Tuesday 7 June 2016 - 9.00am-6.00pm
Parkside Building, City Centre Campus, Birmingham City University
The first in a series of annual international one-day conferences on topics of urgent social interest locally, nationally and globally, ‘Terrorism and Cultural Freedom’ assembles a group of world-leading intellectuals, commentators and cultural figures to discuss the most pressing political and artistic concerns of the world today.
Confirmed high profile speakers include W.J.T. Mitchell (founding editor Critical Inquiry, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago), Tariq Ali (editorial board member New Left Review, political and cultural historian and theorist), and Anthony Downey (Downey leads Ibraaz, a visual arts research and publishing initiative focused on North Africa and the Middle East).
In addition to contributions by these speakers, the conference will include short presentations concerned with cultural freedom in an age of global terrorism, related to music, art, fashion, media, writing and theatre drawn from experts within BCU’s own research community to include both historical and contemporary examples.
Speakers and abstracts
Keynote speakers
W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago, USA)
‘From clones to drones: tracking the “War on Terror”’
My 2011 book, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present, attempted to trace the role of visual and verbal imagery (metaphors, scenes, iconic moments) in the period that ended (I thought) with the election of Barak Obama in 2008. The Obama administration more or less openly declared that the fatefully literalized metaphor of a “war on terror” would no longer be part of the administration’s rhetoric. In its place the euphemistic phrase “overseas contingency operations” would serve as bureaucratic Newspeak for assassinations and covert incursions by special forces, and for a determination not to be drawn into any more invasions, occupations, and “boots on the ground” in the Middle East. If cloning had provided the metaphoric frame for the Bush-era phase of the War on Terror, with its biopolitical connotations of sleeper cells and the viral contagion of terrorist movements, drones provided the emblematic technology for the new precision-targeted and virtualized warfare. My talk will attempt to trace the evolution of the War on Terror from clones to drones, and to examine the role of images and image-destruction more generally in the conduct of this war.
Tariq Ali (Editorial Board, New Left Review, UK)
‘Terrorisms past and present: trajectories, responses, solutions’
Terrorism has existed for many centuries. The first recorded conscious suicide terrorist was the unknown Spaniard who blew up a French armoury (and himself) during the Peninsula War in the nineteenth century. The different forms taken by terrorism have varied but the basic assumptions are, in most cases, the same. Most studies of the current wave of jihadi terrorism tend to be ahistorical, thus decontextualising the object of study. A further problem is the general acceptance of double-standards by ruling parties and attached media outlets. The domestic and external responses by the State to the latest wave are both similar to the past (Ireland, Algeria, Palestine) and different. To obliterate or outlaw any serious discussion of causality and embark on repression of one variety or another is counterproductive on every level and merely prolongs the process. A different approach is necessary if the object is to return to a state of peace. There is also the problem posed by the terror deployed by the State in its responses to individual or group terrorism that has seen changes in law: the dumping of habeas corpus has led to imprisonment without trial, arbitrary arrests, states of emergency, etc. Leaving aside all other considerations the question has to be posed: is any of this effective?
Anthony Downey (Ibraaz and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, UK)
‘Hermeneutic suspicions: contemporary visual culture, insurgency, and the future of archiving conflict in the Middle East’
A crisis in critical and historical interpretation has emerged in relation to the prolific number of digitized images that continue to flow out of the Middle East. This “hermeneutic suspicion”, a form of interpretative anxiety, affects how we understand the nature of events — specifically conflict-based events — and how they will be archived for future reference. This is not about an unwitting, aberrant, or accidental form of image-production; rather, this process involves the conscious, systematic and institutionalized presentation of visual material — deployed by insurgents, counter-intelligence agencies, and media outlets alike — that is strategically designed to produce doubt and suspicion in interpretative practices and image-based archiving. The emergence of iconoclasm as a key strategy in insurgent conflicts has added to this sense of interpretive anxiety. Recent events in Mosul, Nimrud, Tal Afar, Tikrit, and Palmyra, whilst not without precedent, have given rise to a number of questions associated with forms of “hermeneutic suspicion”: to what extent are these images being staged or re-enacted (complete with high production values and editing techniques); who are they being staged for; and, crucially, whose interests are being served in the moment of their global dissemination and reception? As these conflicts, alongside their iconoclastic objectives, engulf large swathes of the region, it is notable that artists have been exploring precisely these dilemmas and focusing on the question of hermeneutics and archiving for some time now. A central component in these practices continues to be an exploration of how the increasingly digitized substance of conflict-based images, in terms of both dissemination and reception, has produced a systemic and perhaps irrevocable crisis in broader institutional and state-ordained archiving. Drawing on a number of pertinent examples, the following talk will propose discrete forms of cultural production based on “hermeneutic suspicion” that not only address and explore interpretive dilemmas but suggests speculative, if not more viable, strategies for archiving conflict in the Middle East.
Shorter papers:
David Roberts (Birmingham City University, UK)
‘Historicizing terror: Macbeth in the seventeenth century’
This paper seeks to historicize the relationship between acts of terror and discourses of freedom through an examination of the changing face of Shakespeare’s Macbeth between its premiere in 1606 and Restoration performances seventy years later. It is widely accepted that this, one of the great canonical works in the English Language, was inspired partly by the 1605 Gunpowder Plot; revivals on November 5th became traditional. Macbeth granted freedom to generations of spectators and readers to perform what in law remained a capital offence: to imagine a primal act of terror against the state. Critical dispute as to the play’s ideological leanings (conservative apology or radical enquiry?) underestimate the inherently unstable festivity that characterized the play’s reception, relying instead on more singular conceptions of freedom now and in the Seventeenth Century. In a further refinement to current disputes, this paper considers the way changing theatrical aesthetics in the Restoration period exploited the high tide of cultural paranoia that arose from the largely fictive Popish Plot of 1678, and so reduced festivity to the punitive parameters of policy. The early stage history of Macbeth, it is therefore argued, is the history of a representational anxiety about terrorism that continues to haunt us.
Andrew Kulman (Birmingham City University, UK)
‘Graphic depictions’
One of the most politically powerful responses to the barbarism of both the West and Middle East has been the visual language generated by reportage drawings, political cartoons and graphic symbols. The Charlie Hebdo covers with their trite depictions of the Prophet to the simple but widely distributed peace symbol incorporating the Eiffel Tower. Suddenly the pen and brush become the new weapons, social media a vast platform. The presentation will be highly visual and stirring but will stop short of offence.
Jonathan Day (Birmingham City University, UK)
‘Orwell, Camus and a Belarussian Ulysses: art school rock and agitation’
Orwell missed the mark with 1984. He was 30 years out. The book’s utterly unlikely two way TVs are now in almost every home and children are, as he predicted, dragged from classrooms and interrogated for terrorism. Orwell posited three global power blocks practicing false flag terrorism on themselves in order to control their populations and assure compliance through fear. Just the thing suggested by current internet memes around bankers and politicians funding groups such as Daesh, with extensive, well referenced and plausible arguments. If there is truth here, then a group who are paradigmatically terrorist in the media are, as in the novel, sponsored by the heart of the Western establishment. This contested ground between ‘revolutionary’, ‘freedom fighter’, ‘partisan’ and ‘terrorist’ – and the fear of such labeling – has implication for personal and artistic freedom. Albert Camus proposed a modus vivendi in response to such forces that embodies personal revolution, and seems to me appropriate for those of us engaged with art as a prophetic activity. He defines this in Sisyphus, whose eternally rock pushing hero represents the only valid response to the vicissitudes of existence. He goes on to acknowledge in The Outsider that this proposed lifestyle can easily slip into socially mediated conceptions of ‘terror’, thus emphasizing the contested nature of the nomenclature. I don’t intend to overly dwell on these definitions – Camus’ ideas extend significantly into music, most notably at the time through Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, thanks to Miles’ Parisienne girlfriend and her friend, Jean Paul Satre. I’m interested here in citing a lived example from my own experience of peaceful creative opposition to a regime - an opposition which was doomed to failure, though we did not know that at the time. In the 1990s my band toured a message of solidarity and played alongside Ulis - a Belarussian rock band of state funded sculptors - in an unfinished theatre liberated from the government by artist activists. This prefigured Pussy Riot and the Belarus Free Theatre’s ‘I’m with the Banned’ shows. Our undertaking had success and beauty and received official praise, but Belarus nonetheless slipped back into totalitarianism. This paper will present ideas, images and sounds from this instance of artist activism.
Paula Barreiro-López (University of Barcelona, Spain)
‘Franco’s state terrorism, avant-garde and the fate of memory’
In 2013 the Catalan artist Nuria Guëll resuscitated (at least virtually) several Republican soldiers assassinated during the Spanish Civil War. She purchased with credit cards she had issued in their names all kind of merchandising related to Francisco Franco from the online shop of the Fundación Francisco Franco, whose mission is to “defend the truth and the legacy” of the Spanish dictator. Afterwards, she buried all items at a non-specified roadside, reproducing the fate of thousands of Republicans killed in masses during and after the Spanish Civil War. Using the means of transnational and global capitalism, this artist found a way to enter in a pro-active dialogue between the past and the present, between Franco’s politics of terror and revenge and the still on-going trauma in Spanish civil and political society. Since the coup d’état on July 18th 1936 and throughout the whole dictatorship, Franco’s regime instituted a state of permanent terror with the aims to eradicate freethinking, to legitimate its endemic violence and to “correct” Spanish society. If the extreme violence of the war became institutionalised during the 1940’s in the legal system, expressing for example through harsh sentences (including death penalties) against real and supposed opponents (in order “to erase the red disease”), the entrance of the regime into the Western camp of the Cold War in 1953 changed the appearance, but not the means. Terror and surveillance continued to be implemented while a more sympathetic face was exported aiming for financial aid and international investments. At that moment avant-garde art became a tool to address the trauma of the (consciously implemented) state terrorism and combat it. This paper will address the ways in which the avant-gardes/visual arts antagonised (and endured) the politics of terror implemented in Spain during the Franco regime. It will show how artists became active participants of the forces for cultural freedom and helped decisively preparing the ground for a change of mentality in Spanish society that eventually led to democratic elections in 1977, after the death of the dictator in 1975. Nevertheless, even though the transition from dictatorship to democracy is presented by mainstream accounts as peaceful and exemplary, the historical revision of Francoist state terror is still continuously obstructed with legal means to political ends. Hence, this paper will also show how today visual artists continue to contest the legacy of Franco’s regime and how they help inciting a pro-active dialogue about the trauma of the past in contemporary Spanish society.
Jenny Harding (Birmingham City University, UK)
Title and abstract to come
Dima Saber (Birmingham City University, UK)
‘“This is our Call of Duty”: ideology, history and resistant videogames in the Middle East’
In recent years, non-state actors in the Middle East have engaged a new generation of activists through a variety of media strategies. Notable amongst these have been a series of videogame interventions, which have appropriated Western game products to convey specific political and religious messages through the inversion or complication of the roles of hero and enemy. This paper explores a selection of such media, produced by or in support of two prominent non-state groups, Hezbollah and Islamic State (IS).The paper takes a discourse theoretical approach to examine the ideologies presented in these media, and reflects on the ways in which these game artefacts engage with, and reject, Western narratives of history and of US pre-eminence. It concludes that, while these game interventions challenge existing hegemonic (re)presentations of the Middle East and the ‘War on Terror’, they remove or reduce agency to the extent that those who engage with these representations can only witness these challenges, rather than instigate their own. This provides support for Chantal Mouffe’s (2005) proposition that the result of resistance is to in effect reproduce the hegemonic frame.
Mathew Teti (Columbia University, USA)
‘Media hijack: Chris Burden and the logic of terrorism’
On February 9, 1972, American artist Chris Burden hijacked a television show on which he was being interviewed by a friend and colleague in Orange County, California. Holding a knife to the throat of the host-turned-hostage, Burden demanded that the show switch over to live air, as this was only a taping of the program. His demand was met and after Burden’s demonstration of TV Hijack, the artist destroyed the station’s copy of the proceedings by unspooling the tape and dousing it with acetone. In TV Hijack, Burden displays a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the fate of terrorist plots that sought to deliver political messages through media exposure. Recognizing that the image of the terrorist, militant, or revolutionary subject was easily compromised and manipulated by the media, Burden insisted on live transmission and destroyed the visual evidence of his hijacking, thereby stifling the media’s ability to harness his image and re-present his actions. This paper analyses TV Hijack from two perspectives: one brings bear research on how terrorism functioned in the mass media of the time; while the other looks at the social and cultural climate in which hijacking and skyjacking had become tropes, born from the news media.