T e e tt no a et Mak h Tmpai f D ah s o

T e e t ino a et Ma h Tmpa o f D a t h s k
Go azt n Mei Iety Voec lbla o , d ,dni & il e i i a t n

Sl a s h

The Temptation of a Death Mask

Globalization, Media, Identity & Violence

Globalization, Media & Everyday Life The concept of global emerged in references to global trade and global war, in the early 1900s; and spread in popular language thanks to a media theory about the formation of mass mediated global village1. These origins overstay in current debate around globalization. Media and political pundits emphasize novelty and originality of the phenomenon and its ties with the birth of market economy and media; but globalization should be conceived as a relatively long-term process. The contraction of space and time, interconnection, and social acceleration hardly represent sudden or recent events in social life. Human societies, across the globe, have progressively established closer contacts over many centuries; recently this phenomenon has, only, dramatically increased. Moreover, globalization should be seen as a series of interlinked processes which are generating new forms of social life. The impetus initially came from economic processes and revolutions in media and means of transport; but globalization has spread into social and cultural arenas. It isnt a tidy process which, from a central power or phenomenon, spread to the whole world; various systems and global microstructures, operating at various levels or scales, influence each other and propagate global interdependence. Global relationships become more interconnected and assume hybridized and non-linear characters; so people are bound together in longer and unpredictable chains of interdependencies.

The early sociological theory of globalization concerned global integration, or the birth of the imperial power; and culture homologation, or the disappearance of traditional cultures. In recent years, many theorists set against this simplistic vision. Featherstone (1996) talked about processes of global integration, de-globalizing reactions; and globalization of differences. In the authors opinion, we shouldnt worry about cultural homologation, because it is better to conceive global culture as a field in which many cultural forms are announced, accumulate, and collide. Giddens (1999, 1994), reviewing the concept of reflexive modernization, introduced that of post-traditional society; where traditions dont disappear, instead they are reflectively transformed in wellsprings of ontological security2. Lash (1999) spoke of a nonlinear process of modernization, emergent chaos and disorganized capitalism; of which the results are undetermined. Rosaldo, instead, contested the notion of culture as an autonomous internally coherent universe. Global world weakens the national borders; but everyday life is deeply permeable and ploughed by border zones, pockets, and eruptions of all kinds. (1988: p.87) In these ordinary border zones, saturated with inequality, power, and domination; people live, communicate and create their own cultures and identities. Culture is always difference, in the authors opinion, and differences dont disappear; people create, around these diffused social border, new hybrid distinctions as orientation towards meaning, gender, class, race, ethnicity, generation, dress-code, food, religion, life style Appadurai describes globalization as a long-term development, but he believes today's world is now an interactive system in a sense that is strikingly new (1996: p.27). The technological

explosion, in the fields of media and transportation, is a turningpoint which pushes interactions to a new intensity and transforms the socio-cultural order. The complexity of new global cultural economy, in authors opinion, cannot be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models; it has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics (1996: p.33). This disjunctures grow out of the disjunctive and increasingly nonisomorphic relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, tecnoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. The suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes These terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors. (1996: p.33). The global world is a word of flows which create tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization; because global flows are locally appropriated by the imagination. The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.3 (1996: p.31) In this context, media play an important role as suppliers of raw materials, ambient and amplifiers for the work of imagination as a social practice. Because of the degree of media penetration and saturation, people live in layered places and it isnt simple to separate their everyday life from these other sets of space. An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on

the globe live in such imagined worlds (and not just in imagined communities) (1996: p.33). Mediascapes, in particular, are constituted, at the same time, by the bigger and more diffused capabilities to produce and disseminate information and by the grooving flow of the image of the world forged by these media. Ideoscapes are also concatenations of images, but they are more directly political (eg. Democracy, Communism). These flows provide large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, keywords, ideas, framing and ethnoscapes to the dispersed audiences throughout the world; but people appropriate these repertories in a creative way and in a specific layered context.4 Many scholars5 have described the process, of people understanding themselves and the world, in terms of self as symbolic project. People create reflectively a coherent narrative of self-identity and make sense of the world by the raw symbolic materials (mediated and not) which are available to them.

Media, Cultures & Global Terrorism The main feature of global culture today is the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another. This effort shows its angry face in riots, torture, ethnocide, and terrorism. Differences and cultures are politicized, by the fluidities of transnational communication and the mutual attempt of cannibalization; and this politicization is often the emotional fuel for more explicitly violent politics of identity (Appadurai, 1996: p.44). The search for steady points of reference, as critical life choices are made, can be very difficult. It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as the search for certainties is regularly frustrated. (ibidem: p.30) The past, religion, cultures and ethnicity become a timeless warehouse of cultural scenario and signs, to which raw resources can be taken in order to create a narrative of self identity, make sense of the world and achieve ones own aims. Identity is a symbolic fiction, instrumental and political, and it is able to aim the social groups engaged in the struggle for the resources6. So people use the symbolic material they have to create a group identity and gain ontological security and power. In todays world people only have the raw material the global flows offer them, in different local layered contexts; and use their imagination to mix these signs and images in a coherent and convenient narrative. Islamic terrorists, for example, arent a pre-modern and isolated organization and their culture isnt a real return to traditional basics of faith. Fundamentalists are a specific reaction and appropriation of global flows of images and ideas; a specific collage-mix of occidental keywords and little block of the Koran. The most

important theorist of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb (19061966), built his own political-religious theory drawing heavily on modern occidental thought7. The effort, to transform the world by acts of spectacular terror, doesnt have any precedents in Islamic tradition, rather it rebukes a European anarchic ideal; in the same way as the revolutionary vanguard has precedents in the Jacobin thought, not in the Koran. The same egalitarianism and rejection of rationality were not characteristics of Islamic medieval tradition (rational), to which fundamentalists recall themselves. The professed faith has little to do with the historical and orthodox Islam. Fundamentalists have created a theoretical collage, stealing scattered pieces from the Koran and reinterpreting them with the modern voluntaristic theory, which was born in the hated West. The fundamentalist elites use this collage to gain power, legitimate themselves and seduce young disoriented people. The impact of global flows on traditions is very deep. It undermine traditional forms of political and religious authority by expanding modes of communication; and, what's more, the new opportunities to create alternative visions of tradition are maximized in global diasporic communities where innovation is a necessity to live in a different layered context. In a fluid and

complex world traditional identity has to negotiate and transform itself in different social and cultural contexts of everyday life. The self becomes itself a border instable zone persistently to forge. This discussion of the media, religion and authority concentrates on the contradictory effects of information technology at the local level, where the circulation of cassettes, text-messages and video clips was initially an efficient method for religious revivalism. At the same time, the flexibility and volume of this religious traffic in information threatens to swamp traditional voices. (Turner, 2007:

p.118) This challenge to traditional authority is stronger in cultures which dont have a clear and vigorous hierarchy. Islam and Judaism are religions without a Pope or a clear leadership; in both the authority of the mullah (master) and the rabbi was based on what I want to call a local, discursive and popular form of authority... A religious leader in Islam is one who has achieved considerable popular recognition and support, and, as a consequence, religious leaders in Islam tend to proliferate and have to engage in disputes about their authority and their ability to issue a fatwa or legal judgment As a result, the democratizing consequences of the

Internet have tended to radicalize a traditional culture of disputatious learning and argumentation. (Turner, 2007: p.119120) The interpretation of original source is a work of art and it is effective when it can respond to the cultural needs of people in different layered contexts. Giddens (1999)has defined this process as reflexive traditionalism in which tradition is a fiction discursively constructed. In a context of invention of tradition and re-articulation of knowledge, a spiral of claims can be the result of new opportunities of debate (above all in less structured cultures). It isnt casual that the most effervescent religions are the least bureaucratic ones like Protestantism, Islam and Judaism. The competitive claim to legitimacy and authority between an infinite number of voices has an inflationary impact on the claims to superiority. To demonstrate my orthodoxy against your claims, I must increase the stakes, and the most promising route to such a claim is to demonstrate that my interpretation of the Law is more comprehensive, more demanding, more exacting and more allembracing But discourse, particularly discourses about religion and its inescapable authority over human life, do not occur in a vacuum; ultimately, these discourses have to be re-embodied and authority displayed in the public space (most vividly through violence). (Volpi, Turner, 2007: p.11) Islamism is a product of global flows they impact and exacerbate a religious crisis of traditional authority, the failures of nationalist governments (political authority), social divisions, poverty and the frustration to suffer effects of global power in a subordinate position. Cetina has analyzed other aspects which bound together modern terrorism and global media. She says new terrorists are organized in global microstructures, structures of connectivity and integration

that are global in scope but microsociological in character. (2005: p.215) Media arent the cause, but they enable and shape the new terrorism. The microstructures use media to organize themselves, to communicate and to get global coordination. But these flows of punctuated communication and integrative coordination couldnt have their effects without a more complex flow of communication; which, by global and wide transmission of relevant events and seductive messages, enables dispersed terrorists to plan, to seduce diasporic audiences and to frame local occurrences onto a global field. This second flow of communication passes through audiovisual media, because they are more emotional and more able to have world-making effects for a wide and dispersed audience. Moreover, these broadcast events are performative, because they call the audiences to a specific forms of action. The sequences of occurrences begin to constitute something of a referential world a thick context that situates individual activities, provides frameworks of interpretation for further events, and is a venue for the renewal of emotional dedication. (Cetina, 2005: p.222). It is a contextualizing mechanism, it enables a spatial and temporal coordination and forges imagined communities. This flow creates not only a collective memory of the group, it also embeds the collective project into the historical sequence. So a new transcendent and fashionable temporality is made. Many members of Al Qaeda would seem to similarly ground their life in moments of transformation. They also appear to be pulled into living-forward toward the end a parallel life that has been delivered over to a new temporality and commitment, while they are at the same time participating in the business of ordinary life. In the terrorist case, the new temporality appears to actively confront, if not embrace, the possibility of personal death as a transitional occurrence en route

to a promised and visually pictured personal paradise. But it also runs forward toward an imagined and ecstatic success of jihad as holy war beyond personal death and toward the future of the community in whose history ones own death is enmeshed Thus, the lived time of terrorism appears transcendent in regard to personal life, and it transcends ordinary time by shadowing it with a second future that embeds everyday activities within a new meaning structure. (Certina, 2005: p.219) Urry thinks that the modern terrorism is tied to the interaction of two phenomena: time-space compression and global media events. Because of the curvature of space-time, wild zones and safe zones have become highly proximate and the social and spatial separation, which cushioned and hid imbalances and tensions, become porous and instable. The wild and safe zones collided in the sky above New York on September 11th in a manner no one in the safe zones had precisely predicted and the effects of this collision are maximized by a media event of macroscopic proportions. This was war as theatre, a spectacle as the images moved instantaneously, simultaneously and irreversibly across the screens of the world, changing in a once-and-for-all way the image-making of violent death. (Urry, 2002: p.64) The amplification of the deed is a key characteristic of any kind of terrorism in history. Terrorism is more a genre of symbolic communication than an attack against a specific material objective. Terroristic networks dont want to win by the destruction of enemy force, but by the destruction of the enemy will (especially of civil people) and by the legitimacy among own population. The link between terrorism and communication is always tight and globalized electronic media allow a local event to become global

and to have impracticable results. Terrorism is a form of violent political marketing and a war by symbolic terror. Terrorists have always selected targets which resonate with meaning. Targets have to be highly symbolic and to represent the power of enemy, his/her heart. The World Trade Center is the symbol of American economic global power and a New York skyscraper is one of the most impressive and widespread iconic representation of American way of life. The destruction of the building, the victims and the economic damage arent the aim of the attack; it undermines the ontological security of American people and forces them to rethink their visions of the world and their belief in their own power and sacred cows. The attack destroys all certainties of the USA and puts in doubt every occidental category of thought.

Terrorism, in this way, trays to destroy the will to fight of the enemy, but it also has to gain confidence and legitimacy. Terrorists have to forge a new community and a new symbolic order (a new way of life) and have to sell this vision to specific dispersed audience which live in different and diasporic contexts. The bigger advantages of fundamentalists are: their identification of a relatively stable set of basic principles which can be easily communicated to a mass; an interpretation more comprehensive and more all-embracing of religion which can respond to all need of orientation; an interpretation flexible and adaptable to many contexts and adhesive to the social situation of subordination in which many Muslim people live; and, above all, a heroic narration of the history and the soul of Islam which can allow people to gain self-esteem, to look at themselves with hope for the future and to have aims. Terrorism emerges as a symbolic language of persuasion which is able to satisfy complex cultural needs of a global community by a process of re-articulation of traditional knowledge and the introduction of this ideology in the global flows of image and ideas (even exploiting the stylistic convention resonates of pop culture and consumer advertising). But this ideology is as effective because it is adapt to the layered contexts in which it is interpreted and to the experience of everyday life of dispersed global audiences.

The Middle East has been, from many decades, in a state of uncertain independence and economic development. The advantages of economic development arent equally distributed and few people live in earthly paradises, while the most live near the poverty line. The authority of the State isnt able to control all the territory and wild zones are diffused. Moreover, the economic development has led to an increase of population without the cultural changes which usually, in developing countries, contain it through birth control. All of this leads to a situation in which most people are increasingly young, poor and without occupation or aim. In a lot of countries of the area the average age is very low and the population below poverty line is very high. Among six countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and Iraq) considered (for the fizz and the centrality in the discourses of global media), the average age of the population goes from 16.8 years to 27 years (with peaks of 44% population between 0-14 years); and the percent of people below the line of poverty go from 18% to 45.2%8. Fundamentalists, railing against rich local political powers and the global power which supports them, espouse popular feelings; and their messages become more seductive when the violence, the continuous wars, the subordination to global power inflamed the fuse and exacerbate a situation already instable.

Fundamentalism offers another very request and rare goods: the ontological security and a frame in which any questions have a clear and simple answer. In a complex world people have to make choices continuously in a context of informational overload and with many alternative possibilities. Fundamentalism is a total world, a clear frame to look at society and one self. It offers turnkey choice for all human activities from foods to politics. People have not to think or to create a narration of one self or of the world, they have all the answers. But the repressed alternatives return, because they continue to excite wishes; so the fundamentalist terrorists of New York lingered in carnal pleasure and others frivolous sins.9 Ideology offers meaning and direction where there isnt. But, the secret of fundamentalism is in violence itself and in the imaginary heroic solution to real subordination. In circumstances where the lived experience of large labels becomes unstable, indeterminate, and socially volatile, violent action can become one means of

satisfying ones sense of ones categorical self it is precisely in situations where endemic doubts and pressures become intolerable that ordinary people begin to see masks instead of faces. In this perspective, extreme bodily violence may be seen as a degenerate technology for the reproduction of intimacy where it is seen to have been violated. (Appadurai, 1998: p.241) Violence becomes a mechanism to produce persons. The original purity of community is re-established by the destruction of the stranger contaminators and community draws close to the sacrificial altar. The atavistic bloody rituals scars the global mediascapes and forges-excites the diasporic community. Al Qaeda is a modern advertising agency. Fundamentalist violence doesnt have an immediate material aim; it is a pure advertising action. It aims to redefine the identity of millions of people, to obtain legitimacy and consent; and, in so doing, to conquer hearts and power. The fancy target is the mass of young Arab, frustrated by the misery and the absence of perspectives. Over this magma of relative deprivation, of lack of meanings, of unattainable wishes; the strong figure, hooded and fierce, stands out. Decapitating the enemy, terrorists create a community dogma by a ritual of sacred violence and purification. The polluter stranger is sent off, the original purity is re-established. The fundamentalist faith, more than a negation of the amoral consumerism and a return to the true faith, is a alternative visual

and fetish spot. To a Eden of unreachable magic goods, it substitutes a fantastic paradise; full of fetish goods in their complete form of prostitutes, magically eternally virgin, ready to satisfy any wish. Al Qaeda offers a simple answer to more elementary human needs: a positive and heroic image of self and a reassuring us. Excepted from the mundane paradise, frustrated and castrated by the absence of power and meanings; the young find absolute certainties and a monolithic identity, which frees them from difficult choices and throws them towards a paradise of lust and heroic immortality. Osama Bin Laden is a media ghost, a fetish to embody to be heroes and saints. The message is strong and adaptable to many different layered contexts. The trajectories of diffusion and appropriation are unpredictable. In the hungry desert, I see fat and happy Occidental. He steals my petrol and helps my oppressor; and I see, above all, virile hooded Arab slaughters the enemy.

In the chaotic suburban sprawl, I see my curled up father; he disowned his religion and worked hard for future. But there isnt future, Im not European, Im terrorist and enemy. My classmates want know what I think of Islamic terrorism; I want know what they think of the colonialism and the hunger. I wish their dress, cars, girlfriends but I only have my rage. Then I see young Palestinian destroy the metallic monster only with a stone. In my small room of college, bored and apathetic, I see my sad, false and empty, father; he walks with his new consolatory mistress, after the last divorce. And I see the medieval certainty of a burqa and the adventurous Mujaheddin stands out against the sunset: heroic like Rambo; bloody in the same way as my loved horrors, full of a solid and reassuring sense. In an African hut, I see any loved things die and, deeply hungry, I see the banquet in American television houses. My sister wants to convince me that these nice people have medications which could curate our parents; but they dont let us to produce this drugs because they invented earlier. Then she vanishes; captured by the father of the motherland and by a Frenchman; because she is a terrorist for a leaflet. So alone, I decide to dream. I cross the desert, almost die. But the paradise is dark. An underground hole for home, everybody hates me and exploits me; nothing to do with my loved soap. Through the windows, I observe white people and I think of the Arabs; they rebel and pray happily in the garage-mosque. Maybe we should fight for our land in the same way. In my small filthy room at Los Angeles, I see Hollywood parties, the stars, the luxury, the lust. I go out and somebody shoots in the street; the police arrests me because Im black and I want see

Angelina Jolies house. I return to sleep, avoiding my mothers syringes, and Im black pissed. We should do as Black Panthers, or, better, as those of Twin Towers; but they are asshole Arab of shit. I push crack on the streets corner, while my sister sells herself on the net to buy the Guccis bag. But a shit policeman runs over my little brother and I get mad and smash everything. The district become inflamed, but the Swat arrives and I, almost, go to Afghanistan so I can shoot against these pieces of shit. You can placate hungry people with a squat of bread; sad, frustrated, insecure and empty people want only give vent to their blind fury. Where there isnt sense, there is death. The Islamic fundamentalism announces a new era; the age of screen-wars. Any crushed body a new spot to spread in global flows and new misery to exploit.

Slash (Gerardo Di Meo)

Postscript 1

Country

Population 0-14 years

Median age Population below poverty (years) line 27 20.4 21.6 16.8 17.6 20.8 18% 25% NA 45.2% 36% 24%

Iran Iraq Saudi Arabia Yemen Afghanistan Pakistan

21.7% 38.8% 38% 43.9% 43.6% 36.7%

Source: The world factbook - CIA

References Appadurai, A. 1996 1998 Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Dead Certainty. Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization, in Public Culture, 10(2): 225247, Duke University Press. "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination," in Public Culture, 12 (1):1-19, Duke University Press.

2000

Bauman, Z. 1998 On glocalization: or globalization for same; and localization for some others in Thesis Eleven, 54, London, Sage. Identity in the globalizing world, in Social Anthropology, 9 (2), European Association of Social Anthropologists. Cutting the Chains of Global Violence, in The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27, New York, Routledge.

2001 2005

Beck, U.; Giddens, A.; Lash, S.; 1999 Modernizzazione riflessiva. Politica, tradizione ed estetica nell'ordine sociale della modernit, Trieste, Asterios.

Bell, V.; Appadurai, A.; Gilroy, P.; 1999 Historical Memory, Global Movements and Violence, in Theory Culture & Society, 16 (21), London, Sage.

Cetina, K. K. 2005 Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies, in Theory Culture & Society, 22(5): 213234, London, Sage.

Cohen, A. 1974 The Lesson of Ethnicity, in Urban Ethnicity,London, Tavistock.

Featherstone, M. 1994 1996 2006 Cultura del consumo e postmodernismo, Roma, Seam. Cultura globale. Nazionalismo, modernit, Roma, Seam. globalizzazione e

Genealogies of the Global, in Theory Culture & Society, 23 (387), London, Sage.

Giddens , A. 1990 1991 1994 Gray, J. 2004 Gritti, R. 2004 La politica del sacro, Milano, Guerini. Al Qaeda e il significato della modernit, Roma, Fazi. La costituzione della societ. Lineamenti di teoria della strutturazione,Milano, Edizioni di Comunit. Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age, Cambridge, Polity press. Le conseguenze della modernit. Fiducia e rischio, sicurezza e pericolo, Bologna, Il Mulino.

2001 Islam, Italia, Milano, Guerini. Macioti, M.I. 2000 Immigrati e religioni, Napoli, Liguori. McLuhan, M. 1967 Gli strumenti del comunicare, Milano, Il saggiatore. Rosaldo, R. 1988 Ideology, Place, and People without Culture, in Cultural Anthropology, 3 (1), American Anthropological Association. 2001 Cultura e verit, Roma, Meltemi. Thompson, J.B. 1998 Mezzi di comunicazione e modernit. Una teoria sociale dei media, Bologna,Il Mulino. Turner, B. S. 2007 Religious Authority and the New Media, in Theory Culture & Society, 24(2): 117134, London, Sage. Urry, J. 2002 The Global Complexities of September 11th, in Theory Culture & Society, 19(4): 5769, London, Sage. 2005 The Complexities of the Global, in Theory Culture & Society, 22(5): 235254, London, Sage. Volpi, F.; Turner, B. S.; 2007 Making Islamic Authority Matter, in Theory Culture & Society, 24(2): 119, London, Sage.

Web Cos' la geopolitica? - Yves Lacoste - Limes http://www.memritv.org/ - The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) The world factbook - CIA http://wikileaks.org/
1 2

McLuhan (1967) Confidence or trust that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self and social identity. (Giddens, 1990: p.374) 3 On the one hand, it is in and through the imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlledby states, markets, and other powerful interests. But is it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge. (Appadurai, 1996: p.31) 4 So much so, Appadurai talk about grassroots globalization, or globalization from below. 5 Thompson (1998), Giddens (1991, 1999) 6 Processes whereby "some interest groups exploit parts of their traditional culture in order to articulate informal organization functions that are used in the struggle of these groups for power" (Cohen, 1974: p. 91) 7 See Gray (2004) 8 Postscript 1 9 Statements from: American girlfriend of one of the terrorists and some traders.

T e e tt no a et Mak h Tmpai f D ah s o

Sl a s h