domestic law. Television programs such as Dexter and Game of Thrones, as well as a spate of blockbuster Hollywood films such as Oldboy, have provided a spectacle of violence unchecked by ethical considerations. Any action, no matter how cruel, is justified by the pursuit of ends that claim to provide greater security and often result in a retrenchment of uncontested power. In the actions of the surveillance state and its turn toward vigilante violence, we see these entertainment narratives writ large. This invariably has political and ethical implications for our societies, especially when the use of force and disregard for democratic accountability become familiar but comfortable entertainment themes—ones we can easily connect to. It is clear that the line between fiction and material reality, along with any distinction between the cultural sphere and the traditional sphere of politics and governance, has blurred to the point where it is now difficult to determine one from the other. If this perspectival and moral confusion has become characteristic of our daily experiences, it is likewise the case that forms of violence and violations of civil rights that should be routinely critiqued as unacceptable are now lauded as necessary and effective tactics in the maintenance of power, so rarely are they subjected to critical interrogation.
It is not merely traditional film and broadcast media that normalize a culture of cruelty and the inevitability of the contemporary crises of chronic social disparities and political domination. As already indicated, people are increasingly socializing—and publishing—through ever-evolving Internet-centered technologies. At the cutting edge of this is Google’s remarkable “Earth” platform. Acquired in 2004, it maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained by satellite imagery, aerial photography, and GIS 3-D modeling. Many people no doubt begin their use of this site by walking down various streets where they may have previously lived, harmlessly reminiscing about their childhood. They may even dwell on the corners of the streets where various misdemeanors of youth took place. Google Earth, however, has a more sinister dimension that reworks the voyeuristic terrain. Increasingly, media stories and news articles about high crime–rate areas are using various stills from the site as a safe and effective way to produce visual images. Camden, New Jersey—tragically anointed “most dangerous place in the United States”—frequently suffers from such digital representations. Camden is often described as a “no-go” area, not only for strangers and outsiders but also for the local police force, which is increasingly suffering casualties and deaths. And yet through Google Earth, we are continually reminded that it is possible to walk these dangerous streets. It is possible to venture down the back alleys. It is possible to view the boarded-up houses. It is possible to really see the impoverishment and abandonment. And it is possible to glide past groups of young men on the street corners—precisely those whom we are taught to fear. Except that in this corporate-owned space we can walk through the worst of Camden’s blight while remaining invisible. With the faces of those who live there edited out by Google, they are stripped of political agency and relegated to voicelessness in a medium that offers them up as much for data for as entertainment. Through the corporate gaze of the Internet we engage in reality touring of the most voyeuristic and ethically compromised kind. Such a window into the structural violence experienced by others is justified in terms of technological progress, but reflects a disturbing culture of cruelty that reinforces that the misery of others can be packaged and presented as fodder for an oppressive consumer gaze long trained to spectate uncritically, and then move on to something else.
All this has contributed to the veritable glut of images of suffering that is having disastrous effects on its real occurrences. The sheer ubiquity of violence as a consciously produced and mediated spectacle has contributed to a closure of conscience, compassion, and sensitivity to otherness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the commercialization of new video game systems that openly market violence as a form of fun. Nick Robinson observes that “games have been important in embedding support for militarization through the operation of the so-called ‘military–entertainment complex,’ which has seen close collaboration between the military and videogames industry, the widespread development of military games, and the spread of the military into the production of commercial games.”78 Such interactivity, which eradicates the lines between “virtual” and “realities” continues to infuse everyday life with a militaristic experience in ways that are deeply troubling. As war photographer Ashley Gilbertson notes regarding the request to “embed himself” in the recently released PS4 game The Last of Us Re-mastered, a post-civilizational drama that allows the user to “freeze the game and lets players shoot, edit, and share photographs of their achievements”:
None of the game’s characters show distress, and that to me was bizarre—it’s a post-apocalyptic scenario, with a few remaining humans fighting for the survival of their race! To be successful, a player must be the perpetrator of extreme, and highly graphic, violence. I’m interested in a more emotionally engaged type of photography, where the human reaction to a scene is what brings a story to life. That was tough inside this game. Occasionally the characters show anger, though generally they’re nonchalant about the situation they’ve found themselves in. In the end, their emotions mimicked that of the zombies they were killing. By the time I finished this assignment, watching the carnage had become easier. Yet I left the experience with a sense that familiarizing and desensitizing ourselves to violence like this can turn us into zombies. Our lack of empathy and unwillingness to engage with those involved in tragedy stems from our comfort with the trauma those people are experiencing.79
Violence as a subject is seldom broached with ethical care or duty of thought in terms of its political or cultural merit. Little wonder that people evidence a certain desensitization, as it appears almost impossible to differentiate between the various forms of violence-laden entertainment, most of which is stripped of all meaningful content for the purpose of sales and marketing. Driven by a corporate agenda whose only guiding principle is the commodification and privatization of everything, daily spectacles of violence are now tolerated more than any due care for the subject, as the power of finance dictates a political agenda that profits from their stripped-down, media-packaged productions. Let’s be clear here: there is no such thing as a cultural “pastime” that would allow us to separate or parcel aspects of our existence into neatly marked boxes for intellectual consideration. Every cultural production impacts the attitudes and ideas of its viewing audience, even if only to promote indifference and the numbing of critical thought. How we reintroduce the political into these cultural regimes is therefore of the gravest importance, for it is integral to the experience of everyday life as socially aware citizens aspiring toward a better collective future.
The Ethical Subject of Violence
Jacques Rancière provides an important intervention into the politics of aesthetics by asking how we might move toward a more emancipated conception of the spectator. Or, to put it in more pedagogical terms, how might we give the subject of violence the proper ethical consideration it deserves? For his part, Rancière takes direct aim at the theatrical nature of the spectacle. Such theater, Rancière notes, is politically debilitating, as it strips the audience of any chance to partake in the world on display; for while there is no theater without spectators, our gaze constitutes a “looking without knowing,” in that the order of the appearance is simply taken as given and not opened up to critical interrogation. “He or she who looks at the spectacle,” Rancière explains, “remains motionless on his or her seat, without any power of intervention.” This passivity implies that the spectator is doubly debilitated, separated from the ability to know the conditions of the performance as well as from the ability to act in order to change the performance itself. It therefore forbids us from acting with any degree of knowledge. Passivity works by rendering the audience catatonic and incapable of grasping the magnitude of what just happened. Such passivity thus denies us the ability to act, except in ways that are coded into and prompted by the program. What therefore is required is the creation of counter-cultures that don’t simply retreat into some pacifistic purity avoiding violence altogether, but engage the subject of violence with the ethical care and consideration its representation and diagnosis demand.
We might begin by arguing that there is
