Francois Debrix | Virginia Tech (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Francois Debrix
The social, political, ethical, and cultural theory archives, Dec 3, 2016
Comments and reflections on Lisa Ann Richey (ed), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relat... more Comments and reflections on Lisa Ann Richey (ed), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power (London: Routledge, 2016), and Ilan Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (London: Routledge, 2013).
Over the past ten years, risk theory has been one of the most fashionable theoretical models used... more Over the past ten years, risk theory has been one of the most fashionable theoretical models used to analyse the crises of late-modern society. Introduced by German sociologist Ulrich Beck in the early 1990s,1 and later revisited by Anglo-Saxon constructionist and critical social theorists including Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash and Zygmunt Bauman,2 risk theory has been deployed as a response to many destabilizing trends and fear-inducing phenomena of the 1990s. With the emergence of environmental disasters in the former Communist bloc countries, sweeping political changes in all of Europe, bloody ethnic rivalries from the Balkans to Africa, and growing social inequalities pretty much everywhere, risk theory has risen to academic prominence with its claims to be able to offer theoretical and practical guidelines that will help people to make sense of the inconsistencies of a globalized society (or what Beck often simply calls ‘risk society’). While intimately associated with the problems of the Western world and the collapse of many of the West’s political values (the state, sovereignty, democracy, welfare), risk society affects the entire world because the West has assiduously sought to ‘globalize’ its values and its political system for the past two centuries.
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2018
ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, camp... more ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, the global production and administration of terror, particularly at the level of its image and what we call virality. We theorize the ways in which media not only “mediate” terror, but also function to regulate and/or administer it and, in particular, to exacerbate, amplify, and proliferate images and activities of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across global networks of digital exchange. We argue that key to understanding the strategies and circulating effects of ISIS’s media involvement is the tendency of viral media operations to overproduce, overextend, and oversaturate. The condition of oversaturation denotes a hyperactive global media circuitry that is collapsing under its own weight. This condition reflects a strategic tendency of terror, which underlies all mediatic processing of images deployed by ISIS. It also reveals a vulnerability for terrorist strategy to exacerbate and exhaust the hyperactivity of media, and thus to accelerate the implosive collapse of the globally networked system. We theorize how implicit and unintended effects or outputs of the mediatic processing of terrorist meanings, images, and discourses may work to overstimulate the global system to the point of its reversal, exhaustion, or implosion.
Routledge eBooks, May 20, 2015
... Making of World Affairs Ralph Pettman Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization M... more ... Making of World Affairs Ralph Pettman Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, Andrew J ... Finally, I want to recognize my wife and colleague Clair Apodaca for her loving assistance, care, and encouragement through the ...
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2018
ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, camp... more ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, the global production and administration of terror, particularly at the level of its image and what we call virality. We theorize the ways in which media not only “mediate” terror, but also function to regulate and/or administer it and, in particular, to exacerbate, amplify, and proliferate images and activities of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across global networks of digital exchange. We argue that key to understanding the strategies and circulating effects of ISIS’s media involvement is the tendency of viral media operations to overproduce, overextend, and oversaturate. The condition of oversaturation denotes a hyperactive global media circuitry that is collapsing under its own weight. This condition reflects a strategic tendency of terror, which underlies all mediatic processing of images deployed by ISIS. It also reveals a vulnerability for terrorist strategy to exacerbate and exhaust the hyperactivity of media, and thus to accelerate the implosive collapse of the globally networked system. We theorize how implicit and unintended effects or outputs of the mediatic processing of terrorist meanings, images, and discourses may work to overstimulate the global system to the point of its reversal, exhaustion, or implosion.
new formations, Sep 1, 2016
Abstract:From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies o... more Abstract:From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life in configurations of geopolitical power has often involved the putting to death of populations. While, following Foucault's work, we can argue that late modern political power has been concerned with the management of people's lives or with the 'health' of a population, this capacity to 'make live and let die' (as Foucault put it) is never separate from a modality of force premised upon a right to put to death. Thus, the distinction between biopolitics and what has been called thanatopolitics or necropolitics can no longer be guaranteed. The goal of this essay is to push further the biopolitical/necropolitical argument by showing that, in key contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction, the life and/or death of populations and individual bodies is not a primary concern. What is of concern, rather, is what I have called the pulverization of the human. I consider this targeting of the human, or of humanity itself, to be a matter of horror. Horror's aim, when it enters the domain of geopolitical destruction, appears to be to put bodies to death. But, more crucially, its aim is to render human bodies, beyond the fact of life and death, unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and sometimes undistinguishable from non-human matter. Horror does not care to recompose human life or humanity. This essay briefly details the argument about horror and horror's 'objectives' beyond death. It also takes issue with recent theories that have argued that traces of human life can be recovered from contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction. Finally, this essay offers two contemporary illustrations of horror's targeting of the human by examining the role and place of horror in suicide bombings and in drone attacks.
The social, political, ethical, and cultural theory archives, Dec 3, 2016
Comments and reflections on Lisa Ann Richey (ed), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relat... more Comments and reflections on Lisa Ann Richey (ed), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power (London: Routledge, 2016), and Ilan Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (London: Routledge, 2013).
Over the past ten years, risk theory has been one of the most fashionable theoretical models used... more Over the past ten years, risk theory has been one of the most fashionable theoretical models used to analyse the crises of late-modern society. Introduced by German sociologist Ulrich Beck in the early 1990s,1 and later revisited by Anglo-Saxon constructionist and critical social theorists including Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash and Zygmunt Bauman,2 risk theory has been deployed as a response to many destabilizing trends and fear-inducing phenomena of the 1990s. With the emergence of environmental disasters in the former Communist bloc countries, sweeping political changes in all of Europe, bloody ethnic rivalries from the Balkans to Africa, and growing social inequalities pretty much everywhere, risk theory has risen to academic prominence with its claims to be able to offer theoretical and practical guidelines that will help people to make sense of the inconsistencies of a globalized society (or what Beck often simply calls ‘risk society’). While intimately associated with the problems of the Western world and the collapse of many of the West’s political values (the state, sovereignty, democracy, welfare), risk society affects the entire world because the West has assiduously sought to ‘globalize’ its values and its political system for the past two centuries.
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2018
ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, camp... more ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, the global production and administration of terror, particularly at the level of its image and what we call virality. We theorize the ways in which media not only “mediate” terror, but also function to regulate and/or administer it and, in particular, to exacerbate, amplify, and proliferate images and activities of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across global networks of digital exchange. We argue that key to understanding the strategies and circulating effects of ISIS’s media involvement is the tendency of viral media operations to overproduce, overextend, and oversaturate. The condition of oversaturation denotes a hyperactive global media circuitry that is collapsing under its own weight. This condition reflects a strategic tendency of terror, which underlies all mediatic processing of images deployed by ISIS. It also reveals a vulnerability for terrorist strategy to exacerbate and exhaust the hyperactivity of media, and thus to accelerate the implosive collapse of the globally networked system. We theorize how implicit and unintended effects or outputs of the mediatic processing of terrorist meanings, images, and discourses may work to overstimulate the global system to the point of its reversal, exhaustion, or implosion.
Routledge eBooks, May 20, 2015
... Making of World Affairs Ralph Pettman Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization M... more ... Making of World Affairs Ralph Pettman Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, Andrew J ... Finally, I want to recognize my wife and colleague Clair Apodaca for her loving assistance, care, and encouragement through the ...
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2018
ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, camp... more ABSTRACT Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, the global production and administration of terror, particularly at the level of its image and what we call virality. We theorize the ways in which media not only “mediate” terror, but also function to regulate and/or administer it and, in particular, to exacerbate, amplify, and proliferate images and activities of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across global networks of digital exchange. We argue that key to understanding the strategies and circulating effects of ISIS’s media involvement is the tendency of viral media operations to overproduce, overextend, and oversaturate. The condition of oversaturation denotes a hyperactive global media circuitry that is collapsing under its own weight. This condition reflects a strategic tendency of terror, which underlies all mediatic processing of images deployed by ISIS. It also reveals a vulnerability for terrorist strategy to exacerbate and exhaust the hyperactivity of media, and thus to accelerate the implosive collapse of the globally networked system. We theorize how implicit and unintended effects or outputs of the mediatic processing of terrorist meanings, images, and discourses may work to overstimulate the global system to the point of its reversal, exhaustion, or implosion.
new formations, Sep 1, 2016
Abstract:From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies o... more Abstract:From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life in configurations of geopolitical power has often involved the putting to death of populations. While, following Foucault's work, we can argue that late modern political power has been concerned with the management of people's lives or with the 'health' of a population, this capacity to 'make live and let die' (as Foucault put it) is never separate from a modality of force premised upon a right to put to death. Thus, the distinction between biopolitics and what has been called thanatopolitics or necropolitics can no longer be guaranteed. The goal of this essay is to push further the biopolitical/necropolitical argument by showing that, in key contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction, the life and/or death of populations and individual bodies is not a primary concern. What is of concern, rather, is what I have called the pulverization of the human. I consider this targeting of the human, or of humanity itself, to be a matter of horror. Horror's aim, when it enters the domain of geopolitical destruction, appears to be to put bodies to death. But, more crucially, its aim is to render human bodies, beyond the fact of life and death, unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and sometimes undistinguishable from non-human matter. Horror does not care to recompose human life or humanity. This essay briefly details the argument about horror and horror's 'objectives' beyond death. It also takes issue with recent theories that have argued that traces of human life can be recovered from contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction. Finally, this essay offers two contemporary illustrations of horror's targeting of the human by examining the role and place of horror in suicide bombings and in drone attacks.