The Frames of War and Circulations of Violence

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The following is from Judith Butler's Frames of War (2010, Verso). She argues compellingly that the audio-visual world of media, especially in its mass communicability, has the power to act selectively in the voices and images that it represents to the public. Because of this power over mass representation, communication through the media is able to 'frame' which voices and images, thus which lives, are able to appear within the frame of the screen or radio/podcast. Life is framed in a certain way, often intentionally by those with wealth and power, and this framing can be used to justify injustice by keeping silent and dark those voices and images of the oppressed and destroyed, who are lost through that repressed injustice. In this way, before a war is waged with guns and bombs and cyber-attacks, it is waged on the screen and through podcasts and radio by declaring who counts as a grievable life and who does not. Those who count as lives to be protected and those who do not are established in advance and sensationalized. Mass communication of ideas and images and audio can actually construct a reality within which the public categories of understanding are formed, especially as this relates to representations of violence and war-waging. Moral categories can be shaped in this way. Butler wonders what makes a life worth mourning and why, and, on the other hand, what makes a life nothing more than the loss of an instrument of war, a symbol who dies in necessity 'for the cause of freedom,' mourned ritually, nationally, but not as a person, not as a victim of tragic violence and rage and greed.

Indeed, we must ask: can there be the continuation of war or, indeed, the escalation of war, as we are now witnessing in Afghanistan, without first preparing and structuring the public understanding of what war is, and by attempting to suppress any visual, audible, or narrative accounts of war that might help to break open a popular resistance to war? Television coverage of war positions citizens as visual consumers of a violent conflict that happens elsewhere, at least in the United States where geographical distance from our so-called enemies allows us to wage war without close domestic scrutiny of our actions. It may be that global media operations like CNN actually export the perspective of the US, enforcing a sense of infinite distance from zones of war even for those who live in the midst of violence. But if the framing of what we see challenges the credibility of the claims made about the war, then we fail to be effectively recruited into the war effort by the news.

This has implications for a whole lot more than war. If Butler is right, and I think that she is, then where does this framing, this constituting of reality, stop? Does it stop with the formation of categories for understanding war, or does the framing attempt to constitute the consumer's understanding of basically everything else, as well? It seems clear to me, especially in the recent blending of politics and media (Joe Biden's cameos as a friendly in Parks and Rec, for example), that those with the control over frames have much more at their fingertips than mere conceptions of war-waging. It is, whatever the truth may be, worth considering.

Edit: There are, as it happens, avenues through which images can travel, such as social media, which transcend the control of the powers that be. Often these images capture moments - people and places and things - that come from outside the dominant frames, generally make war casualtiy numbers seem real, human. An image of a crying mother over her war-torn family can have an impact. If enough resistant images arise, then the frame can begin to be seen for what it is. Existing as a kind of potential rallying point for the entire globe, the rise of the hashtag phenomenon is perhaps the most powerful revolutionary device to appear on the political scene in quite some time.