). The shift of emphasis from their authentic narration to the politicization and mediated enactment is about the constructed past for a national audience. The media event, today materialized through the enmeshing of broadcasting with digital technologies, continuously constructs a mnemonic memory (i.e. digital footage or image). This not only widens the notion of the ‘media event’, as pointed out, but its reassembling, selection, extraction and consumption through a vast repository of images where the notions of a shared past may be thwarted and remediated through search engines and tags, is to also impose a post-digital architecture to the process of witnessing. Here machines which recalibrate humans in their life engagements impose their own sensibilities of re-labelling the imagery, emerging through historicity and present smartphone encounters through their own coding systems and categories of semantic associations. Witnessing as part of this postmodern visuality falls within this amorphous architecture which encompasses the technologies of vision that capture and relay without warning or without the coherence warranted of a credible witness (Ibrahim 2011, 2012). The coupling of technology to the somatic and the ease of uncoupling imagery from the witnessing subject means that the digital image gains autonomy from the witness, acquiring a force through its travel online without the encumbrances of cohesion warranted in the act of witnessing, particularly in a legal framework (Ibrahim 2007, 2008). Machinic activities with human sensorium recode the site of witnessing and its attendant morality. An image may not entirely reveal the subjectivity of the witness or the somatic trauma of the witnessing body. Uncoupled from the witnessing body, the image can invite and invoke new forms of gaze without necessarily positioning witnessing as a primal attribute of an image. One historical example worth mentioning here is the Zapruder footage, a form of post-witnessing trauma which would re-open the investigations into John F. Kennedy’s death. Abraham Zapruder was one of at least 32 people who had taken stills or moving images of the assassination of the President on that fateful day (Morris 2013; Rosenbaum 2013) and his footage became

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  45 part of the evidence used by the Warren Commission, a committee established to investigate the events of the President’s assassination. What the Warren Commission was not aware of at that time was that even though Zapruder had filmed 486 frames for 26.6 seconds, he had put away one single frame (Frame 313) for 12 years, keeping it away from the public gaze. This image would have revealed that the shot came from in front of the President and had blown his head backwards (Morris 2013). That one frame had traumatized Zapruder and in deciding not to inflict that same trauma on the American people, he withheld it from public gaze. With three copies of his films reproduced for government investigators, Zapruder subsequently sold the rights to the originals to Life magazine reportedly for $150,000. Life too withheld Frame 313 from the public. As Zapruder had anticipated when his film, intact with Frame 313, was shown to the American people on TV in 1975, it caused widespread furore, re-traumatizing the American public and sparking attempts to re-open investigations into the assassination. Most importantly, it outright negated the US government’s prior investigative conclusion that the President had been shot from behind. The public outcry after the screening led to the American government appointing a new Select Committee to investigate the President’s murder, opening fresh scrutiny into events which occurred more than a decade ago. The Zapruder images and the trauma produced by Frame 313 raise various salient issues about technologies of vision such as the camera in terms of evidential status and images which emerge through technologies of vision which can trigger repeated trauma for the witness making it difficult to reconcile truth in such a permutation. Images produce trauma and haunting, located through the somatic body and uncoupled from the witnessing subject they can ‘unsettle the settled’ propositions of truth. The Zapruder footage ignited yet more conspiracy theories about the President’s public assassination. The witnessing of a media event and its reconstruction through technologies of vision in this case produced more rupture in the public conscience, invoking trauma and resurrecting Kennedy as a political idol who cannot be put to rest. Images of his life and dying have become part of the historic moment without pressing a coherent account of the encounter. The Zapruder footage, of course, predates the digital era, and in this instance the media played a role in getting this into the public arena. Today in contrast we can upload imagery directly onto global platforms without the media necessarily brokering a space to enable a public encounter or authenticate imagery by bearing witness collectively. What is relevant to this era from the Zapruder case is the inadequacy of technological witnessing, and its deficits and voids in presenting a coherent narrative. Visual testimony as a form of instability, despite our obsession with visual modes of publicizing and truth telling, reiterates trauma and witnessing as prolific cultural forms without conferring these as intrinsically reliable or absolute.

46  Martyrdom and the mobile phone The proliferation of cultural trauma as a genre in popular culture widens the sites and in tandem the production of trauma through user-­generated content online, particularly with our ability to capture on the move with smartphones as flâneurs who observe with and through technology. The theatre of user-generated content pegged to an attention economy of storage, retrieval, downloads and uploads means that it can be replicated with humans acting as relays in passing on trauma and image as testimony. Functioning as tools of mass gratification or ensconced through a communal politics of pity, they attest to the instability of the image and equally its potency in igniting a communal gaze or to be appropriated for mass authentication in engaging with mediated events (Ibrahim 2010). The smartphone as a technology of vision is also an instrument that can be irreverent of the sacred, negotiating the morality and ethics of watching and recording such that technologies can renegotiate boundaries and limits in the digital age. Similarly, in co-opting public gaze into a death event captured through technologies, we constantly renegotiate our notions of taboo which death and the corpse occupy in modernity. The release of Frame 313 to the public signified the transmutation of trauma from Zapruder to a wider public unsettled by the assassination. Technologies of vision in domesticating death and resurrecting new death rituals are engaged in commodifying death for a public hungry to consume it, unbound from journalistic codes of not showing the corpse. In the process, the post-digital economy not only repositions visual testimony as a popular mode of authentication but also re-­ distributes trauma as a cultural form, uncoupled from the legal paradigms of witnessing or their moral and ethical considerations.

Virality and the death event The death icon can emerge forth from the ordinary as a martyr. Unlike celebrity deaths, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan was the story of an ordinary young woman against the background of extraordinary events in Iran. Her death imagery captured on mobile phones and uploaded on the internet produced a moment of transcendence, entrapping her into a liminal sphere of martyrdom. The mobile phone imagery, as a visual testimony of the 26-year-old being shot by Iranian military forces, seized the imagination of a global audience. Her dying moments were recorded by two different phones, and these death images, along with a mix of amateur videos and commentaries, began circulating online, presenting the bloody resistance surrounding the 2009 election protest in Iran. The student protests during this period in Tehran, Shiraz and Hamedan were leaked through mobile telephony to an international community. Neda came to encapsulate the zeitgeist of protest against a turbulent political landscape in Iran. She was an innocent bystander slayed, her death signifying a senseless sacrifice of a young life. Her dead body came to embody the protests and through this mediated death event she achieved

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  47 prominence, despite her anonymity, being elevated to martyrdom through the communal gaze. The images repeatedly broadcast by opposition websites and television channels which Iranians were able to receive with satellite dishes lodged her into a social memory ignited through the broadcast space. Described as ‘probably the most widely witnessed death on human history’ by Time magazine, Neda was sealed as an iconic symbol of resistance against the widely disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Sustained media attention in the weeks that followed Neda’s violent death saw an outpouring of grief in the global community, with videos of her death going viral online and mythologizing her as a martyr. The elevation from anonymity to heroic status through her untimely death and the suppression of foreign media in Iran remediated her death as a witnessing from a forbidden territory, reconfiguring it as a projection into a zone of taboos. What can go viral and grab global attention is often unpredictable but in the case of Neda various elements came together and catapulted her to iconic status, underpinning the visuality of her death and her stages of dying as emblematic of technology’s ability to freeze-frame death and to suspend it into a liminal space of betwixt. The capturing and dissemination of Neda’s death needs to be foregrounded through the restrictive media environment in Iran coupled with the Western media accommodating reports that emerged through mobile telephony. In 2008 and 2009, due to harsh media restrictions placed on local and foreign journalists by the Iranian government on reporting the re-election of Ahmadinejad and dissent over it being rigged, new media technologies played an important role in publicizing these events (BBC News 2009; Wilson 2009). This prompted citizens to turn to mobile telephones and the internet to disseminate reports from the ground. In Iran, despite the country having 7.5 million web users, representing the second highest internet population after Israel in the Middle East in 2006, the authorities resorted to shutting down or filtering access to popular websites and platforms such as YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, IMDB.com and BBC Farsi (Tait 2009). A list of more than five million national and international websites was blocked by internet providers. The ban and restrictions of these websites and platforms were justified as censoring illegal and immoral content which supposedly posed a threat to the country’s national unity or its culture and religion (Mackey 2009). In 2013, Reporters without Borders classified Iran along with five other countries as ‘Enemies of the Internet’. The harsh punishment of jailing bloggers, and the restrictions on accessing the internet by blocking websites through filtering technology, prompted such a classification. Even with the block on YouTube, the site was reportedly receiving videos albeit in reduced numbers and amounting to ten percent compared to the period before the block (Wilson 2009). But despite the tough measures on bloggers, Iran had about 100,000 bloggers prior to the 2009 election substituting for the suppressed reformist press which once flourished in Iran (Tait 2009). In view of the

48  Martyrdom and the mobile phone restrictions, video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and LiveLeak played a vital role in providing an insight into the political scene on the streets in 2008 and 2009 through the vantage point of the bloggers. Sites such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter provided spaces for the exchange of imagery, content and conversations, enabling frequent updates on the situation in Iran. The pushing of content into social media platforms prompted a claim from The New York Times that such a phenomenon was inducing media organizations to break the cardinal rules of journalism in publishing first and verifying validity later (Stelter 2009). The flow of user-generated content (i.e. posts, tweets, blogs, etc.) on the ground and the publishing of these by established media organizations such The Guardian, The New York Times and the Huffington Post signified a seismic shift in the way these organizations responded to this plethora of user-generated content. Numerous videos leaked by Iranians were showed by broadcasters such as CNN in the context of protests against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. As such, a global spectatorship and shifting patterns of practice in accommodating user-generated content by media organizations eager for content from Iranians were pre-existing when Neda’s death imagery entered the spectre. Neda was in fact part of a wider narration of leaked visibility from Iran amidst tight censorship. Leaks from forbidden sites were intrinsically valuable in being categorized as a form of ‘witnessing’ by the global community. As such the mechanisms were in place and awaiting Neda’s transcendence into the world stage, and to be recoded with the mythology of sacrifice of a beautiful young woman by self-serving politicians against a political landscape of turbulence and repression. For Roland Barthes (1973: 55) myth functions in two stages. In the first instance it points out the differences between human morphologies but from this pluralism it projects a sort of unity. Here the peculiarity is subsumed through the common mould of humanity and its universal existence. Myth gives a concrete form and particular expression to abstract collective values which recur making these seem timeless and universal, and in some ways denuding its contingent and perhaps historical nature (Huppatz 2011: 89). In tandem, virality was in fact ready to court Neda’s spectral form online as she was leaked to the West to gain mass sympathy through a community which both contextualised Neda through the political suppression of Iran and her liberation from the offline context to be recoded as an iconic figure of veneration conjoined to death and immortalized through the internet. Embodying the romance of the taboo and forbidden, Neda appropriated various narratives of resistance and liberation. As a symbol of female victimhood amidst the shutdown of the media in Iran, Neda was a phantasm against authoritarian brutality, and there was an intense attraction to this anonymous figure catapulted through the

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  49 slippages of new media technologies. Abstracted into an orientalist fantasy of the West, Neda promulgated the East through atavism and unmitigated violence. She embodied an East not capable of democratic virtues yet re-imagined through the potential democratic virtues of the citizens on the ground hungry for international attention to authenticate their dissent. Neda as an ‘orientalist’ fantasy became the poster girl for the protest, offering a human face encoded through her suffering and unjust death, eliciting solidarity within the nation and beyond through her sacrificed body, transcending time and space to attain global celebrity status as a martyr. The global spectatorship provided a means to authenticate her death and re-­ inscribe her as a symbol of the protest while marking out her body as a site for igniting solidarity and memorialization. She would both be racialized and remoulded through a global imagination, centring and decentring Orientalist fantasies of the Middle East. Dedicated funerary and tribute web pages paying tribute to Neda, a repository of imagery curating her in happier times with and without the head covering as well as poetry specially penned for her in the Iranian tradition linked her with a diasporic international Iranian community as well as a wider global spectatorship. These dedicated sites commemorated her short life, expressing grief through communion and veneration. The poetic re-composition of Neda in many ways performed her through a tribute culture and as Viktor Shklovsky (2004: 15) mentions about poetry, it produced a shock effect in disrupting the ways of seeing and thinking. Durkheim’s (1915) notion of a moral community convening through a set of unified beliefs is relevant here as are his concepts of rituals. For Durkheim, rituals as symbolic communication are about the renewal of bonds and solidarity between an individual and community and one in which shared constructions of meaning and experiences occur. They then portend to the emergence of some measure of collective consciousness with social life defined through the meanings which societies ascribe to them. With relevance to rituals, Durkheim relates to the distinction between sacred and profane through which symbolic classifications are made and through which people can be emotionally unified. With the ascribing of the sacred to social categories, it premises a vital role in the formation of the shared moral sentiments of a community. Rituals as such can perform binaries between the sacred and the impure. Rituals are not only communicative but also performative, reiterated through a repetitive mode and valorizing the interactional or phatic modes rather than their rational or factual dimensions. Rituals are then about the production of the symbolic in sustaining an emotional moral community. The death event lends to the articulation of social bonds as much as it is in the realization of collective solidarity (Van Gennep 1909; Durkheim 1915). In the context of Neda, the emergence of new rituals binds with the cultural resources of the internet to realize the presence of communities which convene through the symbolic

50  Martyrdom and the mobile phone but equally through the platform economics of the code, ascribing a publicness, an open-endedness in terms of rituals and the mediated iconicity, and interactivity in which individual and community agency can be enacted. Beyond psychological states, in such a permutation, emotions manifest as social and cultural practices (Ahmed 2004).

Neda as a symbol of martyrdom Neda resurrected as a martyr against the backdrop of dissent and unrest in Iran installed her as the symbol of public disaffect and quest for change offline. Her fallen images depicting her with streams of blood on her face and body offered a multitude of readings for both the international audience and Iranians. From a theological perspective, the notions of blood and sacrifice were not confined to Islamic interpretations alone. As such, she transcended as a liminal figure suspended between life and death then rebirthed online through her victimhood. The symbolic significance of blood is resonant in different doctrines and sociological theories (Douglas 1966; Janowitz 2015). Blood can be categorized under different classification systems as pure or profane and identified with both weakness and strength (McCarthy 1969; Janowitz 2015: 194). In the case of Neda, her sacrificial bloodletting against a brutal regime reified her within the sacred realm and drafted her as martyr against government suppression. In death her body transcended their restrictions. As her popularity rose with a mourning community in Iran and abroad, the authorities banned public funerals or wakes gathering in her name. Neda as a case study of a digital icon is not just a subject of fascination for the internet. She needs to be contextualized within the cultural and religious landscape of Iran where the notion of martyrdom remains a significant site of collective consciousness historically. In contemporary history, during the 1979 Islamic revolution, landmarks were created on the 40th day of mourning for fallen protestors, igniting a momentum to bring down the Shah’s regime (The Guardian 2009). In Shia-dominated Iran, Neda enacted the cultural significance of martyrdom as a ritual tightly embedded within the population’s psyche and cultural milieu. In Islamic terminology, the notion of ‘witness’ became entangled in meaningful ways. The martyr in Islamic theology is highly interpretative and mediated through the cultural practices of peoples and terrains in which Islam has been practised. Most significantly, the notion of the martyr in Islam (as it is in Christianity) is the ‘witness’. The Islamic term for the martyr Shahid, its plural form Shuhad and martyrdom Shahida in referring to the ‘eyewitness’ appear in the Quran, but also in hundreds of Hadith (i.e. words and deeds of the prophet) and in Sira literature (i.e. biographical accounts). In these texts informing juristic discourse of martyrdom, the references to the Shuhada pertain to those who died in battle during a military jihad (Freamon 2003: 319–321). Other scholars believe the martyrdom references originate from Syrian Christians who refer to those by their manner of their death and their

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  51 witnessing heaven and the supremacy of God (Lewinstein 2001; Brown 2004: 431). Suffering, death and paradise as a subsequent reward were highly entwined in Christian belief (Lewinstein 2001: 78). In view of the Christian and Greek linguistic connection between witnessing and martyrdom, some scholars (Goldziher 1971; Lewinstein 2001) expound that the term Shahid (i.e. the eyewitness) was expanded to encompass martyrdom. Early martyrdom became a corollary of the struggle (Jihad) for truth in this connection between the eyewitness and the martyr (Brown 2004: 432). The notion of the martyr also expanded due to the conflicts with the Muslim community in which martyrdom evolved beyond a struggle against non-believers to be a goal worth pursuing in its own right. Islamic martyrdom as a struggle for truth in early philosophical debates was equally countenanced and influenced by the Muslim martyrs who went into the battlefield in the early accounts of Islamic history. In the battlefield, the martyr who fought and lost his life ‘“in the cause of God” did not succumb to death but entered paradise, spared the normal pain of death surpassing the day of judgment as well as the interrogation in the grave by the angels’ (Freamon 2003: 299). Through time, the martyr as a category was expanded beyond the battlefield to dying in the cause of god. It encompassed other kinds of death to include those who departed from disease or accident, childbirth, or through a meritorious act such as the pilgrimage to Mecca or in scholarly pursuit after leading a virtuous life (Freamon 2003: 321). These categories though not directly referenced in the Quran emerge in the Hadith and some scholars (Goldziher 1971) believe that these additional categories sought to communicate to believers that one could attain paradise even through the normal course of everyday life. The internal debates and struggles within the Ummah, the Muslim community, became crucial in mediating the constructions of martyrdom and the appropriation of the term as a political or religious symbol (Brown 2004). In Iran, for example, the death of the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, becomes a defining event for the Shi’ite community, the dominant Muslim sect in Iran. Hussein and his followers’ massacre at Karbala as a distinguishing event enacting martyrdom as a dominant ritual in their communal psyche meant that Iran’s cultural consciousness is mediated through the notion of martyrdom. The massacre of Hussein is inscribed in Muslim historiography in vivid detail and no other historical event had ever moved the Shi’ites as deeply as the Battle of Karbala (Kermani 2002). As a wounding historical memory and myth ingrained deeply in the Iranian psyche meant martyrdom functions within this grand narrative of sacrifice repeated and recalled through time without quite expiating the guilt of Hussein’s sacrifice as an iconic memory or mythology. The guilt of the massacre and the creation of ritual ceremonies of mourning during Muharram1 as public ceremonies of self-flagellation and processions after the Saffavid dynasty which took power in Iran after 1502 illuminate the potency of martyrdom as an ingrained notion in Iranian

52  Martyrdom and the mobile phone history (Kermani 2002). The Battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of Hussein equally assumed a symbolic importance in consolidating a national identity in seeking to enact a distance from the Sunni tradition of the Arabs. The cult of public mourning exploited by the Saffavids ingrained these rituals, encoding martyrdom, self-sacrifice and veneration of martyrs as a dominant cultural form for Shi’a religion. As a vital tradition even today, the notion of martyrdom is an immanent part of Iranian community identity politics (Kermani 2002). In interpreting Neda’s death through such a cultural landscape, her resurrection as a martyr was enacted through the historical and religious resonance of martyrdom in the Iranian communal imagination. Neda transcended not only into the virtual sphere through her martyrdom but also into paradise through her liminality in being entrapped between life and death through her unjust sacrifice. Her liminal state invites other readings as well. She is equally captured in an in-between state of being trapped on the internet as an immortal without being laid to rest. The notion of the eyewitness is amenable to a multitude of readings. With her eyes open in the death images, she is both witnessing the injustices on the ground and witnessing paradise as a martyr. Her death witnessed through the mobile phone and the internet temporally suspends into a liminality while from a theological vantage point, she is witness to an immortal world which paradise promises. The ascribing of the martyrdom to Neda by the public liberates her from the injustices and violence in the mortal world, installing her in a virtual and celestial world where she is celebrated and venerated. The communal politics of pity ignited through the cultural and religious history of Iran propositions her as a symbol for public mourning and commemoration. The anonymity of Neda in this instance adds to the ritual as she can be re-imagined through the politics of struggle, making her a malleable spectral form within online and offline politics. In discussing the contextual relevance of Iran in the resurrection of a martyr, an important aspect of this case study is that Neda as an iconic symbol became accessible to a universal audience. The abject has a universal pull, particularly death imagery, suffering and trauma tropes. The virality of the internet, its ability to circulate the death and draw pity through this dissemination, is an important aspect. Death can be banalized in modernity but also made proximate through imagery laid bare through convergent technologies of vision. Neda is also about our socialization into fairy tales and myths as well as the portrayal of victimhood within these narratives. Youth, beauty and the innocent as victims are recurring themes in myths, fairy tales and literary fictions (O’Connor 1989: 132), invoking these potent and latent cultural mythologies within our psyche; Neda transcended her anonymity to be appropriated as a cultural icon by the global community to symbolize the quest for justice in slaying the innocent. Death, sacrifice and blood against the pristine constructions of her purity

Martyrdom and the mobile phone  53 and innocence provided a means to make her both a public and private figure for mourning and re-imagining online. The domestication of grief and suffering through media forms relies on a number of elements particularly in terms of its online manifestation shaped through personal experience, the pull to the abject, social networks and the quest for social injustice or reparations for a loss and the need to commemorate through communion. Public and private memories can be equally shaped through our ability to feel the pain and suffering of others or possess the shame to expiate guilt through performative rituals. In mourning Neda, audiences used the cultural resources of the internet to commemorate and venerate this online martyr through dedicated sites, curation of her images, poetry and tributes to a woman they did not know but encountered through death. In seeking to immortalize the death event through the ineradicable qualities of the internet and its attendant circulation, Neda remained alive as an iconic memory. The communion of a global community commemorating the loss of a young women stood in contrast to the situation in Iran where the authorities sought to restrict the veneration of Neda as a symbol of dissent and hope, enacting this as a resistance in its own right.

Conclusion Virality can court death imagery in unforeseen ways, making what is alien familiar and the familiar profane. Blood, sacrifice and the publicizing of the tragic death of Neda through mobile phones conjoined an Orientalist gaze with the fantasy of liberation and solidarity with an atavistic Other. Neda became a symbol of both despair and hope: in the process she produced a moment of solidarity online. Death imagery as part of the aesthetic abject does things to our senses, unleashing trauma as a popular cultural form which is malleable to both banalization and reification. As a form of visual taboo, Neda’s death demonstrated the political power of new technologies despite the purdah imposed by Iran. Leaked images have power, for they sanctify moments as a look into the forbidden. The West’s orientalist view of the Arab world is also played out through Neda being repositioned as a cultural figure in the Western imagination, resurrecting her with or without religion to symbolize change in unreachable frontiers. The release of imagery during a period of media shut-down induced the renegotiation of journalistic practices, to import the primacy of publishing and signposting these first, then questioning the validity of the source. In so doing new myths can circulate, lending to the production of the iconic as a suppressed vision of another world, forged through the gaze of Western sensibilities and desires. Neda is the myth ignited in fairy tales and narratives of victimhood, one that is constantly invoked in our cultural psyche through time such that the ‘innocent slain’ is a renewed site of myth-making. Media

54  Martyrdom and the mobile phone assemblages, the networked economy and the conjoining of private moments of grieving with public sites of gaze and veneration is about the using of cultural resources and raw materials to produce new rituals and enactments which in turn compose culture and solidarity. Rituals are a site of liminality where we reach solidarity and unification through the euphoric; here sentiments overtake and remake the ordinary into the sublime and the anonymous into the martyr.

Note 1 Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar and one of the four holiest months for Muslims.

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4 Tank man as the unknown icon Revitalizing Tiananmen through steganography

Introduction Almost nobody knew his name…But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square – June 5, 1989 – may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined. (Pico Iyer 1998) In baptizing the Tank Man as the ‘unknown rebel’ in Time Magazine (1998), Pico Iyer co-locates an ordinary and anonymous figure with the events of 1989, who will come to embody the events of 1989 in Tiananmen and beyond for the Western social imaginary. In May 1989, Tiananmen Square in Beijing became the site of global spectatorship through student demonstrators occupying it for seven weeks and agitating for democratic reforms from the Chinese state. Strategically planned to coincide with the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s state visit with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the demonstrators sought to capitalize on the international media’s gaze. The summit, as an important moment of rapprochement between two countries preceding 20 years of tension, was a seismic event to be marked with Beijing setting up temporary satellite links to broadcast the historical accord. Against this backdrop the student demonstrations acquired intense momentum and scale as more citizens from different walks of life attached themselves to the cause, prompting a military offensive against the protestors in the square. In face of mounting resistance, tanks supported by troops assaulted the square on 4 June killing unarmed protestors. There was no official figure given for the death toll, with estimates ranging from several hundred to a thousand (Green 2013). The event, known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June 4 Massacre, become an iconic media event through images and soundbites with millions witnessing it through broadcasting technologies (Adams 1996: 426).

58  Tank man as the unknown icon Tiananmen as a suppressed historic memory is invoked through the enigmatic imagery of the Tank Man as part of the Western imaginary into a terrain which does not yield to the Western gaze. As a taboo topic encoded with blood, death and bodies of the slain, Tiananmen is a contentious ‘place memory’ of historically rendered violence over time with the Tank Man abstracted through this bloodshed yet symbolizing the hope of resistance for the West. ‘Place memory’ is doubly loaded, referring to the contents of people’s memories but also place as defined through its memorial qualities of monuments, architecture, walls, etc., and as such functions as mnemonic aids to collective memory (Lewicka 2008: 214). Impregnated through a fervent orientalist gaze and place memory, the Tank Man is never laid to rest through time but resurrected as a pro-democracy symbol embodying the desires of the West where his abject figure is immortalized as confronting and challenging the China’s authoritarian regime. Michael Dutton surmises that that Tank Man ‘constitutes the mind’s-flash image of the Western world’ in which This streetscene, this time and this event, have come to constitute the compass point for virtually all Western journeys into the interior of the contemporary political and cultural life of China. (1998: 17) This chapter examines the Tank Man as a Western social imaginary against his constant invocations to commemorate the massacre of 1989 over time, particularly on social media as a symbol of democratic desires of the West projected on the East, and as a stenographic image laded with meanings yet collapsed through an anonymous mortal juxtaposed against rolling tanks. The Tank Man as an emotional creation of the West lends to a ‘hauntology’ of absent presence fashioned through a forbidden territory while inscribed through the guilt of witnessing a mystic site of taboo and a square filled with the blood of dissent. The complex events of the June 4 massacre as media narratives through the West’s obsession with heroic pro-democracy struggles have come under intense criticism by scholars (Wasserstrom 1994; Chinoy 1999; Kluver 2002; Lee, Li, & Lee 2011). The appropriation of a faceless man squaring up to a column of battle tanks as a defining symbol of the event resulted in the creation of Tank Man as an iconic media memory. The collapsing of complex events through this unknown figure, through time and space, shackles Tiananmen to this indexical entity, delimiting it through his cultural frames of referentiality as a popular myth. A single image as defining unfathomable events fixes the Tank Man as a ‘memory marker’ (Zelizer 2002) fused inexorably with Tiananmen yet delimiting complex events through this defining figure. Representing a multitude of memories for the Chinese citizens, Tiananmen is a space criss-crossed with remembering and forgetting, of landmarks

Tank man as the unknown icon  59 and procession, of state memory and resistance, habituated through violence and reinstatement of order. Guarded closely as a space for history and myth-making, it represents a mutability and hauntology of pasts trapped through a repressive and suppressing state machinery controlling it through official narrations as a ‘voiceover’. Within this instability and insatiable history of resistance and repression, the Tank Man prevails as a media memory of pervasive Western gaze and desires, reproduced endlessly through popular imagination and celebrating his iconic immortality against the might of the tanks.

Tiananmen as a monumental space Tiananmen as a site of violent historical renderings is temporally nonstatic in its meanings and can appropriate a different significance for both insiders and outsiders as a monumental space in terms of collective and shared heritage. Shared meanings can in effect function as a collective mirror traversing beyond the personal in a monumental space according to Henry Lefebvre (1991). Through the performance and sustenance of rituals coupled with the circulation of symbolic meanings, the monumental space becomes encoded through the sacred authority of those in power. The conjoining of power and space as a promiscuous enterprise invariably entails the reconfiguration of social relations which in turn produce new spaces in their own right (Lefebvre 1991: 41). Lefebvre argues that the commemorative process raises issues of territorial domination and the control of memory (1991: 220). Like memory, the monument is an unstable entity, as evidenced by those constructed after world wars, where they sit amidst dialectics and projects of remembering and forgetting (Gillis 1994) in terms of their alignments to social relations and political power. Edward Casey’s (1997: 186) notion of ‘place memory’ posits the notion of memory spontaneously connecting features of a place paralleling its own agenda. By phenomenologically placing humans and their notions of selfhood, place memory is elicited through the architectural and institutional as well as the psychological (Casey 1997: 337). The monumental space as a place memory has been amenable to polysemic readings despite dominant groups imposing hegemonic readings upon these (Halevi & Blumen 2011: 386). Place memory functions through a dual articulation for insiders and outsiders, triggering a shared sense of a common past for insiders, or aspects that can be recognizable or constructed as coherent or identifiable to outsiders (Hayden 1997: 36). The multiplicity of readings is also reiterated by Doreen Massey (1995) as places are imagined through the temporal frames of past and present, mediating identity as something always in the process of becoming. Tiananmen, or the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’, as a monumental space and place memory immanently symbolizes both the hegemonic power of the Chinese state and equally the resistance against it at various times in

60  Tank man as the unknown icon history (Hershkovitz 1993), imbuing it through its immanent instabilities and quests for order. As a site of conflicted histories and memory, the project of remembering and forgetting is overwhelmingly foregrounded through power relations, forging the square through political ideologies and tensions which lends the square to sustained incursions in meaning through its political enactments (Wu 1991: 95). As a marker of historical milestones, the square is a palimpsest of conflicted identities. A case in point is the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China by Mao Zedong on October 1st, 1949, this anniversary being commemorated as a regular occurrence thereafter in the square. These official re-renderings of the square reflect a visual and memorial quest to order and continuously narrate it through an official history and historicity. The symbolic geography of the square is intrinsically bound and layered with a deep-seated trajectory of resistance and rebellion entwined with popular moments emerging as a conducive cartography for oppositional political practice (Hershkovitz 1993: 395). There has been a proliferation of scholarship on the violent historical memory of the square (Wu 1979; Hou 1984; Dong 2003), consolidating it as a manifest symbolic geography of human resistance, resilience as well as bloodletting and sacrifice, attesting it as a space given over to spasmodic violent expiations. Made for visual spectacle by staging human struggles and their immanent social relations as centric to the court, it foregrounds an iconography of contested politics. Centring the human as imbued through demise, death and danger, the space expels the uniform or coherent as part of its composition of space (Wu 19911) while playing a vital symbolic role in the politics of legitimation in the political history of China (Watson 1995). In tandem with this the bloody events of 1989 add to the violent ruptures of the square but in this instance proscribing it through a global spectatorship hungry to look into the body politic of the Orient to reveal its turmoils. A protest demonstration viewed as a spatial tactic is about externalizing resistance, staging it in a public arena while removing it from the private sphere (Halevi & Blumen 2011: 386). Monumental spaces characterize such leaps, and in the process solidify place memory through the act of protest as performative renditions. Examples of such spaces include the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Bastille in Paris, the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square (Halevi & Blumen 2011: 386). Place memory of such iconic sites inscribed through protests is about a memory of its recurrence. These spaces leave residues of symbolic power through place memory. A monumental space in exuding this symbolic power provides opportunities for both dissenters and the empowered to appropriate these circulatory meanings, as in the case with Tiananmen enacted as a dialectical and contradictory construction (Wu 2001). The disenfranchised can draw on the past to communicate their dissent and enact place memory as given to popular

Tank man as the unknown icon  61 readings which is then constantly leveraged and exploited by sub-cultures, civil society and dissent groups seeking to thwart ideological incursions of power from above. Spaces and places acquire new symbolic meanings as cultural artefacts. In drawing on De Certeau’s (1984) ‘space of the other’, Hershkovitz (1993) contends that the production of space is the crafting of new meanings, as evident in the dissent space of Tiananmen over time. While those in power can impose an official reading on a space, those contesting the power without the resources of the powerful have to draw on the alternative readings by manipulating existing ones and veering into the metaphorical sphere. The production of counter-sites is about contesting and thwarting dominant readings while exploiting the metaphorical.

The Tiananmen Massacre as a media(ted) image Tiananmen as a global mediated memory and epochal moment of resistance narrated from the vantage point of the media in the West is commemorated through this global spectatorship. With the student movement originating in mid-April and culminating in the government crackdown on June 4, it saturated our modern collective memory in print and broadcast including a media archive of imagery narrated through human suffering and symbolic articulations. These dramatized and serialized offerings would seize the political consciousness of the Western population, elevating Tiananmen into the status of ‘news icon’ (Kluver 2002: 507; Lee et al. 2011) fixed through its mythology for years to come. Tank Man is undoubtedly a mysterious solitary fiction: an apparition freeze-framed as a ‘young man in a white shirt standing motionless before a row of slowly moving tanks’ (Wu Hung 1991: 84). Penetrating popular consciousness in the West, his iconic status was sealed when he appeared on the front cover of Time magazine on June 19, 1989. With the original image shot by Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener, similar images shot by other photographers expanded the mythic status of the Tank Man as an anonymous rebel and as an iconic image. The mythology of the Tank Man abstracted the notion of a modernizing China in internal conflict with its own image of progress, as an entity of internal ruptures and contestations, and appealing to an international audience. The iconic can collapse context or re-inscribe new imagined place memories. In this instance, the Tank Man stood for a violent moment in the history of China, tightly entwined with popular readings of resistance. Embodying space yet emptying it out through the spectacular of the iconic, the Tank Man is a spectral entity of an ordinary mortal transcending the global spectacular as an extraordinary image. Both the triumph of his mimetic projections and their collapse in meaning happen at once through the image economy of media narratives, signifying at once transcendence and delimitation. The single image as an icon of public memory is about a transient moment gathering permanence

62  Tank man as the unknown icon through the collective act of remembering (Casey 2004: 20). As such it functions through a linear signification – through an index that instantly categorizes without hesitance. The selective attribution of information to an image influences audiences in terms of behaviour, particularly their attitudes towards social issues, positioning automatic ‘retrieval prompts’ to recollect past events, images or photographs (Zillmann, Knobloch, & Hong-sik 2001; Knobloch, Hastall, Zillmann, & Callison 2003; Sacchi, Agnoli, & Loftus 2007). However, as a powerful instrument, it can equally be implicated in the production of false memories. The attainment of Tank Man’s image as cult status was not something its creator Jeff Widener anticipated yet something that materialized through the media gaze delivering the unknown protestor onto the cover of ‘every newspaper in the world’ (cf. Calouro 2013) and sealing his legacy within media history. Media as a site for myth-making and the creation of the iconic through re-circulation and voracious media gaze (Ibrahim 2007) cannot be overlooked. If people produce the iconic through fantasies and desires, the media concretizes them through their viral circulation to enact new arrangements with the popular. As an enigmatic entity the Tank Man lent himself to myth-making where he could be inscribed qualities to transcend the immediacy of his moral physical environment and yet be produced through its constraints. In tandem, Time inscribed him into media history by naming him as one of the important people of the century. Pico Iyer (1998), in commemorating the Tank Man image in its tenth anniversary, recounts him as an iconic global image in contrast to his identity as an ‘unknown’. Iyer points that people know him better than Sun Yat-sen (China’s first post-Imperial leader), his image being beamed as a recurring image into millions of living rooms to achieve an audience bigger than that of ‘Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined’. Drawing on Daniel Boorstein’s book Image, Iyer (1998) locates the Tank Man as a ‘Graphic Revolution’ signifying the reduction of ideals to an image, in so doing demonstrating technology’s power to dehumanize and demystify. Tank Man succumbs to this media assemblage. He is procured as a cultural symbol of resistance through the dramatization of Tiananmen, fused through the machinic bind of circulation where he is imposed as a mnemonic memory that can truncate content or collapse it through human desires and fantasies of accessing sites of taboo and the forbidden through the vernacular of a selective image. The media archive, playing a vital role in shaping visual culture and collective memory, is also about repressing of complex historical events through its machinery or in curating the monumental. History as a realm of construction mediated through photography, print and broadcast media as well as film is about reframing the image through instability and co-­ location with the popular. The media’s role in shaping collective memory through its archive of screen culture and images is an important dimension of modernity (Sturken 1996). The conjoining of social and collective

Tank man as the unknown icon  63 memory with history and popular culture convened through media space infuses a technological architecture as well as a technical bias of the visual within this, and in tandem the iconic is a space of visual myth-making underpinned through this assemblage and its contingency. Media imagery and the media event then become crucial to the co-location of the iconic, remade and revitalized through circulation and global spectatorship. Tiananmen, wedged between the political reality of its origins in China and the social imaginary of the West, televised to the world as a media event possessed in itself an enigmatic quality of something forbidden. It became symbolic for the West, enabling it to make sense of this historic moment and what ensued in and outside of China, imbuing a convoluted and contradictory space with generalized layers of meaning (Lee et al. 2011: 336). The media, as a site which mediates history and memory, and with relevance to the production of the ‘news icon’ invoked the constraints of memory-­making in modernity delimited through journalistic accounts that condensed the complex events within the vernacular of a single image. This equally highlights how cultural values and media memory can elicit the iconic to define what may not be directly comprehensive in consuming an event. The problems with the iconic is that it can be employed to counter or make sense of other events, enacting the image through its potency to draw on the affective audience while retaining it as an iconic memory. Dominant ideologies are also reinforced through the media gaze infusing it as a product of its political economy in societies and as such imposing on history and recoding it through its own moralities and sensibilities such that the media gaze can be employed to reify certain events, entrapping and anchoring these through limited vantage points while muting or obliterating possibilities for alternative readings and interpretations. As such, media memory as envisioned through the media icon can saturate our collecting memory in terms of recall to situate a place or space, distant or proximate and in so doing the media can lend a synthetic stability to it (Schudson 1992; Edy 2006). As a product of memory, circulating symbols and narratives become redrafted into not only disseminating memory through the technological bias of the media archive but also in recording it (Olick 1999: 335). As an affective and sensitizing tool, collective memory is performed through a range of mnemonic products and practices (Olick 2010). Media memory can delimit an era as a metaphoric yardstick redolent with shorthand narratives of the lessons for humanity as a collective (Lang & Lang 1989). In such a configuration, the media lapses within a communication architecture that not only re-arranges information and ideas but is also implicated in reconfiguring the balance of power in social resistance, or in centralizing or subverting power hegemonies (Adams 1996: 419). The ‘media event’ (Dayan & Katz 1992) is an important conceptual notion in media theory, leveraging on the media’s capitalization of live broadcasting to celebrate, re-impose and reproduce moral codes, social systems and ideologies. As such, media events emerge as markers of social and

64  Tank man as the unknown icon political realities through the staging of the live moment (Lang & Lang 1984). The liveness of Tiananmen inevitably codes it as a media event where its narration is pressed through media power, enacted through its high drama of drawing on compelling elements such that another activity is foregone in consuming it (Katz 1980). Thriving on the emotive and in tandem its core placement within an overarching media narrative means that that the media event is subsumed through the aesthetic and the sensory, implicating these as the primary codes of our screen culture in modernity (Kellner 2003, 2005). Screen cultures impose a prosthetic continuity in contemporary societies to suggest a stability to events (Sturken 1996) and as such they become intimate with memory to valorize the image, and in according symbolic meanings through a global imagination and consumption rituals sustained through a global media infrastructure.

Social media and memory-making Lending itself to collective memory, social media is configured through an interactive architecture of mnemonic memory residing though archival and retrieval systems based on semantic associations. As platform capital it projects and abstracts from the cultural and social practices of humanity while premising instantaneity and interactivity as an assemblage of connectivity. Here content straddles through people’s communal imaginations, notions of sociality and friendships, forging communities through shared interests such that conversations and trackbacks leave trails amenable to public consumption and memory-making. Within such an architecture, there are opportunities to perform and produce counter-sites of memory without foreclosing the viral circulation of the popular as offerings to networks as content which ‘trends’ and as such gaining social value through its association with the popular. Social media performing as a site of counter-memory and recovery during times of conflict and trauma is also evident within new media rituals (Helmers 2001, Ibrahim 2010). These interactive ritualistic encounters offer ways to inscribe new meanings to physical sites while being dichotomized from them. In contrast to terrestrial broadcasting forged through a national space in terms of event creation in earlier media literature, global platforms through human communion can inscribe or strip out context as well as spatial and temporal frames and cues, producing disorientation and possibilities for resistance. Connecting the virtual with the physical through norms and conversations, social media as an interactive realm can produce spaces in its own right and, in so doing, reconfigure and challenge power and social relations. Space is something that is produced and comes into existence through social relations and interactions which create and characterize space production through its performativity (Lefebvre 1991) and equally in denial through practices of resistance as in the case of Tiananmen.

Tank man as the unknown icon  65 The pedagogy of the internet is inscribed through dual articulation, where the virtual is not divorced from the real and the virtual is equally not truncated from the social norms and values which shape our offline worlds (Hine 2000). The separation of the two worlds is a convenient mechanism to study these realms, but the iteration between the two is vital in approaching the complexity of virtual world negotiations in which humans bring their pre-existing belief systems but are also capable of producing cultures in their own right online through the raw materials and resources afforded through the architecture of the internet. Such an affordance invokes a whole range of possibilities from the enactment of new rituals and practices, vernaculars and cues not entirely divorced from the real yet inducing curious new practices performing to the platforms of interactivity to perform identity and communal politics. Within such a formulation of the internet producing cultures in its own right are the possibilities for producing not only new spaces as conceived by Lefebvre (1991) but memory-­making as a mode of subversion crafted through the virtual and visual economy of the internet. Spatial reconfigurations on the internet are then not about the obliteration of place per se but the reconstitution and reorganization of spatial relations such that spaces are reconfigured through interactive platforms (Agnew 2011). Material as well as immaterial attaches to memory in enacting ‘Sites of Memory’ (Nora 1989), and hence the internet through its ‘virtuality’ harbours new rituals and forms of commemoration, utilizing the technical architecture of Web 2.0 through personalized acts of uploading, downloading, tweeting, reposting or tagging content in public platforms. As a disembodied space the virtual realm habituates lived experiences of places without the imposed materiality of it. Veering beyond the Cartesian separation of mind and body, the online architecture extends immaterial presence and is consequential for the notion of place memory (Massey 1995; Casey 1997; Hayden 1997). In such a calibration, articulations disembodied online conjoin with those who have witnessed in the flesh through physical sites while tapping into the idea of those who become implicated in an act through gaze or spectatorship. Online media spaces can produce sites to challenge social relations when these are banned in offline spaces. Shifts in our objective notions of time and space happen through social struggles (Harvey 1990: 227). As a platform for social struggles and political expressions, the internet can enable a counter-sphere for discourse, impacting the politics of place memory as well as the production of space from a Lefebvrian paradigm. As a realm not disembodied from the real, the notion of place is inscribed through both lived experiences and the disembodied presence of the online world. The conjoining of communities who live in repressed polities with those who can receive and circulate materials without the immediate censure of offline regimes elongates memory-making and induces new commemoration practices enacted through the spectacle of sharing communities.

66  Tank man as the unknown icon The emergence of social memory formed through articulations on social media fosters a dynamic between individuals and communities, as well as between individuals and historical events (Tallentire 2001: 198). Shared narratives which can constitute social memory, once released from context, can acquire the ability to circulate meanings and ideals, and while unstable at the level of information, may afford stability through shared meanings and reinforced social interactions (Fentress & Wickham 1992: ix). Collective memory as a concept which veers beyond the community or the individual emphasizes the plurality of memory convened through an event yet not proscribed only through it, regardless of where one might be located or whether people are related to each other (Casey 2004: 23). Where individuals may not directly remember or recall through their lived experiences, groups can prompt memories and enable groups to own this as collective memory (Halbwach 1950). As a global platform, the internet has capacities to engender connectivity and therapy through sharing and collective memory-making as well as new rituals for memorialization, enmeshing lived encounters and spectacular economies through a networked platform without the mediation of mainstream media gaze. Nevertheless, the media gaze and its repositories become equally extrapolated into this enterprise in the digital sphere such that the connection between the media event, popular discourses and social memory becomes renewed over time.

Relocating place through social media Nations are a product of ‘shared amnesia and collective forgetfulness’, beyond being bound by their shared memory and consciousness (Renan 1990: 11). Like memory, ‘forgetting’ is an integral aspect of national memory, according to Yael Zerubavel (1995) writing on Israel. As a site of contentious memory, Tiananmen is not about remembering but about guarding over what should be remembered, particularly as an iconic place memory in its own right, which is constantly exploited by those in power and outside of it. The guarding of the memory becomes a means to narrate an official history and memory is continuously thwarted from the inside and outside. Through time this guarding over would be continuously contested with articulations online which conjoin with an international community, seeking to penetrate beyond the official narratives. One such case study is the 2013 commemoration of the Tiananmen Massacre when the Chinese authorities became vigilant about online conversations which challenged the official narration of memory, prompting internet censors to surveil articulations about events which happened 24 years previously. This was reinforced offline rules with officials barring families from visiting the graves of those massacred, with police patrols outside the main Stone Gate entrance to the Wanan graveyard (West 2013). In tandem, Sina Weibo, a social media site similar to Twitter, became heavily surveilled by censors. Searches for the ‘Tiananmen incident’ and ‘six-four incident’ were not in the first instance

Tank man as the unknown icon  67 blocked but brought up references and content related to other historical events such as the mourning of Premier Zhou Enlai in 1976. Subsequent searches would follow with a command that ‘search results cannot be displayed’ (Kaiman 2013). To thwart the internet police, May 35 or 535 were used instead of references to June 4. Getting wind of the circumnavigation of these terms, the Chinese internet patrol responded by blocking the usual terms along with code numbers such as 535, and in the process blocking a host of words which could reference the event including ordinary words as ‘Today’ or ‘that day’ (Kaiman 2013) and Roman numerals ‘VIIV’ (Florcruz 2013) as well as ‘six-quatre’ in French language. The emoticon of a candle as a means to mark the event was also blocked, similar to the year before. When a prominent dissident and AIDS activist put out a call to wear black to mark the event, the search term ‘black shirt’ was blocked on Sina Weibo (Chin 2013). Dubbing this vigilance activity on June 4 as ‘Internet Maintenance day’ or ‘National Amnesia Day’, it restrained many users, including intellectuals and celebrities, from commemorating the event as a form of silent protest. This heavy vigilance online was seen as a means to obliterate the memory of 1989. Internet users responded to the censorship, appropriating techniques to circumnavigate the censors with a mix of strategies. The use of metaphors, oblique references to the ‘dark clouds’ over Beijing, as well as classic Confucian texts were utilized to dodge the censors, with protestors enlisting the metaphorical and historic texts as means to subliminally interlock with the events of Tiananmen. Similarly, imagery stood in for words due to the heavy-handed censorship online, with citizens resorting to memes to evade automatic censorship (Australian World News 2013), curating images by photoshopping them, including that of a girl with her hand over her mouth. One resonant image that was used as steganography was the Tank Man replaced by four giant rubber ducks, referencing the renowned installation at Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong (Kaiman 2013). Imagery, satire, memes, architectural installations as well as humour were used to sneak the event into social media to commemorate it. Such an array of material also included the absent-present image of the Tank Man, leveraging on the global indexicality of the icon as synonymous to Tiananmen. Despite activities to mask the commemoration of the massacre, the Tank Man prevailed through the multimedia platform of social media, re-hashed and reworked to sneak past the surveillance of gatekeepers of memory online, to retain his global iconic status in defining the event. Even when his substitution for the ducks was eventually barred by the censors, he was unleashed through a range of memetic images lending to viral circulation. These included Lego models of the tanks as well as versions of popular computer games such as Angry Birds. These postings were actively consumed and reposted on social media, making Tank Man a resonant media memory online. Despite the suppression of the event in China, the global

68  Tank man as the unknown icon community re-ignited the Tank Man as a mythic symbol of the protest movements and one that could be kept online indefinitely with those communities aligning with the sentiments of Chinese users seeking to commemorate Tiananmen. These rituals of solidarity between users in China and elsewhere were about the enactment of the liminal sphere of shared meanings to commemorate Tiananmen as a sacred memory. Images as both simplified and composite (Zelizer 2004: 160) affirm the problematics of commemorating Tiananmen through the image economy of the Tank Man. With the Chinese authorities’ vigilance over the guarding of the square as a historical site, Tank Man as the West’s orientalist gaze reared its head again in 2013, to leverage on his iconic and global celebrity status, lending to new forms of sociality and communal commemorative rituals. This illuminates the fact that public memory has a bivalent temporality of being welded to the past yet capable of producing further memorials of the same event (Casey 2004: 20). In this instance, the architecture of the Web 2.0 configured the Tank Man through mimetic avatars, installing him as the main vehicle to access the event, refashioning him as a steganographic composition. What is worth noting is that the use of humour and satire to circumnavigate the censors provided a creative and ludic encounter juxtaposed against the government blocking even common words which may not necessarily index the event. The heavy-handed censorship was countered through creative and playful strategies, masking the tragic circumstances of the event. The ritual of getting past the censors online reinvented Tank Man for the social media visual economy while anchoring him to the massacre event and the monumental landmarks of the square. As a memetic incarnation on the internet, the Tank Man will appear reproduced through its ludic qualities to entrance new audiences for whom 1989 was not a lived event. The memetic, unlike photographs, don’t seek to extract the authentic or the representational; instead, they delve on the subversion, on association and its ability to elude and inscribe, such that it can be commodified, archived and curated through a consuming community online. In the digital sphere, protest cultures are immersed through a spectacular economy eliciting participation through visual imagery, while creating an intertextuality between social media platforms and offline politics (Ibrahim 2009). Ousting suppressed memories through platform capital is to equally commit memory through its algorithmic configuration. Here the repression of human memory and its release through platforms via humans as conduits of information remake memory on social media through new modes of retentive architectures which perform through search engines and image archives, and which recalibrate memory through its own intrinsic hidden logic. Freud’s (1915/1957) definition of repression as ‘keeping something out of consciousness’ when abstracted through social media remakes suppressed memories through a publicness of social media spaces and their transactional modes of exchange.

Tank man as the unknown icon  69 Social media platforms, in thwarting the boundaries between the offline and online worlds, provide resources for political subversion and political theatre for enacting new forms of the spectacle and in enshrining the iconic through new rituals which transcend the temporal and territorial. The image economy decontextualized on social media platforms works to the aesthetics of creative circulation, voyeurism and ludic game play, remixing the signification of meanings with the formation of rituals without dispelling the mythic qualities of the iconic. The resonance and intertextuality of the online and offline worlds recombine in ways to provide both explicit parodies and means to enlist memes as steganography to inscribe new meanings and to escape internet governance. They speak to both the instability of images online and equally their mutability to regenerate and revive the iconic between communities, extending global reach into sites which may be difficult to penetrate in physical terms. Spoof cultures, built through an intertextuality between popular culture and real-world events, draw on the image economy and memes as troll figures but also as sites of signification, reifying these through their immateriality. These aesthetic configurations enable new commemoration rituals which entwine spectatorship with subversion while exploiting the possibilities for aesthetic configurations which can efface and re-inscribe the indexicality of the icon. Tank Man was the West’s avatar of resistance and on social media he reappears and floats within modes of instrumental signification of the event and a fantasy of popular culture dichotomized from it. The enmeshing of public events with private spaces means hybrid genres which fuse trauma with entertainment and parody while drawing on real political events will become part of digital culture signifying our engagements with the political and our production of the social. With relentless image manipulation within such an architecture, the political will coalesce with new forms of entertainment where the sacred and profane will crisscross with renewed vigour. The popularization of the political through the parody and trivialization of the political against a virulent economy appropriates the politics of resistance and subversion equally leveraging on the iconic as a site to exploit the symbolic and to procreate new meanings.

Conclusion In 2013, social media as a global platform conjoined with the agency of Chinese users to commemorate the massacre of 1989 as a sacred collective memory despite the heavy censorship of the event in China. The suppressing of articulations online represented a move by Chinese censors to guard over the memory of Tiananmen and to narrate it through the official voice of the state. In seeking to circumnavigate the suppression and repression of these memories offline and online, internet users resorted to the metaphorical and ludic spheres to release a collective memory of the event through imagery, parody and satire. Despite the heavy-handed guarding of

70  Tank man as the unknown icon social memory online, Tank Man traversed as a memetic avatar to project both the violent suppression of Tiananmen and the endeavour to collectively remember the event, but equally to re-articulate his mythic status as a global icon, fashioned by the West to project its own desires onto the East. Stripped from context yet conjoined to the violence of Tiananmen, Tank Man is part of the media memory and social media repository where he will be resurrected, invented and re-appropriated as a symbolic and popular image for years to come. Social media as part of Boorstin’s (1992 ‘graphic revolution’ will amplify the iconic entrapping it through its memetics as both play and counter-sites of memory-making.

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5 The ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon The ‘Other within the Other’

Introduction The ‘media icon’ encompasses stereotypes, role models and entities of adulation veering into negative figures who are often rolled out as a moral panic to caution society or produced as vanguards leading the moral destruction of humanity. If ‘celebrification’ intrinsically implicates the machinery of media and its intrusive gaze, vilification requires such a sustained effort as well. Criminal and negative figures birthed and represented through the media can occupy the status of a media icon, along with more glamorous celluloid fantasies. Ray Surette (1994: 134–135) describes predator icons such as criminals who had been long part of the fascination and pre-occupation of media. They shifted from heroic romantic depictions to more conservative negatives ones after 1850, assuaging an appetite for crime and detective genres while locating the criminality or deviance through individual personality or moral weakness, leveraging these through their divergence from normal humanity. The negative media icon merges entertainment with news in high visibility as part of the icon’s construction (Surette 1994: 135). The Jihadi Bride as a negative media icon emerges through a context of a temporal framing of Islam in crisis with modernity (Ibrahim 2007a). She elongates the trope on the ‘War on Terror’ fabricated and composed through this rhetoric of belonging to a species which through its atavism will destroy the world. She is iconic through her abstraction by the media and her re-composition through their sustained narrative of her as a disalignment with civility and normality. The iconic from this paradigm as a media fiction integrates media as myth-makers in society with the ability to provide a lens into disassembling the body of the Other. She is a product of post-digital materiality fashioned through screen machinations and their representations of ‘Islamic terrorism’ where she becomes understood only through its fracture. With the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the emergence of terrorist organizations such as ISIS (also known as Islamic State, ISIL or Daesh), a whole vernacular of violence has emerged in mainstream media representations which reflect postmodernity’s imagination through the

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  75 screen and its offerings (Brophy 2015; Yousef 2015). One such potent yet iconic entity is the ‘Jihadi Bride’ a hybrid figure forged through the conflict in the Middle East and the appropriation of these as ‘holy war’ or ‘Jihad’ by terrorist organizations invoking Islam as their guiding principle. The Jihadi Bride, emerging through media discourses and new media visuality, is entrapped through Orientalist discourses and entails the phenomenon of young women leaving the West (in the known and proximate) to join with Jihadi fighters and martyrs in the East (in the unknown and untamed). They are figures of constant disruption in late modernity, seemingly ordinary girls who look like they are going about their ordinary lives, raised in conservative families, bearing the brunt of a diasporic upheaval psychologically and deemed more religious and closer to the scriptures than their parents’ generation (Abbas 2005; Skrbiš, Baldassar, & Poynting 2007; Ali 2008). These ‘disappearing girls and women’, in their quest to join the Jihadi initiatives in unknown lands, often appropriate a mythical status as the inexplicable. They lend to media narratives through the potential terror they embody and their disappearance accords them a mysticism as their material bodies vanish, through the journeys they undertake away from home and equally through their eventual and untimely deaths in ‘dangerous terrains’ and conflict zones as casualties of ‘holy war’. Through this disembodiment they become ocular phantasmagoric images – traceable through their media(ted) representations yet often read through their disappearing corporeal bodies, brutal accidents and deaths. The Jihadi Bride as an iconic entity is entrapped within the vernacular of violence and its representations (i.e. visual and discursive) on the screen since 9/11 where the temporal rupture for Western civilization and its apocalypse is imagined through the burning Twin Towers, played and re-played on screens to become our contemporary iconic memory, truncating the temporal frames into ‘before and after’ (Ibrahim 2007a). As such, the Jihadi Bride is a secondary entity, an appendage, forged against the terrorist figure of the ‘monstrous’ Jihadist. Both (i.e. the Jihadist and his bride) are by-products of an ‘unevolved doctrine’ and theology of an ‘Eastern God’. The Jihadi Bride is imagined through the existence of the male Jihadist as the antagonist; her embodied identity defined through his existence and hence her corporeal body is similarly imagined through sacrifice, martyrdom and quest for paradise. Her sexualization is through his male gaze and subsumed through this servitude where both her mind and her mortal body can be possessed through him. These dominant representations often obliterate the Jihadi Bride as being capable of desire and bodily pleasures in her service of Others (both the terrorist and his doctrine, or her quest for paradise). She is envisaged through deviance or forms of mind-body misalignments (i.e. the zombie or the possessed) but denied the carnal desires or fantasies of teenagers or

76  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon adults. Her disappearance and flight is equated with doctrinal objectives of martyrdom and the paradise of another world not directly accessible to the Western gaze. Positioned as a sub-human, she is invoked through the sacred text and cast as a sacrificial object for the sexual pleasure of the Jihadist. In tandem, she is only accorded the extremes in orientation as the ‘radical’ and the ‘fanatical’ or perhaps the compliant. The Jihadi Bride as an analytic category is a problematic category even within feminist studies, invoking questions about the limits of its ontological boundaries (Jacoby 2015; Navest, Koning, & Moors 2016). She remains an enigma, the ‘Other within the Other’. The Jihadi Bride as a ‘femme fatale’ remains a figure of media fascination and a conduit to resurrect the fear of the ‘Other’. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s (1993, 2003) analytic of the ‘nomadic subject’ and her cartographic methodology, this chapter thwarts the conceptualization of the Jihadi Bride as a unitary subject, instead reappraising her within advanced capitalism and fractured postmodern reality as a complex entity reconnecting her with her bodily subjectivity and suppressed pleasures. It re-centres her through the screen cultures of the post-digital landscape. This alternative reading releases her from the shackles of religiosity to recreate her as someone capable of experiencing and producing desire enmeshed with the consumption and experiential economies of the screen. In treating her as a postmodern and a post-digital subject, there is an acknowledgement that the feminine subject is neither an essentialized entity nor is it immediately accessible, casting it into the ambit of a political and conceptual project of ‘transcending the traditional (‘molar’) subject position of Woman as Other of the Same, so as to express the Other of the Other’ (Irigaray 1985: 46). As Irigaray points, out bringing the body back into these configurations locates the body as an interface or a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces, where multiple codes (race, sex, class, age, etc.) are inscribed. Hence, the unitary subject is banished while the complexities are unleashed. The Jihadi Bride as the iconic is entangled with screen machinations yet unassimilable as a feminine entity. The chapter proceeds by locating the dominant readings of the mythic Jihadi Bride in mainstream media and her iconic screen representations where she is associated with the ‘monster jihadist’. An alternative reading of the Jihadi Bride is offered by imbuing her with the sexual gaze where the monster (i.e. the terrorist Jihadist) of mainstream propaganda is recoded as an object of desire produced through the screen and its intimatization of fantasy online. In so doing, it releases the Jihadi Bride as a non-corporeal entity produced through the mythic and the imaginary of the East and to bind her through a mediated screen culture which can reframe notions of proximity and distance, and also desire and sexual gratification. Such a re-reading reunites the Jihadi Bride with her bodily subjectivity within the consumption economy of the digital age while acknowledging her as a nomadic subject amenable to multiple iterations without foreclosing the political context of her emergence in modern conflicts today.

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  77

Mediated ‘Islam’ in crisis While vision is defined as an instrumental function of the eye, visuality combines the social, the representational and the experiential (i.e. of the screen, the encounter, and the virtual). It entails a recombining of the social, cultural and symbolic while overlapping these with the biological in encountering the postmodern screen, global in its reach yet embedded to bodies as a prosthetic extension. The screen is conceptualized as capable of connecting us to a mass of humanity yet fracturing us through our subjectivity. As such, visuality is mediated in activities of the representational without entirely reducing it to the visuality they constitute (Davis 2004: 9). It is in this sense mediated visuality then denotes the constructions of the Jihadi Bride as an iconic subject as produced within a cultural context where notions of bodily embodiment and screen-engendered disembodiment reconfigure the experiential without relinquishing the political. Visuality, then, refers to the ‘constitutive character’ of symbolic renderings in the making of ‘experience’ or a social reality (Langer 1949: 393). The consumption and portrayal of the Jihadi Bride in the media and her iconic status needs to be contextualized through the screening of Islam and its televisualization since 9/11. The Middle East as a subject of Orientalism (Said 2001) entered a new temporal phase with 9/11 and the intense narration of Islam through a mediated visuality (Ibrahim 2007a, 2008). Conjoined with terrorism, carnage and exploding cities in the West, it became part of the ‘media spectacular’ ascribed through the dramatic, the unexpected and the violent. The physical Muslim body politic with its potential to detonate and cause devastation in urban spaces came to embody risk to ordered cities and Western civilization (Ibrahim 2010). Both Islam and the Ummah (i.e. supra-national Islamic community) became situated within the dominant vernacular of explosive terrorist narratives in the media (Ibrahim 2007b). Islam (and in tandem its Ummah) as a media polemic entered a double bind, entrapped within media narratives on the one hand and the radical agenda of terrorists on the other, to be co-produced through these two disparate strands where both had a co-dependence on each other. If the stereotype of Western secularism gravitated towards materiality and its manifestations in the physical world, Islam stood for another world inaccessible to Western civilization. The notion of paradise (through Jihad) as a spiritual quest juxtaposed against the discourses of terrorism, risk and surveillance that pervaded government agendas after 9/11 constructed Islam and the Muslim world as being completely misaligned with the modern world (Ibrahim 2010). The circulation of terms such as ‘Jihad’ as part of popular media discourse meant these became unbound from theology and reframed by popular culture and terrorist agendas. Terrorist groups’ manipulation of Islamic doctrines to justify their agendas and strategies gave birth to a slew of popular terms such as the ‘Islamist’, the ‘Jihadist’, the ‘burkini’, and also

78  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon the ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a deviant form of embodied identity (Ibrahim 2009). Associated with violent acts such as beheadings or the destruction of sacred archaeological sites such as Palmyra, Islam became part of a long and convoluted siege, both by the terrorists and media. Islam as a media text was locked into a distinct visuality or a mode of looking which constantly ascribed ‘unholy’ wars and ‘un-Islamic’ acts under its banner. In the process certain symbols and terminologies such as Jihad or terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda become symbolic of Islam in our popular imagination (Esposito 2002). This visuality equally subsumed propaganda videos of bloodletting and beheadings used by ISIS to entrap Islam into a prism of atavism and rupture in the Western gaze. The narration of the events through the media spectacle and the understanding of complex events through images and soundbites framed Western civilization as being under siege from the radical religious ideology of Islam. The spectacularization of terror in postmodernity is important in framing distance and empathy to events and in committing to new memory and history, while decoupling events from a wider historical memory and trajectory (Ibrahim 2011). While the term ‘Jihad’ in contemporary usage is equated to holy war, the term is a broad heuristic construct referring to ‘struggles in the cause of God’ (Heck 2004: 95–122) and as such is amenable to varied readings. Its appropriation as a political and ideological tool means it is decontextualized from its theological origins to serve the agenda of those who hold a monopoly on the term’s meaning at any one time (Kepel 2006: X). Jihad as an ideological tool appropriated by radical and fundamentalist groups and the selective use of texts and phrases (lifted out of context) adds to the confusion. The moral economy of the Quran and the Ummah are often obliterated in popular discourses of Jihad and as a result the greater Jihad is often not given much emphasis in constructing the Ummah as a moral community. As such, Islam entered a struggle for meaning in postmodernity, particularly its Ummah located in foreign soil (Ibrahim 2007b, 2009, 2010). In tandem, ‘Islamic terrorism’ as an academic and political term intrinsically constructs Muslims as a ‘suspect community’ (Jackson 2009: 179). Media constructs and complex phenomena such as Jihad, the suicide bomber, the dual notions of martyrdom and paradise and mass murder of civilians through acts of self-annihilation become fused into one single media narrative as depicting Islam, despite such acts challenging the core conceptions in Islamic theology and law over the centuries, and remaining contentious to Muslims by overlooking the seminal idea of the sanctity of life upheld by the Quran (Freamon 2003: 310–331; Ibrahim 2011). Classical Islamic jurists appropriated the discourses of a moral civilization and were conscious of the moral constraints that needed to be safeguarded in waging wars. There then emerged a corpus of jurisprudence on all elements of Jihad including ‘military struggle’ (El Fadl 2001). These were then subject to a complex collection of norms, obligations, prescriptions, prohibitions and various legal restraints which were imposed on its conduct – including

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  79 seminal injunctions against the killing of women and children, prohibitions against the devastation of vegetation and property and the forbidding of the torture, murder and mutilation of hostages in all circumstances. The use of terror was not condoned by classical Muslim jurists and the injunctions also forbid taking one’s life in Jihad. Self-sacrifice was not advocated or encouraged through these set of moral restraints (Ibrahim 2010). The theatrical representation of Islam through acts of terrorism and its ‘unholy war’ produces both a vernacular of violence and visuality where new ‘monstrations’ emerge uncoupling the conceptual rigour of the doctrine. In line with this, the media co-locates a whole list of entities including the Jihadist, martyr, suicide bomber, burka, burkini, veil and the Jihadi Bride in the seamless enactment of Islam as a mediated narrative on the screen. The audiences socialized into the genre of horror in popular culture can relate to discourses of evil, ‘light and darkness’ (Coe, Domke, Graham, John, & Pickard 2004) evident in the post-9/11 rhetoric and equally the scripting of terror through the terrorists as the monsters who wreak unimaginable horror on the ordered streets of Western civilization.

The iconic ‘nomadic subject’ The emergence of the ‘monster terrorist’ on the streets of Western metropolises provides a means to reframe the Jihadi Bride within the cartography of conflict in the Middle East. While the monster Jihadist of media representations is the beast responsible for stealing innocent Muslim school girls, this monster figure is equally an indeterminate entity coded as a site of sexual desire. This duality of the monster terrorist in terms of both destruction and desire is employed in an instrumental sense to review the Jihadi Bride as a ‘nomadic subject’ (Braidotti 1993). The monster as a site of sexual imagination releases the desexualized Jihadi Bride solely as an offering for the abominable. In restoring the Jihadi Bride as a corporeal entity and reuniting her with her bodily subjectivity and sexual desires, it equally co-locates her as a consumer within advanced capitalism and the consumer cultures which enable the monster to be rebranded through the screen. The personalization of the screen, as a filter to the wider world and as a prosthetic extension of the body, reframes the body and its senses (i.e. both cognitive and affective) through a mediated visuality. As such, the monster terrorist functions as a potent symbol of (self-)destruction as well as a means to release the female sexual gaze of the Jihadi Bride. In rendering the Jihadi Bride as an embodied sexual entity, this chapter draws on Rosi Braidotti’s (2011a, 2011b) notions of ‘nomadic thought and subject’ and her cartographic method. It rejects the ‘psychoanalytic idea of repression and the negative definition of desire as lack, instead proposing it as a positive concept; as an ontological force of becoming’ (2011a: 2). In employing the concept of nomadic thought, it seeks to undo dominant representations and static authority by being dynamic and outward bound

80  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon while stressing bodily materialism and the lived body as a vital aspect of enquiry. Nomadic thought in tandem stresses the non-unitary vision of the subject, inviting different ways to think about the subject. It acknowledges the subjectivity of the subject as a socially mediated process of relations and negotiations with multiple others and complex social structures (2011a: 2–3). In tandem, Braidotti’s cartography utilizes theoretically informed and politically contingent readings of power relations. This approach provides both analytic tools and creative alternatives to explore the impact of ‘material and discursive conditions upon our embedded and embodied subjectivity’ (2011a: 3). As such, the nomadic subject is intimately entwined with the critique of power relations (i.e. media, archives, entrenched nostalgia) along with an engagement with sustainable alternatives. For Rosi Braidotti (2003: 43–44), the redefinition of the female subject begins through the bodily roots of subjectivity while emphasizing the political importance of desire and of its role in the constitution of the subject. From this perspective, the subject of feminism is simultaneously sexed and social. Braidotti posits the body, or the embodiment of the subject, as a key term in the feminist struggle for the redefinition of subjectivity. It is to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions (Grosz 1987; Braidotti 1989). Drawing on Braidotti, the counter-images of the Jihadi Bride are utilized as a means to reconfigure the politically informed maps of the present (i.e. cartography). It invokes the possibility for transformation while acknowledging the material complexity of the embodied nomadic subject. As such the nomadic subject is positioned through the relative, conjunctive and dynamic, falling between categories (Braidotti 1997: 68; Braidotti 2011a). Braidotti’s non-linear cartographies of power then account for the paradoxes and contradictions in the era of globalization. It resists a unitary vision of the subject to capture the fragmentations, flows and mutations which symbolize our era. Braidotti’s (2011b) cartography of a globalized and technologically mediated world folds in advanced capitalism where there is hegemony as well as a decentring, mobility and rigidity, inherent violence and propensity to self-destruction as a system. Here the linear gives way to the contradictory, particularly in terms of the homogenization of commodity culture where consumer practices conjoin with disparities and structural inequalities. Pluralism and racialized stereotypes coexist. Our world is embedded and supported by a major technological revolution producing counter-­ memories against the grain of the dominant representations of subjectivity. The recognition of an existing cartography and its critique as well as the quest to map alternatives signals a shift away from anthropocentrism. The subject is then produced through an entanglement of material, bio-cultural and symbolic forces (Braidotti 2004). For Braidotti (2004) bodies collapse into an interdependent bind with technology symbolized by the cyborg’s techno-body saturated by a complex web of dynamic and technologically

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  81 mediated social relations. This ‘bios-zoe’ or life-cantered vision of the technologically mediated subject of post-modernity or advanced capitalism is fraught with internal contradictions. As such the subject is denied unitary cohesion and cast into nomadic subjectivity. In a similar vein, Donna Haraway (1990), drawing on Foucault, focuses on the construction and manipulation of docile knowable bodies in our existing social system, inviting us to ponder over what new kinds of bodies are being constructed at the moment. Foucauldian modalities of power index what we have ceased to be. They function as a cartography of a posteriori, failing to account for the situation now. Haraway, going beyond Foucault, locates women in the post-industrial system of production symbolized by the ‘informatics of domination’ (1991), where women have been cannibalized by the new technologies and have disappeared from the field of visible social agents. With the post-industrial system, Haraway invokes an urgent imperative to invent a new politics on the basis of a more adequate understanding of how the contemporary subject functions (Prins 1995). Haraway’s interpretation of ‘situated knowledges’ draws on the metaphor of ‘vision’ where the former ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of knowledge appear as apparatuses of visual and bodily production. Blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, she opts instead for the hybrids as a conduit for reconceptualizing objectivity. In emphasizing the situatedness and embodiment of all vision, Haraway reiterates the increasingly advanced visualizing technologies in postmodern culture which enable us to be everywhere and get to know even the most hidden and dark places. Such a pervasive technical interlocution transforms the notion of vision, diffracting rather than reflecting what is in front of us. Situated knowledges produce or regenerate contested and contestable novel forms rather than reproducing what is already given. These new ‘geometries’ reject existing subject-object boundaries, enabling the emergence of ‘wonderful’ and ‘promising monsters’ (Haraway 1992). Haraway, like Braidotti, passionately invokes a radical rethinking of the notions of the subject as well as the object of knowledge. Her notion of objectivity fuses the notions of subject and object. In analysing bodies as objects of scientific discourse, Haraway marks biological bodies as not natural or given but there to be discovered and revealed. As such ‘stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject’ can emerge and circulate (Haraway 1991: 192). Haraway (1991) in congruence with Braidotti is committed to less unitary forms of subjectivity, opting instead to converge with other strands of feminist notions of critical subjectivity. She seeks to decode the feminine subject from inside as well as outside of feminism. Rather than premising gender as a central category she delves into the contestation of any ‘alterity’ or difference as a given (2001: 147). As such, her notion of vision is a tool for deconstructive relationality that is diffracting rather than one which re-­ inscribes the reflected rationality (Haraway 1992: 299).

82  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon In approaching the Jihadi Bride as a nomadic subject, and employing Braidotti’s cartography and Haraway’s vision, the next section locates her and her association with the mainstream media depictions of the monster terrorist or jihadist. By critiquing the existing power relations through the metaphor of the monster, an alternative reading of the Jihadi Bride is offered as a nomadic subject where she is conjoined with her bodily subjectivity and desires through a pervasive screen culture fusing embodiment with virtuality while conjoining these with the existing cartographies which produce these monsters on our streets and screens.

Tracing desire in the abject Peter Chambers (2012: 32) argues that one of the key determinants of the ‘Global War on Terror’ is the blurring lines of conflict, the indeterminacy of its key figures and their movements, and the uncertainty of their antagonists and their final form. Michel Foucault (1997) conjoined the history of the monster to the discursive practices of abnormality in the West. For Foucault (2003: 56), What defines the monster is the fact its existence and form is not only a violation of society but also of the laws of nature. Its very existence is the breach of the law at both levels. The monster is the limit combining the impossible and forbidden. Foucault encapsulated the relation between a monster and what is shown or presented as a spectacle. Similarly, Jacques Derrida (1995: 385) relates the monster with the transgression of norms which disrupts boundaries and blurs identities or simply ‘that which is not yet shown and can appear as a hallucination’. Within screen studies a resonant element is the inter-­ relationship between the beast or the monster and the production of abject desire and fantasy through repressed forms of carnal desire. In tandem with this, Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai (2002: 117) assert that sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism and this knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They also argue that ‘gender and sexuality produce both hyper-visible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war’ (2002: 118). Puar and Rai (2002: 119), drawing on Foucault’s notion of abnormality, show the ­monster-terrorist as a regulatory tool of modern biopolitics. The monster as a regulatory construct of modernity imbricates not only sexuality but also questions of culture and race. It is not solely confined to the notion of the other but acquires multiform. The terrorist-monster is both an entity to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected (2002: 121). The visualization of the Jihadist as the monster through their violent acts (i.e. murder, beheadings, rapes, iconoclasm, etc.) in our social imaginary

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  83 is an instrumental vision in understanding how desire can be re-fashioned in the conception of the Jihadi Bride. As Connolly points out (2003: 418), today the monster is no longer represented as external to the society within which the text was produced but as springing directly from that society and its contradictions, conflicts and tensions. As an embodiment of a certain cultural moment (of both sentiments and place), its body politic inspires fear, anxiety and fantasy. The demonization of Islam through the screen in part subsumes the cultural dichotomies between the East and West historically. These differences are played out in manifest and implicit ways through time and space. For example, in medieval France, the chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into demonic creatures whose menacing lack of humanity was evident through their bestial attributes (Cohen 2007: 8). The monster is birthed where distinct differences are perceived; political and ideological difference (along with race, culture, gender, sexuality) is as much a catalyst to monstrous representations as cultural alterity (Cohen 2007: 8). The monster is emblematic of the threats to boundaries and the stability of the existing dominant ideologies. The genre of horror in literary and screen studies often embodies the underlying but palpable erotic tension between the beast or the monster and feminine protagonist. The monster then represents the repressed sexual desires and fantasies which transgress the norms, where it is an interstitial entity combining human consciousness and the untamed attributes (including perverse sexuality) of the beast (Connolly 2003: 419). Emerging as an enticing figure, it occupies a primal space between fear and attraction, or what Kristeva calls abjection. The monster is the abjected fragment through which all forms of identities can be claimed – personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal or particular. For Kristeva (1982: 4) abjection is the breakdown of boundaries and that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ or that which does not respect ‘borders, positions, rules’. The abject provokes disgust and the regulation of the sexual subject is often depicted through abjection where boundaries and norms are transgressed. Sexual fantasies with monsters representing the violation of boundaries are seen to be immutable. Thus, the monster serves to enforce the cultural codes and to regulate desire, acting as a vehicle of prohibition to enforce the laws of exogamy including taboos of incest or racial intermingling (Cohen 2007: 15). The monster signifying something other than itself is a form of displacement where it incorporates both the destruction it wreaks and equally the complexity of relations which produce it. The encoding of the monster through death, destruction and unlimited power means that it has tendencies to cross into the realms of fantasy and sexuality, delineating its ability to occupy the real and the imagined worlds. The monster as a figure betwixt threat and desire means it has the capacity to slip between mortal and immortal worlds, and to be imagined through significations of the feminine and the hyper-masculine with a perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite

84  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon (Cohen 2007: 8–16). In view of this, the monster as sexual, perversely erotic or its ability to violate norms means it must be banished or destroyed. The linking of the monster to the abject or the forbidden highlights our attraction to it where it can provoke potent escapist fantasies. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the monster is directly related to the awakening of bodily pleasures, both mortality and corporeality (Cohen 2007: 17). The lands on which the monster inhabits (i.e. distant and exoticized) represent regions of uncertain danger as well as fantasy and liberation of affect. The body of the monster representing that which is unexplored and repressed, in terms of both sexual practices and social customs, is an object of alterity. It is both a distant and proximate entity due to the carnal desires it awakens and the repulsion induced through its abnormality.

Terrorist propaganda and the invocation of desire ISIS (or ISIL), the popular acronym for Islamic State, has been narrated as the largest terrorist threat to the international community and to world peace (Ali 2015). The group is also referred to as Daesh as an acronym for the Arabic phrase al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Established in 2004 in Iraq as a division of Al Qaeda, it emerged as ISIS with its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ruling the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda for many years. Appropriating methods more violent than Al Qaeda, it often came into conflict with its central leadership. By the end of 2004, Zarqawi had become the new ‘beast of Baghdad’, often described in the media as ‘brutal, notorious and violent, unleashing destruction and mayhem’ (Chambers 2012: 39). Peter Chambers, in covering the representations of Zarqawi through the politics of the ‘Global War on Terror’, shows how these depictions were about ‘monstration’ – a key schematic or process by which conflict is narrated and made meaningful as a story. According to Chambers (2012: 48) Zarqawi’s monstration reflects how the War on Terror was driven by nightmares and navigated through ghosts, in effect reflecting the processes of monstration which drive and sustain the narratives of war and conflict. When Zarqawi was killed in an American airstrike in 2009, ISIS remained intact with well-equipped Jihadi fighters and military expertise on the battleground (Ali 2015: 6). The group gained ground with this popular uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, followed by the Syrian civil war, and succeeded in recruiting new fighters due to disaffection among young Syrians with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. At this juncture, ISIS was positioned as a powerful force which would help protect Syrians against foreign interests. In such circumstances, it rose from being an unknown terror group to fronting the headlines of newspapers globally and challenging the security of the world (Allendorfer & Herring 2015; Friis 2015). It became a brand in its own right (Ligon, Harms, &

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  85 Derrick 2015) with its savvy use of multimedia platforms to disseminate its ideology and use of social media platforms for active recruitment. Global platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, as well as the use of hashtags, enabled ISIS to reach across the globe with sophisticated, ­production-quality video and images which incorporated visual effects (Blaker 2015). Proclaiming itself as a Caliphate in vast areas of Iraq and Syria, the group utilizes a specific interpretation of Sharia law deemed brutal and immoral, particularly in terms of its disregard for premising the sanctity of human life which remains a core aspect of the Islamic belief system and its morality (Ali 2015). Their extraction of passages from the Quran or the Hadith (i.e. words, habits and actions of the prophet Muhammad) to justify their inhumane actions, to overwhelm the enemy through gratuitous violence and promulgating the promise of paradise without accountability are part of their ideological and strategic approach. Their indiscriminate use of the holy text for their ideological pursuits has been severely criticized by Muslim scholars and communities at large (Winter 2015). In comparison to other terror organizations which manipulate Islam as their ideology, ISIS is known for featuring women in their propaganda and its extensive use of social media platforms for propaganda and recruitment. Women play an important role in their communication strategy, appropriating a discourse of fighting a ‘decadent and morally corrupt western society, which has no respect for women’ (Nacos 2015). In terms of its media visuality online, ISIS combines hard-core violence with ‘cuddly and fuzzy’ imagery (such as pictures of kittens playing on Kalashnikovs) (Khaleeli 2014). The ISIS propaganda wing, al-Hayat, mass produces videos mimicking Hollywood action films and music videos targeted at young Westerners, with lyrics translated into English as well as a number of European languages and includes English-speaking jihadists (Blaker 2015: 3). Its glossy digital magazine, Dabiq, being its official publication, is presented as providing the Muslim community with ‘factual and truthful information contrary to the content of the “Satanic” international media’ (Gambhir 2014; Nacos 2015). Significantly each issue is heavily illustrated with visuals of males, portraying it as exclusively about males, mujahedeen (i.e. those involved in jihad), male martyrs, soldiers, warriors and Muslims in general and, as such, unleashing the ‘female gaze’ through their masculinity in the context of a holy war. ISIS bans female fighters without foreclosing them or their bodies to violence. Their role in policing others means they may be privy to violence as well as be the bearers of violence (Ali 2015: 12). The banning of education for females and the brutal punishments meted for not adhering to the organization’s dress code reiterate the sustained governance of her body and mind. Their informal and glorified role in the organizations as the biological and cultural reproducers of the Caliphate, as wives and mothers, pledges their corporeal bodies both literally and figuratively to the mortal

86  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon cause while promising them eternity in paradise (Sjoberg 2015). This purification through paradise is juxtaposed through an extreme sexualization of her body. By citing the Quran, ISIS makes it permissible for Muslim women to give up their bodies to militants so the Jihadists can continue the jihad because it increases ‘the confidence of fighters’ (Sarvestany 2016). Women’s role in the holy war (i.e. to marry holy warriors and give birth to and educate future Jihadists) emphasizes the sexual and the procreational, where her body is ordered and encoded through a religious ideology, governed and disciplined. Beyond relinquishing her mortal body to the cause, women equally are vested with promoting the cause as agents of propaganda and recruiters on the internet reaching out to answer questions and assuage anxieties, articulating the sexual roles they are expected to play through ‘chat’ services such as ChatSecure, TextSecure and RedPhone ­(Binetti 2015; Blaker 2015; Navest et al. 2016). The moral panic about the Jihadists in media representations has also been about the numbers of Westerners leaving to join ISIS. The number of foreigners who have left to join ISIS has been reported as over 3,400 with approximately 550 of them being women (Berlinger 2015; Hoyle, Bradford, & Frenett 2015). In the UK, about 850 are thought to have gone to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS, 70 of them girls or women, and in 2015 a total of 56 British females are believed to have made the journey (Patterson 2016: 18). The term ‘Jihadi Brides’ refers to women and girls from the West who undertake a journey to ISIS-controlled territory to wed a Jihadi fighter, live under their protection and codes of conduct entailing a governance of their bodies and morality through the ideology of ISIS. As mystical figures in the media, the Jihadi Brides are often constructed as misled, brain-washed and championing the Jihadi cause of the Caliphate. As sacrificial bodies who veer from the normality of their lives in the West to the abnormality of disappearance and compliance with the monster in the East, they are imbued with an overriding image of victimhood (Peresin & Cervone 2015; Sjoberg 2015; Zakaria 2015; Navest et al. 2016). Significantly, much of the discussion on the Jihadi Bride has been preoccupied with issues of security, risk and developing successful strategies for de-radicalization (Carvalho 2014; Bakker & de Leede 2015; Hoyle et al. 2015; Zakaria 2015). These limited and constrained perspectives of docility, victimhood and pious fanaticism have come under criticism for their reductionism and in simplifying a complex phenomenon, particularly its linear association with radicalization or assuming that the Jihadi Bride is about religious indoctrination alone (e.g. Saltman & Smith 2015; Navest et al. 2016). The media hysteria surrounding the Jihadi Bride nevertheless reveals the extreme fear and anxiety surrounding the phenomenon, casting her as shadow figure of terrorism and one who can only be understood through its violent machinery. In a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), the researchers reviewed the social media accounts of 12 women who claim to reside in IS-controlled territory (Bakker & de Leede 2015: 5). The study highlights

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  87 the oppression of Muslims worldwide and their displacement as the main attractions towards Daesh and Jihad. With Muslim women more likely to be the victims of Islamophobic attacks than men, and facing barriers such as lower levels of employment and qualifications than the population as a whole, these struggles can heighten existing feelings of disenfranchisement (Khaleeli 2014). The horrors of the conflict in Syria, anger about Israeli actions in Gaza, along with disaffection with Western countries’ foreign policies become other points of discontent and misalignment with Western society and civilization. Since 9/11, Islam and Muslims as associated with evil and risk and media hysteria about the niqab, halal meat, gender segregation, mosques as sites for breeding terrorism and government policies such as Prevent have contributed to feelings of dislocation and disenfranchisement (Khaleeli 2014; Patterson 2016: 18). This displacement is further exacerbated by a generational divide with an older generation more likely to rely on a culturally influenced interpretation of Islam, passed down through community norms and oral tradition (Leiken 2011; Patterson 2016: 18). Religion becomes a site for rebellion for the younger generation to challenge conventions from arranged marriages to education while instilling a sense that they are closer to the religion as they are more authentic in their interpretation of the Quran than their parents (Kibria 2008). Media portrayals of the Jihadi Bride congeal her as brainwashed and as an agent acting on behalf of the monster terrorist. Aqsa Mahmood is a quintessential media stereotype of the Jihadi Bride: a privately educated radiology student from Glasgow University who was one of the first British girls to go (Shubert & Naik 2015). Narrated as radicalized by online sermons and social media forces which assisted her journey from Glasgow to Syria to marry an ISIS fighter, Aqsa (now known as Umm Layth) is collapsed as a figure beyond redemption. Her articulations to champion the Caliphate on her Tumblr site and postings of poetry in praise of battles highlight her role as a recruiter. She was reported as being contacted online by one of the three girls who fled from Bethnal Green in London (Blaker 2015). Her advice to prospective brides was to pack ‘good quality’ bras, short dresses to wear ‘around your husband’, ‘fleece pyjamas and an Android phone’ (cited in Patterson 2016: 18). This provides an oblique glimpse into the bodily desires of the Jihadi Bride and her mortal needs including the connectivity and interactivity of the smartphone. The Jihadi Brides’ sexual desires and her consumption of the monster as the hero and her alienation with the Western world are revealed in a survey by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation which reveals that for some women, the idea of being married to a heroic figure and a foreign fighter who is willing to sacrifice himself for a greater cause is an appealing one (cf. Khaleeli 2014). The study also points out that the girls are getting younger, typically 19 or 20, and are not particularly fanatical in their piety. Additionally, their reasons for joining included the quest for adventure, just like the men who left their homes in the West (Nacos 2015).

88  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon The Jihadists as figures of sexual fantasy and female gaze are evident in social media postings of girls and women (Bakker & de Leede 2015: 5). The intense adulation and attention received from women and girls online in the West has even led to some exasperated Jihadists asking their online followers to stop sending marriage proposals on social media, as it is not deemed ‘halal’ – or religiously permissible (Khaleeli 2014). The emergence of a community of fandom towards the monster-jihadist is not dissimilar to obsessed fan groups devoted to sports teams, pop bands or Hollywood celebrities (Nacos 2015). The possibility of experiencing the ‘joys of sisterhood’ (Binetti 2015) and solidarity through an alternative lifestyle and belief system, the promise of romance, the possibility of choosing a husband and legitimation of sex through passages extracted from the Quran and the ultimate promise of paradise in serving the Jihadist construct the Jihadi Bride as a conflicted entity straddling between carnal desires and the ethereal afterlife.

Jihadi Bride – screen icon and desire One well publicized image in the media is that of the three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green who had left their homes to become Jihadi Brides. The photographs showed the ordinary girls leaving their lives of settled domesticity. One of them was 15 but not explicitly referred to as a child in media representations. The deviance of their act is narrated through their chance encounters on CCTV or by eyewitnesses in airports (Rahman, Spillett, & Glanfield 2015; Sherlock, Daunt, & Tarling 2015), through their remorseful conversations to return home (Mowat 2016), or through their ultimate demise (Evans 2016). The innocent and non-sexualized images of the schoolgirls as prey for the monster Jihadists need to contrasted with the polished images of Jihadists in the Dabiq magazines where they promise a new life and lifestyle to the prospective Jihadi Bride while glorifying her role in the Caliphate. The Jihadi Bride created and narrated through screen culture’s demonization of Islam and the techniques of monstration of the Jihadi terrorist can be understood through a duality in constructing her as a media icon; how she consumes the screen in seeking gratification, pleasure and belonging and how the screen consumes her as a sub-category of the monstration. She is produced through the monster and understood through the monster in media framings. Very few of them attribute agency, personal or political, to the women who move across the world to join the organization. Stories about women and Daesh cast her into a category of bodily mutilation, violence and slavery (Nacos 2005; Laster & Erez 2015; Sjoberg 2015). In most of the literature on the muhajirat (journeys in the name of religion) where female migration to Syria had been acknowledged, the journey of these women produces a transcendence into terms such as ‘sexual jihad’, where

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  89 they are represented as rendering sexual services to male Jihadists (Navest et al. 2016: 22). Between these layers of the phantoms and ghosts which conflicts, wars and terrorism narrate, and the spectacular they invoke through the media are more distinct affective paradigms which become subsumed through discourses of victimhood or contrastingly seek to imbue her with agency (or empowerment) in making different life decisions. Robin Morgan (2014), writing about the long history of women as leaders and followers in terrorist movements and groups, documents how women often followed their lovers and husbands into the terrorist terrain. Morgan terms them as a ‘demon lovers’, depicting these women as followers and labelling their rebellion for love as classic feminine and not feminist behaviour. Morgan’s thesis, unlike the vast number of studies on war and terrorism, puts sexual politics and gender power relations at the core of political violence. The screen within the context of the Jihadi Bride requires further deconstruction against its permeation into everyday life (Ibrahim 2015a). The screen is both the stuff of mass consumption and distinct personalization. The monster of the big screen can be re-imagined in the bedroom through a more personalized screen which can be interactive and ‘speak back’ (Ibrahim 2011, 2016). It is important to situate the Jihadi Bride through this contemporary screen culture where the mobile screen is both part of our embodiment (i.e. as a prosthetic extension) and ‘teleportation’ through the virtual without an embodied encounter. Encompassing the public and private realms, the screen functions as a means to access worlds close to us and beyond us (Ibrahim 2016). Fears and anxieties about the Jihadi Bride are imagined and consumed through the screen and hence she is reduced as a phantom through her disappearance from home and her journey to another land. Much conceptual work has been done on the notion of desire, ranging from psychoanalytic theory to philosophy to critiques of capitalism. JeanPaul Sartre (1956), in Being and Nothingness, points out that desire is not only corporeal but something that also affects consciousness with an ability to overwhelm and paralyse. For Sartre, desire can anchor and fix the world in relation to others. Freud (1905) frames desire through the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind when desire is repressed. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) define desire through production, where desire takes a primary role in the assessment of capitalism and schizophrenia and in delineating life and death. Rather than conceiving desire as only a production of fantasy or the symbolic and imaginary, they conceive desire as being situated in the real, the social and even the liminal spaces (i.e. between the real and imaginary). Desire has come under renewed scrutiny today in postmodernity, including a call for a ‘re-examination of desire’ (Irvine 2006). Desire has been associated with a multitude of human conditions from production and affect to a lack, and returning to continuously

90  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon critique our intense modes of consumption and production. Claire Colebrook (2006) argues that the power of capitalism does not lie in its repression of our pleasures, but in its coding of all those pleasures into money and in producing a surplus value of that code: for we are now enslaved, not by being denied what we want, but by being manufactured to want. My desire must be for this or that purchasable pleasure. (2006: 133) Instead of being more accessible, desire has become more inaccessible. The history of the screen is intimately bound with the concept of desire. The screen, pre-dating the internet age, has always been a space for re-­ fashioning desire, as in Laura Mulvey’s (1989) proposition of the ‘gaze’. As an advanced representation system, the cinema and, in this case, the screen structure the ways of looking and the pleasures in looking (1989: 805). While the screen can re-inscribe power relationships, it can also enable the conception of a new language of desire. Desire was not only depicted in the rise of consumerism and its visuality through the screen but also scopophilia; carnal desires for the unattainable disembodied human forms represented through the screen. Freud (1905) identified scopophilia as one of the integral components of sexuality which exists independent of erotogenic zones and entails possessing others as objects and controlling them through a curious gaze. The pleasure of looking encapsulates both perversion and deviation. As such, the screen satisfies a primordial desire for pleasurable looking (Mulvey 1989: 806–807). The genre of horror consumed through the celluloid screen reveals repressed human desires (Berenstein 1996) but it equally valorizes the screen as a space of sexual production and transgression, from cinematic imagination to our present-day ‘selfie’ culture where we can insert ourselves into it (Ibrahim 2015b). In the digital age, the screen has transformed into a much more intimate entity embedded onto the body. As the screen transcended the domestic and social settings to be embedded onto the corporeal body in the form of the mobile device, it reconfigured our notions of proximity to the objects of desire and, by personalizing our gaze towards them, enabled us to access and objectify them with relentless intensity. The unattainable came into our bedrooms and could be part of our private fantasies where the attendant interactivity on the screen enabled objects of desire to be spoken to or interacted with (Ibrahim 2016). The convergence of the photographic and recording facilities in portable devices made communication fluid rather than static, invoking gaze to be brought into intimate realms and, as such, objects of desire can be pursued through browsing, chatting and reformulating new forms of relationships even if they are physically unattainable but leading us to believe they are. The intimatization of the screen and its interactivity produce a means to feel connected and to seek

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  91 instant gratification, igniting new realms of enquiry into how new media technologies mediate desire and sexual gratification for young girls and women (Livingstone 2008; Tolman & Tolman 2009; Starr & Ferguson 2012; Hasinoff 2013) who, prior to an interactive screen culture, fetishized idols and media celebrities through media artefacts such as magazines, popular culture and mass media (McRobbie 1982). The transformation of the screen from a social artefact in the domestic setting to a prosthetic extension of the body enabled desire to be part of both our fantasies and an objectified materiality. Beyond the intimatization of the screen, the new media visuality is defined through a pervasive consumption of imagery and a reticence to accept a limit to what we can watch, whether it be gratuitous violence or ‘the forbidden’ in terms of our moral and ethical codes. This ‘new media visuality’ signified through an instantaneousness, interactivity and virality can equally straddle the reality and fantasy of the virtual world. As such, the Jihadi Bride is much more a product of modernity and not purely of doctrine. As a technological subject with an insatiable desire ignited through the screen of romanticized fighters in faraway locales, the Jihadi Bride is a consequence of advanced capitalism, its production of objects and bodies as brands and its invocation to experience sustained desire. Most significantly, this new media visuality presents desires as instantly attainable by reconfiguring notions of the spatial and the temporal in our ability to interact, curate and access the world visually. For younger people, the screen may amplify their sociality and notions of friendships, fantasy and explorations of sexuality (Tolman & Tolman 2009; Hasinoff 2013). Studies on teenagers and the internet also show how the platform is conjoined to developing a sense of self, self-expression and rebellion (Blais, Craig, Pepler, & Connolly 2008; Livingstone 2008). Haras Rafiq, Managing Director of the Quillam Foundation, in speaking about Jihadi Brides asserts, for the girls the real world is the online world. They are feeling empowered for the first time in their lives. They probably never had a boyfriend. They’ve got hormones all over the place. They are not allowed to go to the shopping centre on their own. This is their outlet. (cf. Patterson 2016: 18) In media portrayals, the female Muslim body censured for its modesty (burkini) or for not revealing its face (niqab) is always understood through governance notions of ‘abnormality’ in terms of its gender and sexuality (Foucault 1997, 2003). Due to its discordance, it is a body which has to be regulated and governed in the gaze of the West. Imagined through deviance, hostility and its aberrance, it is not capable of producing pleasure or consuming desire. Ascribed piety and collapsed through notions of othering in the portrayals of Islam and Muslims, it is not a body which can feel nor can it be sexualized. The fear of the Jihadi Bride in media narratives is

92  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon partly derived from sub-human qualities where it can be ‘brainwashed’ by doctrines of violence but not located through its corporeality or its bodily pleasures or subjectivity. It is a body which can be possessed by monsters and can be reserved for the sexual appetite of the beasts. Such a dislocation means that the Muslim female body performs to abnormality and its sexualization is only possible in another realm and not in the context of the West. It should be noted that the three girls from Bethnal Green Academy who went off to Syria in February 2015 were aged between 15 and 16. The Jihadi Bride associated with youth and naivety is not often understood through typical teenagers’ sexual fantasy or grooming through the internet, which is a prevalent phenomenon in contemporary digital culture, but through a more amorphous term such as ‘radicalization’. It collapses the sexuality and fantasy of the screen to recurrently ignite the deviance of the Muslim female body through religiosity. Fiyaz Mughal, director of the interfaith organization Faith Matters, argues that ‘most (who flee) are not particularly religious but in their minds they feel they cannot flourish in the UK and think ISIS will be the answer to their problems and a chance to rebel’ (cf. Patterson 2016: 18). The subsuming of the Jihadi Bride as a product of theology stands in contrast to the ISIS girls and women’s knowledge of Islam and ISIS’s use of the Quran as justification for their reign of terror. After interviewing radicalized Muslim teenagers in the suburbs of Paris a French journalist concluded, ‘They knew very little about religion. They had hardly read a book and they learnt Jihad before religion. They’d tell me, “You think with your head, we think with our hearts”’ (cf. Driscoll 2015). The conjoining of desire and sexual fantasies or playing out adventures of crossing into unknown lands and having sex with strangers are an integral part of this phenomenon. However, they are not entirely integrated into discussions of the Jihadi Bride and she is often too rigidly positioned through radicalization or security risk discourses, casting her as external to bodily pleasures or her embodied subjectivity in the West. ISIS’s adept use of social media as part of their propaganda strategy and the legitimation of sex through their manipulation of the sacred text enabled them to get into the bedrooms and to invoke the female gaze, in part capitalizing on their monstrous portrayals in media representations. For the West, they signified the forbidden associated with bestiality rather than masculinity. Their heroic depictions (in stark contrast to those of the Western media) in their official magazine were designed to elicit sexual objectification and co-produce desire with the forbidden. The juxtaposition of their violence (through viral videos of beheadings, murders and destruction) with their posed ‘brave warrior’ and heroic images online seeks to draw on the intertextuality between the monster and the possible lover tamed through desire. These sexual depictions are deliberate and sustained while leveraging on the disaffection of Muslims feeling like a ‘suspect community’ where their intent and actions are under constant surveillance and censure.

‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon  93 Numerous online accounts show pictures of men riding horses while carrying the IS flag; good-looking men adoring their completely veiled women, pictures of beautiful sunsets, and of lions and lionesses (Bakker & de Leede 2015: 6). In the process it recodifies the monster-Jihadists by imbuing them with new aesthetic codes which draw on their dissonance in the Western gaze, sexualizing them through the danger discourses and equally by making them attainable to women who consume them. ‘To them [Muslim girls in the West obsessed with ISIS men] Jihadists are like Brad Pitt, only better because Brad Pitt is not religious’ (cf. Driscoll 2015). If the female Muslim body is not sexualized in the Western gaze, the world of the monster-Jihadi seeks ways to both objectify and sexualize it and to equally legitimize it through the scriptures. The romanticization of the Jihadist-monster through imagery on social media platforms and its ability to ignite desire and sexual fantasy are also related to the legitimation of sexual activity which the notion of ‘Sexual Jihad’ enables. The practice which began in 2013 after a Wahhabi authority called for Sunni Muslim women to present themselves for sexual jihad in order to increase the confidence of men fighting in Syria (Greenfield 2013). Based on ISIS’s interpretation of the Quran, Islamic law and Sharia law, Muslim women were asked to offer their bodies for sex to comfort members of the Islamic State are known as ‘Jihad Al Nikah’ or ‘Jihadi Brides’ (Sarvestany 2016). Many Muslim scholars condemn this practice and consider it to be prostitution (Ali 2015: 17). But for girls and women consuming desire through the screen and the journey to unknown lands is also about sexual liberation, fantasy and discovery with the possibility of becoming a martyr through their acts (in ISIS’s interpretation of Quran). By opting for such a form of marriage, the muhajirat distance themselves both from mainstream styles of dating and from those arranged marriages where material and familial interests are the main concern (Navest et al. 2016: 23). The possibility of a voyage of sexual discovery compared to a conservative family-bound arrangement of marriage and restrictions on their sexuality underpins the phenomenon as complex where women can re-arrange their conjugal relationships by going away to another land. Here the screen, desire, sex, and the sacred conjoin in disturbing ways. In reality, the young woman lured through the desires of the screen to be presented through the servitude loaded in the terminology of the Jihadi Bride is someone who cannot be assimilated back into society let alone someone entitled to citizenship. This is evidenced in the case of Shamima Begum, one of the infamous three from Bethnal Green, who was stripped of her British citizenship, with the court ruling that ‘she was eligible to apply for citizenship of Bangladesh, the birth country of her parents’ (Sabbagh 2020). This ruling pronounced her as neither redeemable nor worthy of being recognized as a legal entity in her country of birth. Shamima now belongs to the internet as a racialist meme where she is hashtagged

94  ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon #LetHerRot. When Shamima’s photo was used as a target for a shooting range in North West England, it prompted the Muslim Council of Britain to state: While people may feel strongly about Begum’s actions as a 15-year-old girl, it is incredibly dangerous to use this sentiment to feed into the broader dehumanising of Muslim women or lead to the incitement of violence towards those who happen to look or dress like Ms Begum. (cf. Busby 2019)

Conclusion The Jihadi Bride as a media iconic is depicted as an extreme religious figure or fanatic in search of an afterlife in paradise. Denied her bodily pleasures and encoded through death, martyrdom and sacrifice, she performs as a shadow figure of conflict and violence. In reviewing her as a nomadic subject (Braidotti 2003) within the cartography of conflict (i.e. in the Middle East and between the East and the West) and through the monster figure of the terrorist-Jihadist, this chapter sought to reconnect her to her embodied subjectivity. The war on terror performed through a process of monstrations reiterates the monster-Jihadist as a central figure in re-inscribing the Jihadi Bride and in unleashing her sexual gaze in transforming the monster into an object of desire commodified through the screen. Here the mediated visuality of the screen reconfiguring proximity and intimacy provides a means to connect with and encounter desire and to reassess the Jihadi Bride as a digital icon within a technologically mediated screen culture. Capitalism and consumerism centralize desire as a potent aspect of the human condition in modernity. Desire is bound with not only consumerism but also scopophilia where fantasy and reality conjoin through the screen particularly in a post-digital landscape. The Jihadi Bride is conceived through a mediated visuality where the screen as a prosthetic extension of the body produces desire and instant gratification, reappraising her through her corporeality. The Jihadist as the monster-lover emerging through the screen and produced through an alterity in media discourses is a figure of fantasy and romance for the Jihadi Bride. The distinct relationship between screen and desire reconstructs and re-fashions the Jihadi Bride as a consuming mortal entity with bodily pleasures in postmodernity rather than a sub-human possessed and groomed for sacrifice. Resisting a linear reading of victimhood or empowerment, it acknowledges her as a conflict(ed) figure entrapped between mortal desires and the promise of eternity in afterlife.

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6 The iconic migrant body Necro-aesthetics, mimetics and the dead

Introduction The internet as a morgue for displaying the dead recodes it through its pathology of housing the dead as theatre for spectacular and popular consumption. The abject and the grotesque float within a wider architecture of gaze and voyeurism online. The dead are unsettled entities in these archives, doubling up as raw material and resources which can encounter ‘the play’ and manipulation of the creative in which bodies can be resurrected as troll figures and memes to reside through the circulation economy. If art, for Rancière, re-redistributes the senses, online platforms can abstract sense from sense to release the dead in recombined forms. These spectral figures invoke the ethical and moral boundaries in tampering with the dead to resuscitate them through the artistic or perhaps the alt-right. The iconic dead as a liminal figure is one which is constantly tested through the pathos of grieving communities but equally a site of the profane, marking the depravity of the human condition against the suffering of another in the politics of migration. Images of suffering herald a ‘new form of constitutive realism’ where they are exploited for moral and political purposes (Dean 2015: 240). This chapter in reviewing the ‘migrant body’ foregrounds it through the mimetic aesthetics of the internet which exhumes drowned bodies from the Mediterranean sea seeking refuge in Fortress Europe through the refugee crisis of 2015 to unpack them as refuse bodies not worthy of asylum but viewed as parasites or invaders of European lands. In dispelling these non-human forms, the aesthetics of the internet made for short attention spans and viral imagination repossesses the dead, enacting them through creative rituals of memetic curations pledging the corpse to virality, and remaking pathos through the ludic to thwart the mortality of death and its tryst with the sacred. The communal gaze of dead bodies online transforms these from abject encounters to transactional artefacts that accumulate value through their exchange, amplifying the risks in the ‘body of the other’ as recurring objects of border crossings.

102  Iconic migrant body Postmodern visuality through mobile technologies premises the immediate tapping into instant gratification of the senses through clicks and shares (Ibrahim 2019). This enhanced visuality of constantly drawing attention to the morbid and depraved as we flit through archives as image flâneurs denotes our post-digital subjectivity. Constant looking, ousting, peering through into spaces of the intimate, the interior and the endogenous is to not know the boundaries or the limits of the sacred or profane. The aesthetic of the internet, where images leap with and through our senses, is not quite the residence of ‘moral spectatorship’ but an architecture which entices us to enter into a realm where images can be made and remade, inducing a pathology which lends to the sensorial: to objectify and commodify the non-human and human. We consume through our vision and double this vision through imaging digital technologies which sync us with a communal gaze in which the collective act of watching can redraft an image as a product of sharing, transformed through this collectivity and collapsing pity and perversity in this assemblage. In such an assemblage, the iconic performs to memory recall and resonance, denoted through the sacred and its injunctions, and through such a configuration is prone to its effacement and desecration. The migrant body of the forced migration crisis in Europe configures this entity through its politics of excess in which migrants overflow at its borders and shores, colonizing islands and forcing authorities to create outposts and holding centres to detain and order these bodies. The politics of pity against this excess of bodies crossing through borders and security fences renders them as neither sacred nor fit for sacrifice (Agamben 1998). Expelled as the unwanted on our shores, they are produced within this aesthetic of excess as parasitical entities not deserving of pity nor assimilable as humans. Hence, the spectatorship of suffering falters in not being able to constitute the other as human in the first instance before it can process pity. As a spectral body given to death and capsizing offshore, this migrant body is bound with and through death from its inception, enacted through its overcrowding and unstoppable influx in which the ‘accidental death’ does not draw pity but disdain in its proclivity towards death in risking its own life. Its trauma is thus muted through this risk taking. The internet as a liminal space reproduces a Derrida (1994) hauntology, invoking entities as neither dead nor alive, material nor invisible and in so doing recasts our concrete foundations and definitions of the real. The examination of this spectral quality, for Federic Jameson, may yield opportunities to deconstruct meaning as opposed to the living present (cf. Davis 2005). Within such a spectrum, the iconic death is infused both through opportunities to draw on humanitarian affectivity and to be expunged of its iconic status through derision, decoupling from its momentary exalted status. Yielding new modes of signification in the platform economics of the internet, iconic images are received and processed through this mutability of acquiring new forms. They are then re-imposed through image curation,

Iconic migrant body  103 including the production of memes, celebrating the turbulence of such an economy for advancing communion and commemoration through the immanence of disruptive qualities in not retaining images in their provenance (Ibrahim 2017). Death imagery abstracts both sublime and profane qualities online, where our anxieties about death interplay with our fascination with immortality as an element which the internet proffers. As a liminal sphere of new modes of ritualization, the internet lends not only to martyrdom but also to effacement, entombing dead bodies through the aesthetics of new media, dispossessing corpses from the slumber of death and conjoining them as objects not liberated even in death but to be released through the automaticity of the virtual realm. Here the dead become conflicted autonomous subjects powered through communal desires and the pathos of pity. These creative bodysnatching rituals mark out the corpse as raw material for the production of new artefacts, re-inscribing humanity’s fascination with the abject. The dead as phantoms and apparitions re-released as troll figures abstracted through death and animated through user-friendly image-manipulating tools inadvertently remaking them as commodities for aesthetic consumption. The internet is foregrounded as a realm of conflicted moral spectatorship adduced neither in absolute pity for another or absolving the fear of the Other, flitting through a spectrum of affectivity that commits primarily to the sensorium of an ‘image world’ which collapses and builds meaning through human affective entanglement with machines. As such, users online as emancipated spectators render their own translations and interpretations, curating these stories as their own (Rancière 2007). The acknowledgement of photographs of atrocity and suffering rendering an imperceptibility to the suffering of another has also meant the domain of ‘witnessing’ as extremely problematic and has raised calls for a ‘distance’ (Möller & Sontag 2010). Stripped from the political image as a signifier of new modes of production and recirculation images of trauma are both borne through human suffering yet dissected from it through the spectacular economy of the internet. Metamorphosed into Rancière’s ‘aesthetics of politics’, they acquire force as spectral commodities of gaze enlisted through the ‘migrant’ politics which expel bodies at the boundaries. The appropriation of the migrant body as a site of fervent creativity is about the utilization of these bodies as raw material for the spectacular economy of the internet while foregrounding them through the hostile immigration politics of Europe. As transgressive objects of border politics, they invoke an ‘empty intimacy’ of gaining proximity to the corpse to distribute its trauma and pathos without dislocating it from its identity politics inscribed through the border and its dispelling of the ‘Other’ as part of its proclamation of sovereignty and securitization. As a conflicted image, the iconic dead migrant body is suspended between an aesthetic of ‘artification’ (Erjavec 2012) and the hostile politics of the borders harbouring the illicit and illegitimate. Associated with art-like features, artification subsumes aesthetic, artistic and creative

104  Iconic migrant body practices online while mimicking or acquiring art-like elements. Memes as artistic practice in their own right fall within such a category, equally reframed through their democratic qualities of access to their signification and malleability in terms of meaning-making (Thompson 2016; Goklani & Kane 2017).

A dead child as an ‘iconic image’ A drowned dead child garnered global attention in 2015, washed up on a Turkish beach and highlighting the shoreline as the new morgue of forced migration. Standing in stark contrast to the notion of the beach as a retreat, the sea would witness even more capsized boats of refugees fleeing conflict zones. Beaches would become spectral theatres for the displaced dead. As a liminal space for remaking moral order, the beach speaks to the carnivalesque (Shields 1990), illuminating the showcase of dead bodies which would wash up against the Mediterranean coast as the frontline of Europe. The dead boy, three-year-old Alan Kurdi, would come to embody the despair and trauma of forced migration to Europe against its hardened and hostile measures towards the refugee body. Dubbed the biggest migration crisis in living memory in Europe (Smith 2015), the dead bodies became material yet disposable testimonies of seashores as sites of death and suffering, with an estimated 4,337 people drowned seeking to reach European shores for refuge in the period from September 2015 to August 2016 (Deghan 2017). Alan Kurdi, embodying the humanitarian crisis of forced migration from Syria, invited worldwide spectatorship when an image of his lifeless body carried by a policemen became a trending image on Twitter with the accompanying hashtag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik (humanity washed ashore) (Smith 2015). Symbolizing the loss of innocent children hoping to reach safety in Europe and the West, Alan Kurdi’s image cut through the chaos of human suffering to become an iconic migrant body that embodied the crisis of migration. If the suffering of the migrant body has been engulfed in silence by the inadequate reaction of Fortress Europe, photographer Nilüfer Demir (2015) sought to ‘express the scream of his silent body’ through the image of the dead three-year-old (Walsh 2015). The traumatic image had an immediate reaction on the global stage, igniting furious debates on the migrant crisis and prompting the opening up of Germany to refugees by Chancellor Angela Merkel (Ensor 2016). Similarly, it would enlist a promise by Prime Minister David Cameron to absorb 4,000 Syrian refugees a year in the UK, though this would not happen in reality after the furore over the image had calmed. A dead child as a media taboo was perceived as dilemmatic for most news organizations in view of an informal journalistic norm that dead bodies should not be pictured in newspapers. While the BBC, in line with this ethical taboo, decided against running the image, other news organizations felt

Iconic migrant body  105 that Alan Kurdi’s dead image possessed the power to move a ­community. Publishing the image in full, The Independent felt that it was appropriate in this case to do so against the context of a humanitarian crisis (cf. Gunter 2015). Alan Kurdi as an iconic image could extract pathos from the global community of inertia, restoring the dead child as an ethical entity in the face of moral apathy towards the dislocated.

The sensorium of death The unimaginable outpouring of grief for this unknown dead child on the beach was partly due to the fact in its initial receptivity, he did not represent an alien child of the other but one anyone could identity with his. His still body in the arms of the Policemen raised uncertainties and hope that he may still be alive. As subject of global gaze and pity, Alan Kurdi transcended racial barriers in not immediately being catalogued as part of the ‘migrant’ race waiting to swarm the boundaries of Europe. Mass spectatorship claimed his body as a communal apparition and tragic form, uniting people in guilt at their initial readings and throwing light on Europe’s hardline stance on the victims of forced migration. The West’s frozen inhumanity, symbolized through the memento mori of this dead child, revealed that the iconic dead can transcend boundaries to ignite an affective community. This power to transcend is the transactional aspect of the iconic and as a form of social memory which can trigger a sense of communal loss to create it as a collective memory. Trauma has the power to mediate boundaries in remaking the iconic as a form for mass spectatorship and global consumption. In the virtual world, trauma can be stripped from context to remould the iconic through the internet’s aesthetic codes of using its communal resonance as fodder. As an iconic image, Alan Kurdi became immersed through a ‘necro-­ aesthetics’ birthed through pathos with its transcendence into ‘jouissance’ inviting consumption through the pleasure of the abject. Acquiring virtuality and virality online through its iconic status, Alan’s dead body was readily identifiable yet its iconicity was framed through the Mediterranean refugee crisis. Celebrating humans’ fascination with the abject, death as an iconic image draws on modernity’s banishment of the dead body and our quest to remove death as an immediate and present encounter. Through their morbidity certain deaths cross into iconic status in our screen culture (Ibrahim 2015a, 2015b). Death as a precocious phenomenon in the body of a child produces a hauntology induced through its spectral qualities leaping into our subconscious while drawing on the emotive. Alan Kurdi, with his shoes intact, is contextually dislocated through a multitude of readings. Shoes interlock with memorial sites of 9/11 and the Holocaust to brandish absence and victimhood as marked through the tangible, brandishing objects as a peculiar form of the sublime (LaCapra 2009: 69). Alan’s imagery, when first released, produced an outpouring of grief inexplicable yet ironic

106  Iconic migrant body against Europe’s catatonic reaction to the humanitarian crisis. Throughout these spasmodic moral episodes of reckoning, Alan Kurdi was resurrected through the mimetic world of the internet producing insurmountable tensions within Europe’s moral lethargy with the refugee crisis. The bind of aesthetic theory with the sublime, particularly in the consumption of trauma and suffering, stands for a sort of ‘subjective experience as form of postmodern condition’ (Redfield 2007: 72–73). Alan’s death tapped into a ‘necro-aesthetics’ in the virtual sphere where he was repossessed through the hauntology of the internet to be reincarnated into a series of memes to mourn and commemorate his passing. This mode of aesthetic rendition enables the corpse to cross ethical boundaries to incite a sensorium refracting the social and political without dispelling its resonance in a consuming community willing to be drawn through these inherent intertextual qualities induced through an iconic dead body. Immersed through such an ‘aesthetic regime’ (Rancière 2009), this iconicity is co-located with and through a promiscuity with the political while having the possibility to be autonomous and transgressive, to step out of the political. The term artification (Erjavec 2012), in implicating broad categories of artefacts, events and processes, invokes a phenomenon in how these may acquire the designation of art with time in varying degrees by procuring art-like elements. Art is meditated through a process which can involve its contextual placement transforming into an art-like status (Erjavec 2012). The enfolding of the artistic with the aesthetic entails political, moral and ethical judgements. Within this consideration, I place memes through this processual architecture of having the tendencies to acquire art-like elements over time re-pressed through the social and political as well as the ethical and moral. In coalescing with artistic practice and the aesthetic practices of both consumption and production online, memes demarcate autonomy from the political without foreclosing it. Memes’ artistic values are in their social resonance and the acquisition of value and social capital through their virality that accrues with social sharing online, leveraging on their stature within popular culture. Memes consecrated through the architectures of the sharing economy are not only about performance or the binding of the material with their affordances in the virtual but equally about how this intertextuality can orchestrate the subversive. Heterogeneous and autonomous memes reframe art through their democratic potential, instilling art’s ability to recast reality through its disruptive tendencies (Ibrahim 2016). Trauma of another and its transfiguration into popular genres is immensely problematic where it can be elevated, co-located with exhilaration or the sublime, or transformed as an experience (LaCapra 2009: 70), bringing into sharp focus the aesthetics and politics of mediated virtuality. Through the mediated traumatropes of screen culture, the aesthetic question signifies the vulnerabilities of modernity where catastrophes can acquire an ‘aesthetic rendering’ to be objectified for the screen (Redfield 2007: 71).

Iconic migrant body  107 Within the political, for Jacques Rancière (2009: 32), lies the potential for aesthetic activity, specifically in the ‘polemical redistribution of subjects and objects, places and identities, spaces and times, visibilities and meanings’. Modernity marks a porosity between life and art induced through production and replication techniques, facilitating new forms of commodification and social life. Hence in modernity, the aesthetic is the collapsing of hierarchies and boundaries, foregrounding an infinite openness made manifest through art and life being indiscernible. Within Rancière’s treatise of the aesthetic regime, art is made perceptible within specific realms of experience as evident in the two distinct sense experiences he offers: logos and pathos. The former standing for the world of sense-making through justice and injustice, and the latter in which pleasure and pain are experienced in suppressing the political. Subverting the corpse into an aesthetic mode through new death rituals online is to sense and feel the corpse through different sense experiences. In so rechannelling the dead, creative and artistic practices and their ingraining through modes of sociality and gift-giving online remediate the enterprise of death, enacting irreverence as well as its attachments to the sacred and political. If modernity is about the porosity between art and life, the digital intensifies this fluidity through the abstraction of the machinic into everyday life. It colonizes everyday life through its aesthetic modes and attention economy, infusing the spectacle as ordained through the everyday. The digital’s eradication of boundaries between art and life becomes more enhanced and pronounced such that mimetic renditions accommodate and consolidate these through the vernacular of the digital. As a fluid medium validating the aesthetic through the accumulation of attention, the internet births the dead through social and cultural practices of production. As such, the meme draws on the spectacular economy which modernity celebrates through sharing networks whereby content manufactured through these characteristics unsettles the dead ensconced within the machinic reconfigurations of the digital. Drawing on the refugee body as a site of pathos through its ‘migrant’ politics and drownings on the shores of Fortress Europe, the aesthetic of parasitical renditions become co-located with the tragic. The migrant as plundering European soil is remediated through the plundering of the ‘migrant’ corpse. This mimetic interplay extracts the political to redistribute trauma as an aesthetic offering with and without the political. This context of hostility against migration in Europe positioned through the architecture of the virtual exhibits its projectile tendencies to retain the political and exploit it through the restaging of these dead bodies as performative and artistic devices. This co-location, the thwarting of the political and Alan Kurdi’s immersion into this aesthetic regime meant that the taboo of a dead child could be renegotiated and reiterated in the online medium making it ripe for new rituals of redemption and desecration. Here the mingling of the logos and pathos, hybridization, the sacred and profane as well as the irreverent mixing of bodies with the

108  Iconic migrant body virulence of machinic engagements co-creates the iconic migrant through the modalities of politics and its dispossession. Collective lives can be framed through artistic production in which objects of the profane can penetrate, as Rancière posits in his articulations of the aesthetic regime (Dronsfield 2008: 3). If objects and subjects can be abstracted and remixed, so can the profane and sacred, enacting these as part of the aesthetic experience, connected or dislocated from the political. If art draws from the social, writes Rancière (2000: 258), it can also distance and separate itself from it. As such, this configuration of art as political and apolitical retaining and thwarting something of both is the reconfiguration of collective life in which aesthetic sensibility can be extracted and withdrawn from other spheres of experience, incubating and drawing on a sensory alienation as well political intelligibility (Dronsfield 2008: 4). In so doing, it renders a ‘double effect’ of igniting political signification and sensory shock, which thwarts and subverts meaning. The location of the ‘iconic’ adds to this dimension of the aesthetic and its relationship to the political. Its stature of familiarity and celebrity within a collective means that audiences will draw on its collective recognizability, instilling it as an object of signification which is constantly exploited. In redistributing the sensible while extracting from the ordinary and familial material world that attests to our collective life, memes as aesthetic and creative practice enact a post-digital spectacle by binding the political intelligibility with the affective. In extrapolating common resources from collective life, the real can be fictionalized and induce intimacies between the death event and the material world online or equally in making these foreign in our sensory realms where new senses are explored and distributed. For Rancière this aesthetic sensorium is about the collapsing of distinctions between the intelligible and the sensuous, producing an adulteration between logos and pathos (2001: 31–38). This mixing presents the potential for art and artistic practices to rupture from the representative and so doing they ‘redistribute sensibilities’ (Stejskal 2012: 6). Memes as sensory community artefacts for sharing instil an instability in terms of the representational, exposing their aesthetic seduction without foreclosing their autonomous qualities. In subverting and thwarting the intelligible yet infusing the political, memes as aesthetic practice harbour the political and its fracture. In thwarting the notion of entities having singular meanings, aesthetic practices produce a dissensus, breaking down the distinctions through the redistribution of senses. This being the central aspect of the aesthetic regime and, as such, invoking the complex bind between life and art (Tanke 2011). As such, memes disintegrate meaning while possessing the possibilities for the sublime and equally the ludic. The internet as rife with emergent cultural practices and the abundance of user-friendly toolkits can re-render images, allowing users to rehash and remix them as mash-ups which defy solitary meanings. Memes perceived beyond their subversive capacities are also tools for collective recovery and

Iconic migrant body  109 redemption during moments of crisis or in remediating media events. As cultural artefacts they redistribute sensibilities while foregrounding these through common materials which engage a community. Invariably, this includes death events and corpses refashioned as cultural resources for the creative economy of the internet or what can be termed as necro-aesthetics, birthing an array of activities including the carnivalesque and rituals offering a sensorium online. The invocation of death through such an aesthetic is equally about collective resistance to death, perpetuating presence through the virtual and celebrating its ineradicable qualities. Memes within such an aesthetic regime are about humanity’s ability to produce art in profane conditions and to break down boundaries and hierarchies. In fusing the political with the apolitical, memes as constitutive of this necro-aesthetics draw from death to celebrate the profane, extrapolating ‘sense from sense’ (Rancière 2009) while co-locating emergent rituals with the iconic dead.

Necro-aesthetics and immortality through the digital The initial reaction of overwhelming grief to Alan Kurdi’s death images dissipated over the year into ambivalence, prompting his father to lament that despite his son’s tragic death very little had changed for vulnerable refugees (Ensor 2016). Amnesty International attested to the fact that thousands continue to die in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas in the years after Alan Kurdi’s wretched demise and even though a dead child should have created a turning point for change, his death had been in vain (Ensor 2016). The dissipation of pity and the inaction following the event in the long term affirm the double bind which necro-aesthetics of the virtual induces: abstracting the corpse while abandoning engagement and responsibility for the political. Death imagery as abjection and its pull into a sensorium of affect affirmed the short-lived nature of grief. As part of the postmodern condition, the ‘wound’ of trauma disappears and is replaced by experiences of surprise and mild shock belonging to a category of expression in which we are assaulted by sensations we did not expect (Redfield 2007: 72–73). While in its immediate aftermath Alan Kurdi’s death called attention to the plight of the refugee situation in the Mediterranean, the fascination and obsession over time shifted towards the death imagery a mode of commodification and the collective sensorium which can be exploited as an avatar for artistic renditions including contradictory ideological agendas. The corpse as a common cultural resource complies with Rancière’s notion of ‘partition of senses’ in its co-location with the political and its consumption through the sensory, signifying the communal jouissance it induced. Alan Kurdi, through his death imagery, became the subject of varied artistic endeavours around the world including Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese activist and artist, recreating the dead body on a pebbled beach on the Greek island of Lesbos (Tan 2016). Art unrestrained by limits and boundaries celebrated the mimetics of death, producing a transcendence as a commodity

110  Iconic migrant body for the public invoking the sacred in the initial instance. In the spectral dimensions, meaning breaks down and so does its ability to represent the real, as such its meaning-making hinges on something that may not be materially present but that which haunts and returns (Peim 2005: 74). The spectral, as constitutive of the internet, abstracts the corpse invoking pain and pleasure through its spectacle. In unleashing an abject gaze, death imagery equally harbours the iconic which renews a fascination to the death event as an indexicality. In crossing into notions of taboo and the unspeakable or unrepresentable, necro-­ aesthetics possesses the corpse without being responsible for it and, as such, produces an ‘empty intimacy’ enacting death as a recurring encounter which humanity cannot surmount through science or technology. As a mechanism of coming to terms with death, our remaking of death online is equally about the subversive and the trolling of the corpse re-releasing it through its abstraction of trauma. The iconic dead occupy an exhausting proposition on the internet, as one is never laid to rest, facilitated through a liminalityof being between states when the body is relentlessly reincarnated, plundering the corpse as a common cultural medium for ludic play, pleasure and pain. Entering a bind with production and consumption economies online, memetic play absorbs the iconic corpse, leveraging on its signification to produce moral shock or to transgress norms through its shock value. The mourning of the iconic corpse will occur alongside projects which abstract and exploit it for its cultural value and resonance. Iconic death forged through collective memory is communally owned and as such it becomes a subject for collective mourning and an object for commodification, defaced and effaced through the creative enterprise of the internet. Alan Kurdi, as a subject of forced migration as well as the communal politics of pity, ruptures the intelligible and sensuous binding these in ways which compromise the sacred, offering death as a site to produce memetic avatars which expel and induce pity.

Mythology, fake news and the migrant body Alan Kurdi, in his initial public representations, transcended race and geography. However, subsequently he was remediated through the neoliberal politics of migration, casting him as refuse and as a prime target for hostility and violence online. As part of the composition of the suspect figures waiting to invade Europe, Alan Kurdi’s body became abstracted through this vitriolic politics, tearing flesh from his corpse to reroute him through the alt-right politics of European victimhood in the face of a migrant ‘invasion’. The French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, released an animation suggesting that Alan Kurdi, had he not died, would have grown up to be a lascivious predator of women, characterizing him through a story in which immigrants were allegedly involved in assaults on women in Cologne

Iconic migrant body  111 (Meade 2016). With a heading asking ‘What would little Aylan have grown up to be?’, the image depicts two terrified women running away from piglike men with their tongues hanging out, with the answer to the heading at the bottom saying: ‘Ass groper in Germany’ (Meade 2016). Hence, the image of Alan Kurdi became extrapolated into racialized hostility and then into memetic avatars associated with parasitic depictions of migrants which further dehumanized the dead child and other desperate refugees in search of sanctuary (Dearden 2015). Alan Kurdi and other refugees became part of the fake news economy through false and misleading temporal framing of images, co-locating refugees with ISIS militants seeking to penetrate Europe. An example was the manipulation of protest imagery in Germany in 2012 (before the rise of the so-called Islamic State) to claim that refugees attacked police with an ISIS flag. Another false claim included using fake imagery was to suggest that refugees were not malnourished and hence undeserving. This was made by Pegida UK, a branch of the German group known for its anti-Islamism (Dearden 2015). Alan Kurdi’s death was portrayed as fictional, with alt-right groups claiming it as conspiracy to invoke pity and mislead the public (SBS News 2016). As a site for fervent myth-making, Alan Kurdi’s corpse drew on the eroding of Europe’s humanitarian response to the refugee crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. His death then became caught up in the world of conspiracy theories in circulation since 9/11, polluted by these as part of his fictional construction. Produced and co-opted through the Orientalist readings of the Middle Eastern Other, he embodied threat and destruction of the values of the West, subverting him into a project of dehumanizing the Other and in reiterating the refugee as ‘bare life’ in the politics of Fortress Europe. As a depraved figure not deserving of life and portrayed as a future sexual predator who will morally corrupt the West, Alan Kurdi’s effacement was bound through a mythology of cultural carnage by the East, through false economies and conspiracy theories meshing unrelated associations to distort him through a violent politics of explusion. The concept of moral spectatorship and distant suffering as a mode of spectacle is resonant in scholarship on the media (Boltanski 1999; Ibrahim 2010) but the nature of this conflicted spectatorship needs more introspection, particularly when it is plundered as a site of pleasure and reconstituted into art. In examining the notion of necro-aesthetics, it is evident that the moral spectatorship is an unsettled project including constant incursions on the vulnerable and their pain, integrating them as part of the ‘carnivalesque’ online (Bakhtin 1984). Alan Kurdi as the anonymous iconic dead is a body rife for snatching, to be emptied out of pity or to be installed through pathos, distanced from or conjoined to politics of migration in Europe. Producing through the euphoria which rituals can produce, this iconic body is amenable to both martyrdom and rituals of commemoration online. Conjoined to unstable aesthetic regimes online which can turn the

112  Iconic migrant body real to fake or blow up a child as sexual predator, the online memetic culture can be art and effacement at once. When an image can cut through to the whole of humanity where others may not be amenable to the readings of sacred, the iconic can penetrate the conscious and subconscious imbued with subliminal and manifest significations which can invoke the affectivity of a collective. As a site for myth-making the iconic can acquire new meanings through time, rendering it as unfinished in meaning, invoking proximity to the unrelated objects and subjects, and as conducive to conspiracy as well as distortions. As a space betwixt, the iconic straddles between the veneration of the sacred and its desecration. Art as a mode of representation has been problematic for its ability to release pleasure and enjoyment from the sites of the traumatic or what Adorno terms as ‘aesthetic pain that parallels a scream’ or what LaCapra (2009: 69) asserts as the ‘transfiguration of a wound or trauma into the sublime’. The phrase ‘after Auschwitz’ which encapsulates Adorno’s elicitation that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz frames the representation of the past as an enormous challenge particularly through art, though the term has been amenable to a number of readings (Rothberg 1997). The ­onerous challenge of representing the unrepresentable with reference to the H ­ olocaust, as signifying a break in temporality through a before and an after, foregrounds the limitations of representation and human articulations. Vital yet limited, Adorno’s aporia of art, locates the function of art in the aftermath of tragedy within a consumerist landscape where it can yield pleasure while diminishing the horror and pain of the past it draws on. In so doing, it denigrates the victims by extracting pain from the suffering (Adorno 1982: 9). Commodification for the consumption of suffering poses a double-edged challenge: the existence of art as necessary to reiterate the suffering which it forbids in concurrence (Martin 2006). The critique of artistic and consumerist practices post-Holocaust through the commodification of human suffering as art illuminates the ethical challenges and practices in modernity with an event such as genocide. With relevance to Alan Kurdi, the commodification of suffering not only appropriates his iconic death but also commodifies the suffering of forced migration and the risk of death trying to reach the refuge of Western soil. In re-releasing trauma as art and a cultural form, death camps and capsizing boats reframe the moral dilemma of commodifying the suffering of forced migration. The widespread precarity of the body of the other where suffering is not only in designated spaces through a ‘camp-mentality’ ­(Gilroy 2000) positions the narration of the now as problematic even before we can consign it to past. This category of humanity subsumed under the terminology of ‘migrants’ stranded at the walls of Western nations (Wynter 2003: 261) enacted through their ‘invisibilization’ and labelled the ‘New Poor’ (Bauman 1987) is an entity for expulsion and exclusion. In creating a new race of the unwanted through forced migration, their death is

Iconic migrant body  113 not bound to the camp or any specific cartography of containment alone, assigning expulsion and death as fluid phenomena in postmodernity and neoliberal politics. This spectacularization of non-sacred bodies and their commodification are then renewed through the aesthetic techniques and spectral qualities of the internet redrafting them as objects of consumption and propaganda. Virilio, in drawing on Albert Camus’ notion of the twentieth century as the ‘pitiless century’ (Virilio & Baj 2003: 36–37), attributes the phenomenon of the pitiless to technologies and the viral circulation of images of carnage. Here the speed of technologies and an accelerated culture induce a ‘virtuality’ of experience (Armitage 2001: 5). Finding congruence with this acceleration and virtualization, artistic practices and expression become compliant rather than opposed to these sensory modes (James 2007: 108). Producing a desensitization through an excess of shock and its saturation, art transcends from being oppositional or improper into being a resonant and constitutive element of this accelerated modernity (Virilio 2010: 35). The internet and memes as part of this composition reiterate this congruence. More importantly they feed on the trauma of the iconic as a popular cultural form in the digital age, blurring distinctions between pain and pleasure, abstracting pathos from the iconic in producing a communal jouissance. And as such inducing the carnivalesque in the sites of trauma to transmute them as commodities for popular consumption.

Conclusion For the internet, an iconic death is mere cultural fodder for commodification and exchange. Iconic deaths are valuable resources in terms of their ability to accumulate value online through their invocation of the popular. With the virtual sphere of relentless consumption and re-composition, the iconic dead get a second screening to be re-released through the communal imagination and aesthetic practices and to be re-abstracted ideologically. As spectral figures inhabiting a liminal sphere of remaking online, they speak to artification, commodification and re-enactment of bare life to be fetishized and distanced. As both sacred and unholy entities they lend to the memetics of the internet to be celebrated through its democratic potential or to be liberated as autonomous entities with and without the political context of their origin. Memes thwart representation while drawing on the political, infusing the subversive yet reframed through the sensory. As autonomous entities they recalibrate meaning through exchange and sharing economies or networked sociality, infusing the corpse and its memetic avatars as cultural forms. If the internet provides modes of commemorating and aestheticizing the dead, it also constantly challenges our notions of the sacred and profane and in so doing revives the iconic dead as figures which can be signified or effaced through their iconic status.

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116  Iconic migrant body Tan, M. (2016). Ai Weiwei poses as drowned Syrian infant refugee in ‘haunting’ photo. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/ feb/01/ai-weiwei-poses-as-drowned-syrian-infant-refugee-in-haunting-photo Tanke, J. J. (2011). What is the aesthetic regime? Parrhesia, 12, 71–81. Thompson, J. (2016). One does not simply make an exhibition about memes – meet the curator who did. Evening Standard. Retrieved from https://www.standard. co.uk/go/london/arts/one-does-not-simply-make-an-exhibition-about-memesmeet-the-curator-who-did-a3322686.html Tomic, M. (2010). Reframing the invisible: On the uses of “bare life” in art. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 22, 159–178. Virilio, P. (2010). Art and fear. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Virilio, P., & Baj, E. (2003). Discours sur l’horreur de l’art. Lyon: Atelier de Création Libertaire. Walsh, B. (2015, December 29). Alan kurdi’s story: Behind the most heart breaking photo of 2015. Time. Retrieved April 05, 2019 from http://time.com/4162306/ alan-kurdisyria-drownedboy-refugee-crisis. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

7 The Napalm girl and platform capital Facebook governance of the iconic

Introduction All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none. (Baudrillard 2004: 371) Platform capital, through its own governance architecture, will impose its knowledge/power regimes on society through the ordering of content, data and imagery. While this happens with image and content governance calibrated by newsfeeds powered by algorithms, data empires such as Facebook and Google are ordering and repositioning knowledge and research, presenting innumerable challenges for humanity particularly in our constructions of the iconic and its perseverance through time. This chapter examines the processing of the iconic in the hands of platform capital yielding an important insight into how the iconic can be remediated through capital’s governance structures configured through the rudimentary agenda of accumulating traffic and data for profit maximization. The Napalm girl image is undoubtedly a mythic image, imbued with elements of the numinous. Its encounter with Facebook would recode it as pornographic, denigrating its symbolic status as an iconic entity. On September 9, 2016, Facebook decided that the image breached its ‘community guidelines’ as a nude image and hence it was banned. Uploaded as part of a series on war photography, it was taken down as a nude photograph of a child and later restored after a public backlash (Ingram 2016). In fact, the Napalm Girl image shot by Associated Press Photographer Nick Ut is a celebrated Pulitzer prize-winning photo entitled the ‘Terror of War’. Facebook’s denial of its symbolic status in representing the trauma and suffering of war constitutes an act of iconoclasm and incursion into a moment of

118  Napalm girl and platform capital human redemption to repudiate the violence of war and its effects on the innocent, particularly children. Images and photos as cultural artefacts are intimately implicated in projects of collective memory and in concretizing the consecrated as a liminal space for communing a moral community and to retain its residue of horror as a caution for humanity for time to come. Facebook’s act of censure in not recognizing it as a historic war image brought to scrutiny its content governance structure (or its lack of editorial oversight). The ethical challenges invoked in the age of platform capital are duly reflected in the immense accumulation of data and content in these sites which can induce viral circulation or proscribe it through its design and regulation configured through a technological ‘intelligence’ (i.e. algorithms, human censors not editors) and mnemonic memory. Such data empires with prowess to order content and knowledge can leave humanity depraved and beleaguered through their immanent architectures which can unsettle the settled, including the stature of the iconic. In About Looking, John Berger (1980: 51) asserts that ‘Photos in themselves do not narrate’, positioning photos as signifiers underpinned through a complex interplay between knowledge, identity, consumption and in the assemblage of meaning through communication. Depositing a large volume of data and content into data empires such as Facebook and Google is to remake governance of our knowledge and values, foregrounding knowledge creation through capital’s predetermined agenda of wealth accumulation. As such, content and image economies can become abstracted from their social and historical context to be re-mapped through their content governance architectures. The recoding of Napalm Girl through her corporeality disembedded from the social and the historical is about the dominance of Facebook’s technological gaze in mutilating a war image into a pornographic object. In so doing it constituted an effacement of a corporeal body already mutilated and violated by the effects of chemical warfare. Such a reading is to assert the pornography of violence that platform capital can impose on the sacrosanct, re-mobilizing taboos through its governance structures while thwarting the iconic with its machinic recalibrations. As a war image which projects the brutality and senselessness of the ­Vietnam War and its impact on innocent civilians, the image of the Napalm Girl is a moment of naked reckoning of the brutality of war. The unmitigated suffering of war captured through the desperate reaction of children and adults including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, attempting to run from an aerial napalm attack, is a haunting image of abhorrent violence visualized through the melting flesh of a child. As an image exposing the barbarity of war, the photo is a moment which freeze-frames the depthless depravity of humanity. As an image symbolizing the call to conscience, framed through humanity’s collective failure, the image acquired iconic stature. Embodying the inviolable through the abject imagery of the burning flesh from chemical warfare in American geopolitical dominance, it invokes both the spectacular of a global audience and equally an intimate encounter with

Napalm girl and platform capital  119 the melting flesh of a helpless nine-year-old peeling off her clothes to be released from the toxins ingesting her skin. As such it came to occupy a reified realm as iconographic war photography. As a moment of confrontation with humanity’s depravity, the disintegrating flesh of the child not only personified the brutal reality of the war but worked to remove the distance of space and time, remediating it through the ‘horror of now’. The horror of chemical warfare additionally reasserted the mindset of an American public with a waning appetite for war in and out of America. Appearing in the front pages of almost every newspaper and magazine in the world, the image of the Napalm Girl mobilized public sentiments against the war in Vietnam (Sims 2016). Producing a seismic disjuncture in the public in a population already deeply fatigued by the war, its popular receptivity led President Nixon to challenge the authenticity of the image (Time 2016). Six months later, with the signing of the Paris ceasefire agreement between the USA, North Vietnam and South Vietnam in January 1973, it effectively called an end to the war. Through these historical events and the context of the turning tide of the American population against the war, the image acquired iconic status having the social and political power to mobilize sentiments. A series of imagery preceding the Napalm girl equally laid bare the senselessness sacrifice of the innocent. Through its association with world events the turning of public sentiments, the image came to occupy a revered status to freeze time and to transcend its moment of capture as an iconic object. This temporal duality of her existence trapped within the prism of war and suffering yet projected through the spectacular on a world stage meant the Napalm Girl would be released as a phantasmagoric figure. As one of the most disturbing images of the twentieth century, the Napalm Girl would be installed in the annals of history and memory, and as a redemptive tool against the loss and suffering of the innocent. The iconic acquires longevity through its transformative potential and resides in its ability to ignite an affective community well past its moment of occurrence. One of the most renowned images in American photojournalism, the image is also known as ‘Accidental Napalm’ (Hariman & Lucaites 2003) and bears the scars of a nation coming to terms with its conscience. The Facebook ban as such constitutes a moment of amnesia of industrial proportions in terms of an ‘American technology’ company forgetting its own ‘American history’. This is despite the fact that the Vietnam War was perceived as an ‘American war’ in which lives were blighted by ‘American Napalm’, as termed by Susan Sontag (1977: 136), and spectacularized through ‘American photojournalism’. Facebook’s framing of the image as pornographic was a moment of disavowal of the victimization of the innocent by American power on foreign soil. As such, if ‘remembering is an ethical art’ (Sontag 2003: 115), the remediation of our social memory through algorithms and machinic governance of content swathes humanity with new modes of vulnerabilities. All content flowing through Facebook

120  Napalm girl and platform capital becomes remoulded through its governance architecture of ‘morality and image regulation’ collapsing the Napalm girl as a ‘Naked Child’ in violation of their community standards (Hovland & Seetharaman 2016). In pressing a deviant gaze on the image, Facebook reduced it to a prurient entity firmly dislodged from its reified status. In so doing, it reformulated the body mutilated from war as a pleasure site for paedophilic gaze. Capital’s organizational morality is called into scrutiny here inherently invested in accumulating vast amounts of data and content pumping through its veins while having the possibilities to recode numinous sites such that they are abstracted from their historicity and social context to become objects for remaking immerses the iconic within this turbulence of platform capitalism. Capital’s organizational morality is called into scrutiny here as it invests in accumulating vast amounts of data and content while having the possibilities to recode unprofane sites such that they are abstracted from their historicity and social context. If our quest for collective redemption negotiated the nudity of the image, Facebook in its predominance as a data empire inscribed the image only through its nudity. This chapter in assessing the challenges both ethical and moral invoked by platform capital in reordering image archives comes into a direct relationship with the sacraments of the iconic, with data empires having the power to proscribe the symbolic through their own organizational agendas. The re-categorizing, manipulation and reordering of content has consequences for the iconic in depriving it of its context and moral stature. This presents intrinsic challenges for our projects of memory, for acts of solidarity or communion and in inscribing bodies and senses through capital’s quest to reorder through its own modes of sense-making. These incursions on the redemptive and the iconic are about the destabilizing of our shared values and significant moments of redemption, and as such become acts of iconoclasm, leaving societies saturated with content yet depraved through the reordering and distortions of the symbolic and revered.

Photojournalism as a site of myth-making As an aperture which provides access into a set of interlocking questions in Vietnam, the role of the iconic in the construction of American national imagery and memory is foregrounded through this image (Miller 2004: 262). The Second Indochina War, better known in the West as the Vietnam War, was fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam (also spilling into parts of Laos and Cambodia) from 1955 to 1975. The Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and other communist allies supported North Vietnam, while the South received support from the USA, the Philippines and other anti-communist allies. A large-scale campaign was undertaken by the USA against North Vietnam as part of its wider Cold War strategy in seeking to impede the spread of communism in Asia. The campaign

Napalm girl and platform capital  121 polarized American public sentiment and gave rise to a large anti-war movement which questioned both the rationality and humanity of the country’s involvement in Vietnam. In addition, the war effort resulted in a huge human cost amounting to millions in terms of fatalities and injuries. It induced a sense that the American government was waging a senseless and illegitimate war without an end in sight. Such sentiments were augmented through rising liberal individualism as manifest in public culture through personal autonomy and human rights (Hariman & Lucaites 2003: 38–41), configuring Napalm Girl in 1972 as an iconic fixture through this tide of emotions. The American Cold War strategy to fight communism fractured a war-weary general public particularly through the public’s exposure to the images of the war. The My Lai Massacre in 1968 saw the mass murder of as many as 500 unarmed civilians including women, children and elderly men by American infantry, but perhaps the full trauma of the US military’s presence in Vietnam did not impact on the American public for another four years when the horrific image of the Napalm Girl became known globally. The Napalm Girl image amplified the use of the lethal liquid of Napalm by the American military as a weapon in their anti-communist war, with the Americans dropping some 388,000 tons of it (Neer 2013: 11). This chemical weapon, developed in 1942 by Harvard University scientists, was a means to secure funding from the government in aiding war efforts in the Far East. Napalm has the ability to roast and singe human flesh, generating temperatures of 800–1,200°C and sticking to the human skin, making it difficult to remove the burning substance (Neer 2013). This quality was seen as advantageous in flushing out the Vietcong from their hideouts. Napalm, along with the defoliant and herbicide Agent Orange, was utilized by the Americans to clear out vegetation so that pilots could see their targets more easily. Napalm, a signifier for the brutality of the Vietnam War, would result in the destruction both of people and their environment. The image of the Napalm Girl running from an attack, as witnessed by the photographer Nick Ut, crystalizes the moment through her disintegrating and burning flesh where: ‘Her whole back, neck and arm were black like a barbecue’ (Miller 2004: 272). In Nick Ut’s personal reflection, he offers insights into the little girl’s trauma: …then I saw her skin coming off and I stopped taking pictures. I put my cameras down on the road. We poured water over this young girl. Her name was Kim Phuc. She kept yelling ‘nóng quá’ (Too hot). We were all in shock. (cf. Harris 2015) The Vietnam War and the spectacularization of the invaded bodies equally invite notions of ‘Othering’ inserted into the cartography of the East as a

122  Napalm girl and platform capital site of violence (Coram 2013) where most of the Napalm ever used was deployed. This violence is a stark counterpoint to the exoticized notions of the East in the American social imaginary. In depicting this, Robert Neer (2013) in his book on Napalm chronicles how American pilots between air strikes would have a cold can of Budweiser while Napalm bomb pods were reloaded onto their planes by ground crew. Napalm as a site of polysemic meaning-making is equally about the Orientalist desire of the female body as an object of gaze, and a biopolitics of the Third World on display (Sontag 2003). The emergence of the Napalm Girl into public consciousness was not without clashes about editorial propriety in newsrooms. There were intense anxieties about the image’s ‘frontal nudity’ causing a moral outcry, prompting airbrushing of any suggested existence of pubic hair on the nineyear-old (Miller 2004: 271). Nevertheless, the iconic image transcended newsroom objections and editorial norms on nudity, and its power was eventually recognized as symbolizing America’s growing repugnance with the war (Time 2016). The corporeal violence inflicted on the innocent overcame objections to the nudity of the child to foreground her suffering at the hands of chemical warfare. The brutality of the war and its savaging of the child’s body renegotiated her nudity, enlisting it as non-prurient (Hariman 1995) and in the process the image violated one set of codes to enact and activate another (Hariman & Lucaites 2003: 41). Transcending the controversy of nudity against the brutal context of war and chemical warfare, the Napalm Girl image demonstrated an immanent characteristic of war iconography to leap through time and space, to retain the abject violence of war. Facebook’s recoding of the war image was, as such, an incursion into the sacred in seeking to relegate it into the deviant. As an embodiment of purity and innocence and in some ways signifying hope for the future (Wyness 2006: 14), the child is a carrier of the moral values of a society (Jenks 2005: 6). As such, visual imagery of children can move communities and enlist them to engage with the subject in the image and equally set the moral grounds for collective identity (Jones 2014). Images of a naked child can be abstracted quickly in the digital realm into sexual deviance, reducing burning flesh to the pornographic. With the internet economy, the vulnerabilities of the child emerge through its recoding through victimhood and pornography. The Napalm Girl encountered a similar plight. While she could transcend the proprietorial objections to nudity in the newsroom and the global stage, Facebook could only construct her through her nudity. As a signifier of an event, the ability of the photograph to represent the real has been debated over time, retaining it as a contentious artefact in the project of memory. Yet it can retain canonical status in representing the limits of trauma when transcribed through social context or the values of a community. The iconic image in acquiring mythic power and interlocking value systems with acts of depravity can suspend the temporal or transcend

Napalm girl and platform capital  123 it. It can equally transgress the ideological and the material realms. In sustaining its mythical and mystical qualities, it becomes constitutive of the sacred. Photojournalists can play an import role in myth-making through imagery, capturing the euphoria of communion or collective acts of redemption. Their role as storytellers and creators of myths is somewhat underexplored in journalism studies (Knightley 2004). Such an anthropological perspective on the role of journalism can lend insights into the production of the revered and iconic. Within the digital economy, the demise of editorial oversight and its replacement with machinic governance as a form of technological gaze invariably have consequences for society. Here, content can float without the status of authenticity or as fake news, reassembling the internet as a site of intense anxieties and fiction. In the era of social networking sites, the constant flow and circulation of images without human editorial judgement will undoubtedly tamper with the sites of the spiritual. Within such an ecology, the iconic will be re-governed through the moral sensibilities of data empires, calibrating it through their designs, algorithms and censure. It speaks to not only the effacing and thwarting of social memory but also the fact that the iconic will be re-birthed through its travel and receptivity online as a mere image collapsed through the governance structures of networked capitalism.

The new news economy and social networking sites The prominence of social networking sites as platforms which handle large amounts of content and images has a direct bearing on the Napalm Girl image, pointing to the fact that imagery goes through an industrial abstraction in which it is located through new modes of indexicality ingrained through the design architecture in these sites. Projects of memory will then require constant vigilance against platform governance and its distortion of content, particularly the disfigurement of the iconic. This notion of the iconic being decontextualized and abstracted through the governance of data empires asserts the icon as a vulnerable entity resurrected through a new machinic and organizational gaze which reorders through its own modes of logic. As such, the social relations within which content becomes transactional online and the extraction of value become important dimensions in the reconfiguration of the iconic. The rise of social networking platforms premising sharing and maintaining connectivity through networks reframes the iconic within these assemblages of sharing and passing on content, with consequences for human and society through everyday acts. The notion of the post-human as one who is constantly imbricated in content sharing and the production of social intimacy through interactive exchanges are cast within the vulnerabilities of such an extraction economy. As such, we enter into an intimate bind with technologies to relay content

124  Napalm girl and platform capital and to secrete data that are abstracted back into these assemblages. The reconfiguration of the self into data and becoming part of the assemblage of a datafied society coalesces us with machinic modes. These reframe the human through not just flesh, bones and blood but data profiles and data tracks that recompose the post-digital self through her presence online in serving an ‘attention deficit economy’ where we are always called upon to authenticate and endorse content through consumption. Transposing content through sociality and the act of sharing means that humans power the machines of this circulation, trading the banal and the consequential, offering content through networks of connectivity and trust. Relentless sharing, exchanges and the transactional modes of sociality are also about the renewing and maintaining of personal connections at the everyday level. If late modernity premises a world of networked connectivity, it equally portends a world of intense loneliness which social networking sites tap into, leveraging on human vulnerability to re-imagine sociality through these transactional encounters. In such an undertaking, they become implicated with monetizing platforms trading the commodified self as data in this economy. Symbolized through the notion of the ‘gated community’, modernity is about the intensification of strangeness, connectivity and securitization but equally loneliness as a condition that prevails and predominates as people live more isolated lives under the guise of privacy with the construction of privacy as a valourized ideal in modernity. Locked front doors then co-exist with platforms which unlock our private information and profiles, enticing us to shed the layers and notions of the private while being seduced into a new sociality without any modes of intimacy. This ubiquitous sociality is time-consuming and will fatigue humanity in seeking to maintain ties through technologically mediated networks which constantly demand our attention to the devices which mimic our senses. This teleported ubiquitous sociality where the self is immersed and imagined through the transactional economy of sharing, and networks and friendships are about committing to our presence online and recasting the self and a wider humanity through these platform architectures (Ibrahim 2018). As seductive regimes which premise both the construction of the self and the emergence of networks through the commodification of the self, emphasizing sharing as a primary agenda to retain the sense of self and community. The interplay of capital with human affectivity, loneliness and the need for sociality in an increasingly alienating modern world is about pegging the monetization agenda to human vulnerabilities where the secretion of the self within these platforms contributes to industrial productions of data. This digital capitalism thrives on the accumulation of mass volumes of data and traffic, which in turn can be manipulated, profiled and re-sold to advertisers, remixing commercial enterprise within networking platforms where people pledge engagements and personalize these as their space.

Napalm girl and platform capital  125 The non-stop transaction of text and imagery in this convergent economy means that content that is circulated has a psychological significance to the human and her notion of connectivity and self-making or its relationship to others in the mediated world. The ‘self’ shares an important relationship with content in such a calibration, in transposing the self through such aesthetic modes of virtual consumption and equally the consumption of self through these dynamics. The anchoring of the self through a profile culture within platform capitalism re-labels this connectivity to networks as ‘friends’. This remixes the social imaginary tightly with the agenda of capital, giving a sense that these spaces are personalized in building a sense of belonging despite them being part of platform economics. This falseness of giving a sense of ownership to spaces online is a mechanism by which capital offers engagement, commitment and sociality as well as modes of dependence in viewing the world through a screen culture of coded norms. Nevertheless, without an attendant reflexivity of how these spaces are governed and regulated through their architectures which are designed to facilitate virality of content but not necessarily to challenge its veracity. As such, the mix of tools to govern these spaces, including user agreements, community standards or outsourcing of content regulation to hourly paid labour in the global south or low-income economies, imposes a technological gaze co-opting users as relays of content and algorithms designed through human interactivity, emotions and habituation. Social networks, such as Facebook, as sites for sharing public and personal content, portend a world in which information is shared through attention economies in which information can go viral through ‘word of mouth’ online. These have intimately bound news production with social networks (Singer et al. 2011; Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton 2012), infusing a rechannelling of news and mediation of news production. News production has become open-ended, facilitating contributions from an interactive public. Equally it has created a sensation of empowerment and liberation where users can become content producers by adding to news stories. This new category of the ‘citizen journalist’ as a hybrid category which meshes professional expectations with ground-level agency to oust news and information through convergent technologies presents renewed challenges (i.e. the removal of standards of accuracy, authenticity and objectivity) to journalistic practices while broadening and emptying its professional status. By enlarging the label of the journalist through production modes of interactivity and public upload, journalism encounters a moment of fracture. Social networks and the rechannelling of news through these sites firmly bind platform economics with news production which arbitrarily exploits the trust and attention economy within such networks. Entering a realm of ‘sociality’ underpinned through this technological architecture, news is respun through its extractive tendencies. Premising monetization in exchange and accrual of traffic, news which ‘trends’ is consequential to networks as newsfeeds to be manipulated through algorithms. With news organizations

126  Napalm girl and platform capital reducing operating costs and co-opting stories from ‘citizen journalists’ news is being consumed through networks, newsfeeds and trending stories yet not necessarily validated through editorial oversight coalescing with the virality of digital architectures producing a taxonomy of popular content. News dissemination and its integration into social networks renewed Katz and Lazarsfeld’s (1955) classic reception theory of two-step flow. In this formulation, the receptivity to news is mediated through trust invested in authority figures in the community. News re-spun through networks and degrees of trust as well as sociality encounters new modalities which will mediate its receptivity as a social offering. Facebook describes itself as a technology firm yet handles vast volumes of news content. This places it in a controversial position. The channelling of news through social networking sites prioritized through the number of times a story is shared or viewed without editorial oversight repositions news through platform economics and not in terms of adherence to professional news standards. Its governance of content through its own moral economy of ‘community standards’ can detach news and imagery from their social and historical content, reframing them through its standards of acceptability and user agreements where it can ban what it deems as violating its regulatory policies. In the case of the Napalm Girl image, the banning of the image constituted an iconoclasm against the moral history of its emergence. Marxist critiques describe social networking sites as neoliberal capitalism extracting free affective labour through machinic interventions such as algorithms as part of the agenda to accumulate data and monetize exchange (Fisher 2009; Davies 2013; Terranova 2014). This neoliberal digital regime is not just about the extraction of use value but also about affective, aesthetic, social and ethical values with humans acting as relays of this relentless information flow (Terranova 2014: 381–382). The extraction of labour through human pleasure and leisure constitutes an intrinsic dimension of platform capital. Thus, the accumulation of data as well as that of content configures in capital’s exploitation of free labour in this ecology of consumption and production; the latter includes our activities to pass on and recommend content or in adding to it. The use of algorithms to manage information is about the expansion of capital’s agenda to intensify the extraction of value within these networking sites. As a form of pre-meditated logic, algorithms are designed through this agenda and the monetizing capacities of capital in leaving its imprint in its non-neutrality. The ordering of information on an industrial scale through algorithms and artificial intelligence systems portends an age of digital transcendence, highlighting our initial celebration of the internet in terms of libertarian and emancipatory potential to its present intensively monetized platforms of capital accumulation. The earlier visions of a utopian virtual sphere as open and ingrained through democratic values have been reabsorbed through the clandestine workings of algorithms which are attuned to capital, performing to

Napalm girl and platform capital  127 its discreet codes while protected by trade regulations. Working through a hidden code within platform capitalism, algorithms reside through the frenetic pace of capital accumulation within an economy which exacts attention through connectivity. As clandestine, unknown and hidden codes, algorithms coalesce with capital in terms of agenda and its modes of operationalization (Lievrouw 2012; Diakopoulos 2015). News as a product of this networked sociality is then non-static in this realm, constantly curated and re-presented through networks where it can elicit and ignite through shared interests to become an echo chamber for news that communities may be more attuned to. Networks as filter bubbles transact news through their values and orientations. News organizations as vulnerable to increased operational costs and finding a need to shift their modes of working to accommodate new media technologies and their immediacy means that they are binding into these social networking structures where information can be ousted by users. Social networking sites in working through the guarded logic of capital and the sociality underpinned through interactive networks are sites without editorial oversight. This is contrasted against the vast volume of information which may pass through these sites. The lack of editorial oversight remains a huge challenge in such sites of news transaction in the digital era. In tandem, organizations such as Facebook have come under intense scrutiny for fake news, particularly following the Cambridge Analytica scandal which involved the manipulation of content through psychometric tests and experiments on users without an attendant consent to use their data or their friendship networks. These unethical modes of data sharing, experiments with user profiles and the manipulation of content open up ways in which networking sites can remediate the world through data manipulation and in close monitoring of consumption patterns and habits online. Facebook continues to be a controversial organization, inviting criticism about manipulating trending topics. Facebook has replaced humans with algorithms to curate topics which have increased the spotlight on the company for a string of errors and inaccuracies including the sharing of hoax stories (Hovland & Seetharaman 2016; Vincent 2016). Defending itself as a technology company as opposed to a media company, its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, ‘asserts that the company does not produce content but tools to curate and have the experience users want’ leveraging on the sites connectivity (Baral 2016). With the emphasis on sharing rather than veracity or accuracy, content is manipulated through the logic of sharing and what the organization defines as the defence of ‘public interest’. Such a stance invariably witnesses Facebook as enmeshed through content controversies, including the manipulation of the iconic. As a site of myth-making and sharing of social memory, journalism has a long and important role to play in the construction and invocation of historical media moments. Through narratives and imagery, journalism builds

128  Napalm girl and platform capital a social archive of collective memory, elongating myths or producing new ones, lending to the enactment of the sacrosanct in focusing events through their lens. These invariably result in the creation of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) or in the insertion of a shared time (Scannell 1996). In so doing, they produce a shared social consciousness of time and space, underscoring the importance of news production. Today news production and the construction of a shared consciousness are remediated through the instantaneity of convergent technologies which are expected to keep releasing new information while calling your attention to it. Here, new technologies become somatic entities with information syncing through biorhythms re-calibrated through technologies. News as delivered through the sociality of networking sites; as a socialized, personalized or intimate artefact remakes news through the logic of capital’s agenda to monetize while being cognizant of consuming communities and their modes of fetishization. The paradigmatic shift is equally consequential for the retention of the iconic and its desecration through the technological gaze of social networking sites, blending the iconic through the machinations of content regulation.

Images, nudity and Facebook morality With a relentless flow of images moving through Facebook, the company has over time defended its actions under the ambit of ‘community standards’ when encountering complaints and issues. Such a defence projects a moral authority in guarding its position. A controversial example is the banning of breastfeeding images due to the fact that nipples were exposed which counters it nudity clause, instantly prompting a sexualized reading of the nipple rather than as a natural maternal act of nurture (see Ibrahim2010). While Facebook rescinded the ban due to public pressure, the banning of the nipple was invoked through its community standards which ban nudity. Facebook’s simplified coding through body parts brackets out the social context as in the case of the breastfeeding images. Facebook, in 2015, finally relented to public pressure over their breastfeeding images policy, asserting that it will always allow women ‘engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring’ (Moss 2015). As a recurring issue of content governance, nudity has landed Facebook in a quandary on other occasions. A French court received a case in 2015 when a school teacher sued Facebook for taking down a photograph of Gustave Courbet’s nude painting ‘L’Origine du Monde’. In this instance, again amending its policy, Facebook announced that it will ‘allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures’ (NBC News 2015). Despite its objections to nudity and the nipple in particular, Facebook has fewer reservations about violence and gory imagery, citing these as being in the public interest. The exposé website Gawker (now defunct) received a 17-page leaked document in 2012 from an employee of the outsourcing company, oDesk,

Napalm girl and platform capital  129 which censors content for Facebook with labour mainly from the global south (but not limited to it) including the Philippines, Mexico, Turkey, India and Morocco where such workers are paid $1 per hour to trudge through content and to report deviations from Facebook’s regulations (Chen 2012). The manual sent to Gawker was a direction on their censorship policy regarding posts and images, particularly when the ‘report’ button has been clicked on the Facebook site. Revealing a confused and fractured approach to content, the document revealed that while sex is banned violence and gore are not discouraged, going into details on their so-called ‘community guidelines’. Graphic imagery of animals is allowed if portrayed within the content of food processing and hunting. ‘Crushed heads and limbs’ are permissible as long as their insides are not showing as are ‘deep flesh wounds’ and images of people using marijuana, but not bodily fluids or the ‘drunk or unconscious’ (Arthur 2012). The document revealed the voluminous amounts of images and the contentious issues which they have to navigate. In response, Facebook defended the use of the outsourcing company as enabling them to provide ‘precursory classification of a small proportion of reported content’ and as subjecting these contractors to rigorous quality controls constituting the several layers of safeguards instituted to protect its users (Arthur 2012). Facebook’s stance towards violent and gory imagery under the guise of ‘public interest’ has come under intense criticism, particularly where these images may be a means to increase traffic on the site, permitting videos and images from news reports and documentaries depicting abuse, murders and terrorist activities (Gibbs 2015). In 2013, Facebook had argued that gory images such as beheadings are permissible as long as such acts are condemned rather than celebrated (Oreskovic 2013). This decision was repealed after public furore with Facebook acquiescing that such an approach was flawed and that hosting such imagery would be to glorify violence. Facebook has over the years experimented with cautioning users. While clips showing beheadings were later banned altogether, the site initially trialled the use of warnings to caution viewers (Kelion 2015). In releasing new community standards in 2015, Facebook sought to provide clarification on objectionable content, asserting its right to remove the sharing of imagery for sadistic pleasures or to glorify violence (NBC News 2015). Other measures included actions to prevent anyone identifying themselves as being under 18 consuming these graphic images, even though Facebook permits accounts from the age of 13 years and it is well known that users can circumvent age verification to create accounts and video content (Gibbs 2015; Kelion 2015). The social networking site has also attracted controversy for streaming violence with its livestreaming feature launched in 2016 (Kuchler 2016). The livestreamed death of African American teenager, Philando Castile, again ignited controversy over its lack of editorial oversight over violent or objectionable content, renewing calls for the organization to accept ethical

130  Napalm girl and platform capital responsibility in processing news content. Another issue which has confronted Facebook is revenge porn. In a significant case brought to court in Belgium against Facebook, the organization was held responsible for not permanently blocking naked images of a 14-year girl where the imagery had been extracted through blackmail (Topping 2016). Images once online can be copied and multiplied and re-circulated to other sites making their removal difficult. To regulate child pornography, it uses PhotoDNA to block known child abuse images. However, revenge pornography images (among others) have to be reported and reviewed before these are taken down. Criticized for not protecting users from repeated harassment until pictures are reported means there is a time lag in which more harm can happen. Facebook’s reliance and utilization of the community to report harm means that users are attributed with responsibility in terms of both policing and sharing. Through the rhetoric of ‘sharing responsibly’, the company has collaborated with charities to fight paedophiles with its ‘think before your share’ campaigns. This consigning of responsibility to users then shifts its own accountability, enabling it to occupy a lofty moral position. The moral governance of images through community standards for Facebook has been to combine a slew of strategies including the use of outsourced labour primarily from the global south at inexpensive rates, the use of identification software to recognize known child pornography as well as algorithms replacing human curators to push content. The co-optation of the users to vet and report, and the regulation of images through community standards result in it appropriating a moral position despite is fractured approach to violent and gory images. The replacement of humans by algorithms to curate images is then about the accumulation of capital where such software works without reference to history or morality. Extracting aesthetic and moral labour from its users, and using consumption patterns to push feeds while adopting a paternalistic stance in urging users to share responsibly without a harder stance against gore and violence, puts the organization in a position where it can enmesh vast amounts of data through its own moral architecture. It can constantly test the limits of acceptability while hiding behind its own community standards and confused guidelines. This constant testing of limits between the exalted and the profane through the governance of data empires invariably has consequences for humanity in terms of collective memory and acts of redemption, particularly when this accrues through an iconic image.

Conclusion The Napalm Girl as an iconic image trapped within the machinery of Facebook and re-spun through its nudity clause is a moment of the mythic encountering the agenda of platform capital and its processes of working through human content without context. The reordering of our content and information through platforms and their technological gaze will produce

Napalm girl and platform capital  131 constant incursions on the iconic, entrapping them through regulatory structures to unmake the redemptive. Our moments of collective reification or projects of redemption will be remediated and thwarted through new modes of image governance which will reorder content to assuage the popular and viral. This testing of the iconic in the digital sphere will desecrate the iconic, totalizing it through algorithms designed to be synced with the agenda of capital. The monetizing of our aesthetic and moral labour will happen in tandem with transgressions of the iconic, flattening out the symbolic and mythic as part of platform logic.

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8 Digital icons – recombined with speed in the digital age Concluding remarks

What does it mean to remake the ‘iconic’ with the speed of the digital age and to morph it through the digital architecture of the virtual realm overridden with creative enterprise, the capitalist agenda and a voracious appetite to consume imagery through its instabilities? In short, to understand the post-digital economy we live in it needs to be seen through the lens of the ‘libidinal economy’ where human psyche enmeshes with capital, or through Freud’s notion of understanding the phenomena of our lived worlds through psychological gain and loss. Libidinal political economy directly challenges the normative construction of economic man by analysing the central role played by libidinal drives in explaining economic behaviours, systems, structures and outcomes (Cameron, Nesvetailova, & Palan 2011: 121). The libidinal economy for Freud (1919) as a schematic space between humans’ instinctual energies in constituting the human ego showcases the conflict between libido, the life instinct, and thanatos, the death drive. Within the post-digital economy, libidinal energy and psychic investments are underexplored but nevertheless tap into the unconscious dynamic of the social in stark contrast to the rationalist discourses of political economy. At the start of the book, there is an acknowledgement that the iconic is a sensory experience which traverses through time absorbing fetishes, fantasies and desires as well as elements which consecrate and denigrate our constructions of the iconic, lending it new significations while drawing on the symbolic value as an object produced through collective gaze, identity and ownership. If postmodernity is defined through its ephemerality in terms of speed and an accelerated mode of consuming imagery as well as traumas and the banal as cultural forms, the iconic is about testing its longevity against new sensory experiences which recode the icon with renewed modes of signification such that it transforms into new morphologies. In speaking about 9/11 as a trauma trope, Redfield (2007) speaks about the transactional economy of iconic imagery, namely imagery which confronts new subjective realms of experiences through its trysts with the aesthetic and the ocular. There was also a conscious argument to draw on the Deleuzian (1994) notion of the simulacra where the model and its imitation are not about its similarity per se, but the differences that acquire signification

Digital icons concluding remarks  135 in their own right. In binding the iconic through the premise of the libidinal economy and its design architecture, the iconic and its iterations as simulacra opened new modes of gaze from the Orientalist, and the postcolonial, to the perverse dislocation of the iconic as pornographic. Underpinning this was a recognition that the code of the internet habituated new modes of governmentality in enticing sharing rituals for the extractive agency of capital. Within such an architecture, the iconic contained not just residues from history but new fragments and fractures produced from its rebirthing online where history could be truncated and contemporized through the operational logic of the code. The iconic as a mode of aesthetic consumption is further elongated in the post-digital world in which we find new proximities with it, re-work its morphological forms or are relays in communicating through iconic imagery adding to its virality. The mutability of the internet, however, against the immutable status of the icon produces a fissure within the digital realm, as martyr, memes and avatars remade for the digital landscape, they absorb sense experiences of digital consumption assembled through its architecture logic, without dispelling its subversive dimensions or aesthetic modes which co-locate it through the sublime or in inserting effacement as a redolent element of the aesthetic mode of screen culture. In assembling the different stories of the icon, this assemblage of icons premises not just a ‘mimetics’ but a ‘memetics’ of the digital in which the travels of the iconic interplays shock value and spasmodic pleasures, co-locating these with grieving communities as well as the politics of pity.

From mimetics to the ‘memetics’ of the internet If mimesis can be interpreted as imitating our world to reproduce reality through cultural artefacts and art forms, imitation through mimicking becomes an integral aspect of our material cultures and human behaviour, as memetics as a genetic precondition. Social contagion theory to explain crowd behaviour is not new: Durkheim (1915), Tarde (1962) and Dawkins (1976) have all drawn on ecological evolutionary frameworks. As prefaced in Chapter 1, memes are presented as replicators working within a triad of replication, variation and selection, emphasizing the role of memes as units of imitation (Dawkins 1976). Within such a paradigm is a latent assertion that memes are autonomous with a will to replicate as opposed to assigning credit to creative human energy (Blackmore 1999) and, as such, prompting Daniel Dennett to assert: I don’t know about you, but I’m not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves before sending out copies of themselves in an informational Diaspora. (1995: 202)

136  Digital icons concluding remarks The iconic as a ‘recognized offering’ leverages on its celebrity status or notoriety to be elongated as a subject of adulation, curiosity and fandom. The internet’s memetics drawn from Dawkins’ evolutionary genetics theory of cultural units leaping from person to person contains within it a reproducibility where ideas can leap from one to another. This sort of replication has consequences for culture, certainly for the iconic in instilling its symbolic significance within a cultural milieu. This memetics, conjoined with a virtual architecture of sharing and monetization, recalls the iconic within a positionality of interplay between capital and culture. Immersed in an aesthetic regime, it transmutes subjective experiences from trauma to communal grief, inscribing new rituals online where these provide a space for Turner’s (1974) liminality and communitas, or modes in which symbolic consumption can happen through this transactional economy. The iconic gains new meaning without completely dispelling its significance of origination in absolute terms. It is in the juxtaposition of the symbolic status against the shock aesthetic in the virtual and social media that binds the iconic with the sublime: icons as symbols work within certain heuristics. These symbols as sensorily perceptible vehicles and assets of “meanings”, are essentially involved in multiple variability. Living, conscious, emotional, and volitional creatures employ them not only to give order to the universe they inhabit, but creatively to make use also of disorder. (Turner 1974: 55) As entities which instigate action, affectivity, desire and performance, they are repositories of possibilities for form and meaning, particularly with the virtual medium which morphs and manipulates with intent and yet is uncertain in terms of capacity to release human potential or curb it. As such the iconic online can be abstracted into what Arnold van Gennep (1909) terms ‘liminoid’ status where icons as reverent symbols can lose their exalted status and be ascribed modes of levelling or effacement. In the case of the Napalm Girl, her extraction into Facebook’s architecture was to consign her to a deviant gaze. This liminal non-status applied to the icon is to inscribe her through invisibility and anonymity, denoting a discontinuity with the past and the historicity of a war in the Far East. As such the space of liminality is an invocation of the ludic and subversive, including the suspension of taboo and the forbidden as the new norm. The sphere of digital games as a site of liminality allows this ephemerality to be extended into the sophisticated design of new rules and abandoning old ones, concocting new rituals in opposition to the pre- or post-liminoid spaces. Digital game environments and games designed to perpetuate iconic events elongate the liminoid as a space of remaking and re-imagining the world while integrating its conventions as a point of departure. The shoes

Digital icons concluding remarks  137 thrown at George W Bush and the shoes as objectification of the sublime in the case of Alan Kurdi both incite memetics through their aesthetic renditions online and in the name of art. Memetics as a form of transmission is also about amplification, projecting the symbolic value of the iconic onto the banal such that it functions through everyday modes of meaning-­ making while being amenable to the ‘extraordinary’ to become a vehicle to load meaning or recombine it with force through the virality of circulation to defy offline political contexts, as in the case of the Tank Man and the taboos on commemorating Tiananmen as a revolutionary political event. This liminality, for Turner (1974: 60), in incorporating the ludic and subversive elements is also about the incorporation of novelty within symbolic systems, enabling multiplicity of readings. As such, liminality is a temporal interface which inverts a consolidated order. In terms of myths and rituals, for Durkheim (1915) these produce solidarity-inducing modes of collective action binding a community through their shared values. What is significant for the virtual environment is the constant remixing and recombination of forms including the grotesque and the uncanny. Here the grotesque is not just about the possibilities of combining the familiar with the unfamiliar and its production of an anti-structure per se. It denotes a ‘latent system of potential alternatives’ (Sutton-Smith 1972: 18–19) in which disorder can yield an insight into societies. These new paradigms can be revealing of the cultural creativity of humanity and equally its human condition in the digital age. This ‘anti-structure’ can denote a plurality or alternative viewpoints and can encompass the radical. The affective consuming communities which emerge on the internet through trauma or the politics of pity may be sustained through a ‘flow’ which Turner (1974: 89) describes as creating a communitas seeking communion with one another where the flow enables a spontaneity and the unanticipated. However, more importantly, with relevance to the online sphere, communitas and flow point to the nature of the experience conjoined to the symbolic resonance of the icons as well as the new forms of rituals which emerge through this bind. Memes, as part of visual culture encapsulated through the ability to represent the iconic, are about their ability to absorb new meanings and context co-located with their leaping from human to human within the ambit of memetic theory. In such a positionality, memes are ontologically subjective (Schmid 2004: 105) and their subjective modes of existence mean that the symbolic can function at different levels while binding a collective of humanity. It is significant to invoke Tarde’s (1890) Laws of Imitation considering the role of the biological (i.e. the gene) within the social sphere where modes of replication also entail concepts of variation and selection. For Tarde (1890: xi), even the ‘most imitative of men is innovative in some respect’ infusing a recombination as well as mutual reinforcement and hence inserting an ‘interference’ between imitations which emerge in a ­socio-cultural sphere while binding us through beliefs and desires. As such

138  Digital icons concluding remarks Tarde fervently defended the ontologically subjective character of replication. Also important in this articulation is the notion that a person’s desires and beliefs can be co-located with those of others without completely foreclosing the autonomy of the self. While memetic theory was positioned through human behaviour and the mechanisms in which we imitated deeds and ideas, this enmeshing of human actions and conditions within a digital architecture calibrated through capital is to invite new readings into both memetics and aesthetics and our ability for sublimation and equally denigration of the sacred, and within it the manifestations of the iconic.

The aesthetic theory, memetics and the iconic The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important… (Shklovsky 1916/200416) For Viktor Shklovsky (1917: 16), the function of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. At this juncture, the aesthetic theory of the internet through the travel of the iconic weaves in a number of elements which underpin both the importance of the aesthetics of the internet and its wider architecture in which the memetics as outlined in the earlier section occurs. The travel of the iconic which has been covered in this book is not linear, neither is it all encased through a historical lens of past events occluding the ferocious movement and momentum of the iconic at points in online realms. Certainly, within the analyses of these varied narratives presented are dominant and resonant themes which emerge emphasizing the iconic as a cultural purchase which is contentious yet sustained through a communal imagination of enacting myths which suppress and express human anxieties at conscious and subconscious levels. The icon in some senses is rebirthed on the internet, disembodied yet realized through the convening of communitas which consume and produce it and as such are involved in a social process of re-signifying the symbolic or in forms of ‘interference’ (Sutton-Smith 1972) with the reproduction of the icon online. This resurrection in online spaces coalesces the iconic within popular realms of imagination where it can be abstracted from an event to emerge through its pathos as in the case of Neda Agha-Soltan to be immortalized as a martyr, an entity suspended between earth and paradise on the internet, absorbing the cultural and religious readings, venerated through the protest movement in Iran or to be absolved of its material context.

Digital icons concluding remarks  139 Events can proscribe but icons are also lifted out of their austere conditions as in the case of Alan Kurdi, where memes breathe life onto death and equally elongating the grim possibilities of his adulthood. There is both veneration and effacement in sharing where these can interfere with its positive symbolic signification, recoding it with the puerile and the profane or Freud’s notion of the uncanny. For Freud (1919), in ordinary adult reality the ‘uncanny’ can emerge as repressed infantile complexes encompassing the castration complex, womb fantasies or death as a threat. Freud’s notion of the uncanny has been utilized to discuss events or phenomena which lie beyond the perceptible and in igniting the effects of the unconscious. The uncanny is also the co-existence of the familiar with the strange, and the ways in which certain modes of behaviour and desires can recur. Freud locates these drives as forces within us, over which we might not have complete control, and which reside in the unconscious. Freud also locates the uncanny through feelings of ‘doubleness’ where something strange coexists with what is most familiar inside ourselves, revealing the effects of the unconscious (Rivkin & Ryan 2004: 389). In Mythologies, Barthes (1973) points out that cultural artefacts reveal supplementary and latent meanings embedded within everyday life, constituting metaphorical repositories of collective desires. Encapsulating collective modes of meaning-making and norms, they can regulate group behaviour or reinforce a sense of a moral community. As such, the notion of ‘myth’ can denote consumer culture within a technological society where objects mediate individual experiences with the symbolic, shared vernacular, ideologies or conventions assimilated consciously or unconsciously (Huppatz 2011: 88). The production of memes within the memetics of the internet is the sensation of making the familiar unfamiliar. Drawing on Leo Tolstoy’s techniques of ‘defamiliarization’ in his writing, it involves the removal of automatism from perception such that the familiar can appear strange, even uncanny (Shklovsky 1917: 16). The Napalm Girl, the Tank Man, Neda, the Jihadi Bride and Alan Kurdi are thematically subsumed through an Orientalist Gaze. As cultural products in terms of a postcolonial critique, ‘they represent the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order’ (Babha 1994: 171). As such the construction of the ‘other’ entails ‘continued interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences and far from being static it becomes an overworked historical, social, intellectual and political process’ (Said 1995: 329). The iconic ‘Other’ is a site where perverse imagination can unfold through the othering of Orientalism and its invocation as a stereotype in social and collective memory such that the iconic can elongate the gaze, enabling its objectification as the exoticized sublime or dangerous entity marked out for its turbulence and ingrained through sacrifice or bodily distortion. The Orientalist readings in Othering the iconic means that it

140  Digital icons concluding remarks can transcend and equally be suppressed through its cultural identity infusing stereotypes with and through the iconic. The Other, for Jacques Lacan (1970: 186), can signify many things whereby ‘the Other is the structure that produces the subject’ and the iconic symbolizes the subjectivity of the orientalist gaze, infused through its alterity as a site of persistent desires and fantasies of bodies abstracted and disembodied, refracted through death and immortalized through the virtual. Death produces no settlement on the internet, abstracting the corpse for performance and propaganda. This restless death imagery produces a macabre avatarism of the mortal dead where they function with and through the instrumentality of the online aesthetic regime. The Orientalist readings of the icons in this book illuminate that postcolonial criticism remains in a bind, ‘haunted by the reappearance of colonial images and ideologies of Orientalism re-inscribing Orientalist sites of memory within the contemporary context’ (O’Riley 2001: 49). For Said (1995), the Orientalist trajectory produces a repository of stereotypes which predominates the Orientalist gaze, including its erotic dimensions. Another dimension is the fusing of the temporal with Orientalism. The present is haunted and hybridized by the colonial past, producing ‘a signifying time for the inscription of cultural incommensurability where differences cannot be sublated or totalized’ (Babha 1994: 177). The Orientalist readings also offer the transcendental journey online and a ferocity of travel where they can be conferred sacred status or revert to the profane. Alan Kurdi’s image as the tragic migrant straddles a whole spectrum of being reified to the desecrated through an Orientalist Othering gaze contextualized against the desperate refugees seeking to reach Fortress Europe. Death and drowning become both strange and familiar, as a site of refugee politics within a hard-line European politics of immigration as fluid bodies trapped between death and ‘bare life’. This essentialist otherness becomes an igniting force which enables seismic and sharp transformations online, marked by the schizophrenic avatarism or reincarnations as in the case of Alan Kurdi as a turbulent entity who can be both a child and a demonic adult, attesting to the West’s sordid predicament of the dangerous migrant who will sexually harass White women and rob the West of its civility. Composed through the pathos of mainstream media and altered through race and alt-right politics online, Alan Kurdi is a figure positioned through the affectivity of the grotesque where he is enlisted to impose a radical alienation on the world, emphasizing the absurdity and the demonic as intermittent possibilities (Kayser 1963). The grotesque is not only in the constructions of the iconic but ingrained in the very process of producing this art. Memes which transmute Alan Kurdi into a lascivious sexual harasser veer into the dimension of the grotesque. In such a conception, Kayser contrasts the grotesque against the ‘fantastical’ evident in fairy tales yet not constructed as familiar and not foreign to us. Thus, the grotesque foregrounds a connectivity to our

Digital icons concluding remarks  141 familiar world and the alien other world suggesting its malleability but also an aversion from acceptable human forms (Clayborough 1965). Ruskin (1903–1912: 3), in speaking about grotesque art, asserts ‘that the imagination, when at play, is curiously like bad children, and likes to play with fire’, and thus ‘it is hardly ever free from some slight taint of the inclination to evil’. The co-location of creative play with evil or the forbidden surmises the grotesque as a missing element in the discussions of the aesthetic theory of the internet where these are in waiting to efface the iconic. For Ruskin, the grotesque is the binding of the fearful with the ludicrous. Within the ambit of transactional social media platforms these arouse amusement and fear and as such the potency lies in the combination of contrasting emotions (Jennings 1958: 14–15). Humour, the ludicrous and the subversive recombine online creating a thin boundary between the horrific and the playful. This is the condition in which Alan Kurdi’s dead body is found, contextualized against the politics of migration and infusing forbidden ideas to extract the innocence of a dead child. In unsettling the category of the child, the narratives of the icon reveal the child figure as one that can reflect the desires of the West onto the East as an entity for expulsion. The Orientalist child category, in the case of the Napalm Girl, is the site of the ambivalent in the politics of the iconic, to be inscribed as an object of nudity and hence recoded through the pornographic gaze of the West but not through the violence of warfare it wreaks on the most vulnerable subjects of war. The Orientalist child submerged through death and warfare is not contextualized through a normal childhood but imagined through its abnormality and disembeddedness from society and hence amenable to sustained dislocation through the violence of memetic cultures and forms which abstract it for sordid pleasure and vitriol. Thomas Cramer (cf. Steig 1970) distils the grotesque as an expression of anxiety ignited through the comic pushed to the limit and equally the means with which the grotesque is defeated through the comic in face of inexplicable anxiety. Hence, the location of the ‘grotesque-comic’ is to create anxiety as well as to relieve it. The grotesque is the strange and alien yet seemingly possessing human qualities. Thus, an ambivalent response can be accorded: on the one hand there is anxiety over the human qualities which are defaced and yet the recognizability of the human qualities is also about the denial of these (Steig 1970: 256). The relationship between the anxiety and the grotesque becomes an ambit of focus drawing on the comic and the horror. Michael Steig (1970) invokes Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’, locating it within the boundaries of the fearful or repressed infantile fantasies, wishes and impulses. As such if the fantastic is about the fairy tales, the uncanny alludes to the grotesque. The grotesque through its distortion of form channels them into the harmless while underscoring the nature of the anxiety it produces. The grotesque then works through the double bind of amplifying and assuaging

142  Digital icons concluding remarks anxieties. The occurrence of the grotesque in literary form has been well studied (Kayser 1963; Clayborough 1965; Thomson 1972), alluding to ‘distortion of persons and objects, the yoking of incompatibles, the fusion of the fearsome and the ludicrous, inducing in the reader a sense of dislocation and insecurity’ (Nettels 1974: 144) and the sense that the totality of human experience is beyond ordering (Barasch 1971: 164). For Bakhtin (1968) and Kayser (1963), the intermingling of seemingly incongruous elements and the juxtaposition of opposites challenge the expectations of the audience. For Bakhtin, the grotesque celebrates the emancipatory potential of breaking down ideological barriers. In this mode of the grotesque as defined by both theorists, the juxtaposition of incongruous elements points to a fundamental absurdity, a terrifying emptiness and even a demonic disorder in the universe (Lokke 1988: 7). In many senses, the grotesque is something we are socialized into in myths, fables and fairy tales produced through their own intrinsic logic. The grotesque-comic sublimation seeks to overcome anxiety and, in the case of Alan Kurdi, this particular manifestation reeks with the anxiety of the West about invasions of foreign Others who will put a strain on public spending and pose a moral threat to society. In tandem, the Jihadi bride appropriates colossal power in her re-­ imagination through her ‘facelessness’, on the one hand, and her re-­ imagination through the attribution of a name as in the case of Shamima Begum, on the other. Her association with the monster terrorist ascribes her as incapable of being a unitary subject sustained through an animality and assembled through atavism. She is not exotic and amenable to the attributes of the pristine, as in the case of Neda, but a symbol of destruction for the enlightened West in which the secular purity of the West is invested in her expulsion and her ultimate statelessness. Her black-cloaked body swathed through perversity as an object of desire of the monster terrorist means she is denied both humanity and, equally, the innocence of the misled teenager. Her bodily desires can only be coded through their abnormality, mystification and tendency to evil. She is the biopolitical site of geopolitical risks, particularly terrorist ideologies which infiltrate the West through the religion of an Eastern god. The Orientalist readings of both the Jihadi Bride and Alan Kurdi inscribe Foucault’s (1982) ‘biopower’ where power relations climb into bodies, inserting itself in reframing them through its reach. Neda and her death as a bystander against the agitation for political change in Iran also constructs the East through its ‘imagined geography’ as oppositional to democratic values and conditioned through its atavism. Long-standing tropes of the Orient are re-circulated and re-deployed with the Orientalized icon of Neda while domesticating her through the consumption cultures of the internet. The politics of Othering reinstate this cartography of the East, leveraging on its qualities to assault Western senses through the unexpected and untamed. This equally accords its theatricality (Gregory 1999) and, in the

Digital icons concluding remarks  143 case of Neda, a ritualized martyrdom unfolding through the ‘platform vernacular’ (Scott 2017) of the internet using its modes of user-friendly tools to produce, commemorate and mourn an icon through the pathos of her death in a militant land. The negation of her martyrdom in Iran and the agency to install her within the martyr category impress a global imagination of the slain innocent. She is the classic embodiment of purity within a fairytale narrative of the tragic innocent damsel sacrificed by brutal forces. She invokes good and evil in polemical terms to incite a communal imagination to install her as the martyr transcending cultures and religions. Her exotic origins and senseless slaying refresh the mystic and brutal qualities of the Middle East, and her martyrdom online becomes a redemptive endeavour, to renew her slain blood through the potency of communal grief. Within the concept of the libidinal economy is the role of ‘play’ in which digital games provide a new spectrum of immersion transforming the players through the interface of ‘automaton and autonomy’ (Haraway 1991: 139) conceiving the body through its entanglement with the medium. The body as a distinct category dissolves, positing it in relation to its immersive environment. The ‘cyborg’ as a new ontology for Haraway (1991) dissolves the distinction between ‘nature and culture’. For Freud, play becomes central in understanding desires as well as the mechanisms to cope with loss. For Walter Benjamin, there is revolutionary potential in play. The repetition of a child’s free play he discerns as being uninhibited by any models, rules or conventions, as such ironically posing a threat to established order (Powers 2018). Beyond digital games, memes as playful devices reiterate order while challenging its conventions through humour. The psychological foundation of jokes, for Freud, is foregrounded through the childlike impulse to play where this can function as an outlet for repressed pleasure, namely, the childlike joy of nonsensical wordplay (Powers 2018: 725). Memes as artistic endeavours and aesthetic forms can also constitute a moment of shared unconscious identification between creators and their recipients. Play can then thwart the conventional while centralizing resistance by foregrounding it. Effacement, denigration, pleasure and poetics through art particularly through events of trauma have been critiqued over time, encapsulated through Adorno’s (1982) illumination of the aporia of art with his phrase ‘after Auschwitz’. In imposing a chronotopic break, ‘before and after’ the Holocaust, he calls attention to our ability to represent the unrepresentable but to also experience pleasure in sites of unmentionable horror. For Rancière (2009), art transcends but also inscribes the political yet is autonomous from it, in partitioning our senses and in re-distributing it. Rancière conceives of art through its breakaway qualities and into aesthetic realms of the sensory. Art and trauma have a quintessential bind with forbidden pleasures which art extols through sites of suffering. The icon is a space of re-imagination beyond its mortal existence, re-rendered and resurrected through art, acquiring new morphologies online where its possibilities are unlimited.

144  Digital icons concluding remarks If Neda was positioned within the fantastic tropes of pristine martyrdom, Alan Kurdi was denied the innocence of a child’s death in his later incarnations as an ideological propaganda tool in the hands of the alt-right. The grotesque, the uncanny, the sublime and the lucid lie in a spectrum without distinct boundaries over which the iconic can cross. As such, the icon is produced through myth in which anonymous and disappearing figures like the Tank Man can acquire a celebrity status to be inscribed as a steganographic tool for commemorating the Tiananmen Square protests, while he is forbidden in official sites. The might of the column of tanks, set against the fragility and ordinariness of the Tank Man with his shopping bags, transformed him into a mythic figure without an offline identity who is constantly re-imagined through the valiant efforts of those fighting their political struggles in China. He is abstracted from his historicity to be re-imagined as a cult figure in popular culture, produced through the democratic desires of the West and their incongruent co-location in China. However, George W Bush, an icon of the US superpower, is married to the image of the flying shoe and its constant replay online. Memetic play keeps Bush guarding against the shoes which are thrown at him at a relentless pace in online games. The dodging of the shoe in this memetic play binds social memory through an event in which the ordinary shoe prevails.

Code and governmentality The code and its attendant governmentality of data empires are about the ways in which organizational power is imbricated through the design architecture within which they regulate and amplify the flow of content to monetize their capitalist agenda in maximizing profits. In such a formulation, data itself become a form of primitive accumulation in which intense experiments ‘of the human’ and ‘with the human’ are enacted. If Western democratic politics built their governance on normative notions of accountability without relinquishing the role of capital, in the design architectures of the code, capital works through hidden modes in which machine learning and algorithms form an uncanny intimacy with human actions and through their residues of data, resurrecting humans through the movements and traces of their data shadows online. Industrial volumes of content flow through platforms which in turn regulate content through their own modes of governance and definitions of moral sensibilities. In terms of rhetoric by appropriating the discourse of public interest and advocacy to share responsibly, platform capital has the power to both censor and facilitate content through its own governance architecture and technological gaze. The memetic economy online is premised on sharing as a form of genetic habituation which is inherently engendered in the design of digital architecture such that the code conjoins with the agenda of capital in terms of traffic and profit maximization. The human libidinal economy

Digital icons concluding remarks  145 coalesces with the agenda of capital where its insatiable urge to share forms communitas or communions of grief and comic-sublimations will further power assemblages and networks. In such an assemblage virality ignites as a condition induced through human curiosity to share and experience jouissance through consumption cultures, inciting pleasures in sites of trauma. Facebook defends itself as a technology company which maintains an assemblage of webbed relationships through the sharing of content to power its platform. This ordains new (ir)responsibilities over content ferociously combined with its intense experimentations with human data, and modes of extraction and negotiations over the ‘social human’s’ understanding of privacy. Images as content are re-spun through Facebook’s technological gaze without editorial oversight, mediated instead through algorithmic calibrations in which community standards are enacted by cheap labour, especially from the global south. Historic as well as iconic images swim as ahistorical entities to be remade through Facebook’s technological gaze in which the sacrosanct can be reduced to the puerile, where the Napalm Girl is re-categorized as a forbidden nude image of a child. This opens up challenges for the ethical act of remembering (Sontag 2003). The Napalm Girl is effaced yet again in the digital age as a forbidden nude image of a child pressed through a pornographic gaze of Facebook as a data empire. The reconfiguration of the iconic and historic through its machinations of ‘community standards’ will challenge our social and collective memory and historicity, committing the iconic through the ‘moral sensibilities’ of data empires. Here the Napalm as part of the American chemical warfare on the East as a historic memory and moment of collective redemption against the innocent is reconfigured through a new mode of data governmentality. Inscribed through the technological gaze of data capital, the iconic as a depraved entity in the digital age will require our constant vigilance against this iconoclasm.

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Index

affective 2, 3, 7, 10, 17, 30, 43, 63, 79, 89, 103, 105, 108, 119, 126, 137; see also affective turn affective turn 3 algorithms 20, 118, 119, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131 artificial intelligence 5, 26 asylum 101 avatarism 12–14, 140 bloody 46, 60 bystander 3, 15, 46, 143 Caliphate 85–87, 89 Charlie Hebdo 110 code 1, 2, 12, 13, 14, 20, 36, 41, 44, 50, 127, 135, 144; see also coding system coding system 45 comic 14, 25, 28, 33, 141, 142, 145 commodification 107, 110, 112, 113, 124 communion xi, 7, 15, 34, 36, 42, 49, 53, 64, 103, 120, 123, 137, 145 cybernetic 13 Darwinian 9 desecration ix, 102, 107, 112, 128 disembeddedness 141 domesticating 46, 142 effacement 2, 3, 17, 19, 27, 103, 112, 136, 139, 143 embody 5,6, 40, 48, 57, 58, 61, 75, 77, 104, 118 euphoria 12–14, 19, 111, 123 evolutionary genetics 5, 9, 11, 12, 136 extraordinary 5, 25, 40, 43, 46, 61 forbidden 47, 48, 53, 58, 62, 63, 82, 84, 91, 92, 136, 141, 143–145

genetics 5, 8, 11–13, 35, 36, 135, 145; see also evolutionary genetics gopolitical 27, 118, 142 Greek 7, 8, 51, 109; see also Greek island of Lesbos Greek island of Lesbos 109 grotesque 1, 101, 137, 140–142, 144 habituation 41, 125, 144 Hadith 50, 85 historicity 44, 60, 120, 137, 144, 145 humanitarian 102, 104–106, 111 humanity 7, 13, 19, 35, 42, 43, 48, 63, 64, 74, 77, 83, 103–105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119, 121, 125, 130, 137, 143 hybridity x, 13 indexicality 67, 69, 110, 124 Jihad 50, 78, 86, 93 libidinal economy 1, 13, 19, 134, 143, 144 media event 14, 26, 27, 30, 33, 36, 41, 42, 44, 45, 57, 63, 64, 66, 109 memetics 8, 12, 19, 36, 70, 135–139 mimesis 7, 8, 11, 12, 135 mimetics 4, 5, 10–12, 19, 30–33, 35, 101, 109, 135 monetization 30, 35, 124, 125, 136 mythology 11, 48, 51, 61, 111 ordinary 27, 31, 34, 36, 40, 46, 54, 57, 61, 67, 75, 88, 108, 137, 139, 144 pathos 30, 101, 103–105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 138, 140, 143 phantom 41, 89, 90, 103

150 Index photojournalism 119, 120 popular culture 6, 9, 12, 28, 34, 46, 63, 77, 79, 91, 106, 144 postmodernity 5, 32, 74, 78, 89, 113, 134 primal 6, 11, 33, 35, 44, 83

testimony 43, 45, 46 theology 11, 50, 75, 77, 78, 92 transactional 68, 102, 106, 123, 124, 134, 136, 141 transcendental 3, 34, 140 transduction 14

Quran 50, 51, 78, 85–88, 92, 93

uncanny 1, 137, 139, 141, 144

reincarnations x, 14, 140 revolutionary 4, 19, 137, 143

violence 29, 32, 49, 52, 58, 59, 70, 75, 79, 80, 85, 89, 91–94, 111, 118, 119, 122, 129, 130, 141 virality 2, 10, 11, 33, 36, 48, 52, 53, 91, 101, 106, 125, 126, 135, 137 virtuality 17, 65, 82, 106, 113 vitriol 110, 141 visuality 3, 33, 35, 36, 42, 44, 47, 75, 77–79, 85, 91, 94, 102

simulacra 2, 3, 5, 6, 16–19, 32, 134 simulation 6, 16 spectacle 6, 7, 14–16, 27, 28, 32, 35, 41, 44, 60, 65, 69, 78, 82, 108, 110, 111 spectatorship 49, 57, 61, 63, 65, 69, 102–105, 112 sublimation xi, 19, 138, 142, 145 sublime 1, 33, 54, 103, 105–108, 112, 136, 137, 139, 144

warfare 118, 119, 122, 141 zeitgeist 46