A Ritual View of the Spectacle: Mediated (Trans)formations of Meaning and Identity During Crisis
This paper interprets
a program on CNN called "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in terms of its content and form--or more specifically content of form--in order to reveal a political
unconscious of crisis. There appear to exist social and cultural contradictions sublimated via narrative mediation, repression exorcised in hyperreality, although irresolvable in reality. The hope is to express how narrative crises speak to crises in actuality, how either passive or active participation in the story is inscribed when reading it. If, as Frederic Jameson suggests, ideology is created through narrative production, consumption, and circulation, I am hoping that reading for a political unconscious of crises in “Operation Iraqi Freedom” might foster a better understanding about why it is “history that hurts.”
Zones of action ordered simultaneous information to maximize audience consumptive
potential. There were “images of war and liberation” in one zone. In another zone, a narrator in foreground provided the correct discursive frame as one navigates. A third zone was a scroll of text on the bottom of the screen giving brief synopses of the “unseen” war. There were concurrent aesthetic zones of action too. These seemingly free-floating signifiers turn out to be cues, signals, for the viewer to understand what was going on no matter when s/he tuned in.
Obviously, the program's content of from is analyzed with the knowledge that this "television show" is not simulacra, but material forces and tragedies that play out dramatically in their mediation. However, by treating CNN's production as something that can be conceived as fictional in a formulaic sense, sub-textual interpretive possibilities arise; such potential is the at the heart of reading for an unconscious of crisis sought after in this project.