The Terrorism Spectacle

How terrorism is portrayed by the news media, and thus perceived by the public, is directly linked to government's foreign policy goals. Steven Livingston demonstrates the complex interactions among the press, the public, and political actors in illuminating a policymaking process that relies on image management as one strategy in achieving policy objectives–not just in combating terrorism but also in handling other foreign policy problems.

Henry Giroux's essay awakens us to the ways new media proliferate and circulate images and ideas of terror that order our lives, pervert our pedagogy, delimit our democracy. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to comprehend our times, our politics, our possibilities. --David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine Henry Giroux is one of the sharpest cultural critics today. His new book is an important intervention on media and spectacles. It shows us the depth of the dark side, only to conclude that the same media may be deployed in recovery against the social fragmentation caused by fear and consumerism, which is essential to bringing the country back to the path of decency and justice. --Arif Dirlik, University of Oregon Prominent social critic Henry Giroux explores how new forms of media are challenging the very nature of politics in his most poignant and striking book to date. The emergence of the spectacle of terror as a new form of politics raises important questions about how fear and anxiety can be marketed, how terrorism can be used to recruit people in support of authoritarian causes, and how the spectacle of terrorism works in an age of injustices, deep insecurities, disembodied social relations, fragmented communities, and a growing militarization of everyday life. At the same time, the new media such as the Internet, digital camcorders, and cell phones can be used to energize sites of resistance, provide alternative public spheres, pluralize political struggles, and expand rather than close down democratic relations. Giroux considers what conditions and changes are necessary to reinvigorate democracy in light of these new challenges. Radical Imagination Series

Discusses why terrorists resort to spectacular -- and often futile -- acts of violence; how terrorist groups are organized; their social base; and their strategies and the strategies used against them. Since the late 60s, terrorism has increasingly become a substitute for popular struggle, with the aims of blackmailing the state and capturing media attention. The author, a leading authority on guerrilla warfare, draws on a wealth of examples, from the Red Brigades and the IRA to the Armenians and the Afghan Mujahidin. He explains how the pattern of war has changed from conventional wars to guerrilla wars and the development of terrorist-type actions.

What is ISIS? A quasi-state? A terrorist group? A movement? An ideology? As ISIS has transformed and mutated, gained and lost territory, horrified the world and been its punch line, media have been central to understanding it. The changing, yet constant, relationship between ISIS and the media, as well as its adversaries’ dependency on media to make sense of ISIS, is central to this book. More than just the images of mutilated bodies that garnered ISIS its initial infamy, the book considers an ISIS media world that includes infographics, administrative reports, and various depictions of a post-racial utopia in which justice is swift and candy is bought and sold with its own currency. The book reveals that the efforts of ISIS and its adversaries to communicate and make sense of this world share modes of visual, aesthetic, and journalistic practice and expression. The short tumultuous history of ISIS does not allow for a single approach to understanding its relation to media. Thus, the book’s contributions are to be read as contrapuntal analyses that productively connect and disconnect, providing a much-needed complex account of the ISIS-media relationship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

During the mid-1990s, the O.J. Simpson murder trial dominated the media in the United States and were circulated throughout the world via global communications networks. The case became a spectacle of race, gender, class and violence, bringing in elements of domestic melodrama, crime drama and legal drama. According to this fascinating new book, the Simpson case was just one example of what the author calls 'media spectacle' - a form of media culture that puts contemporary dreams, nightmares, fantasies and values on display. Through the analysis of several such media spectacles - including Elvis, The X Files, Michael Jordan, and the Bill Clinton sex scandals - Doug Kellner draws out important insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies. In this excellent follow up to his best selling Media Culture, Kellner's fascinating new volume delivers an informative read for students of sociology, culture and media.

The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideasgenerated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attackon commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everydaylife continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, publishedtwenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previousanalysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in aperiod when the "integrated spectacle" was dominant. Resolutely refusingto be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through thedoxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to showhow aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, theMafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacularsociety. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logicof domination, Debord's Comments convey the revolutionary impulse atthe heart of situationism.