Abstract
Images and representations project and sustain the power to discipline and punish. The power to “evoke emotional responses, demand attention, threaten us, influence memories, and change ideas of what is natural” underlies the influence of images (Reeves and Nass 1998, 251). Transforming images into a simulacrum of experience, television projects fear, panic, despair, hope, moral indignation, outrage, and purpose, signaling that “the conditions in which our beliefs are constituted have entered into a phase of intense evolution” (Stiegler 2002, 149). By increasing the complexity, accelerating the appearance, intensifying the presence, and extending the reach of images and representation, the worldwide spread of television projects and sustains the power to discipline and punish. Television images shape identities and values that sustain global power by giving them stability, coherency, and intelligibility. However, the complexity, speed, intensity, and extent of televisual image production often masks the fact that “reality is always lost in the acts of picturing and describing” (Taylor 1998, 4). The disjuncture between lived experience and representation can be glimpsed through the notion of “global presence”—that is, a sense of planetwide immediacy and “nowness,” of seeing and knowing, which characterizes globalized television practices. To discuss how television blurs distinctions between representation and lived experience, I examine select images from the Iraq conflict in 2003–2004 and relate them to literary narratives of captivity that appeared in colonial North America.
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Dartnell, M. (2008). Disciplining Perceptions, Punishing Violations: Captivity in Televisual Narratives of the Iraq Conflict. In: Leatherman, J. (eds) Discipline and Punishment in Global Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612792_7
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