Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism

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Appenzeller, G. 2015. Wie das Bild von Deutschland in der Welt geformt wird Tagesspiegel, 23 February. Schreiner, P. 2008. Auswärtige Kulturarbeit zwischen Konzeption und Umsetzung. Paper S12. Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. Such processes are not isolated to campaigns of course. Political leaders use visual communication to shape their public image, and subtle differences in visual representation can have significant effects on their public perceptions. Browning, C. 2015. Nation branding, National Self-esteem and the Constitution of Subjectivity in late modernity. Foreign Policy Analysis 11 (2): 195–214.

The domino effect of the Arab uprisings speaks of images as possessing the potential to activate the viewer, not because they impose a uniform meaning – images are always open to interpretation, negotiation and rejection – but because the image can be an empowering agent, enabling citizens to perform a meta-narrative of political agency. The Arab Spring revolutions were people’s revolutions, in which the image of the singular leader was erased, to be replaced with the image of the multitude. It is the people who are now the political agents of the Arab world. President Donald Trump constantly uses images on social media to create an impression of a certain kind of success, power, and leadership. He also appears to be ever mindful of the image he portrays, putting great effort into his stance and gestures, and displays of presidential power. Politics in the Middle East is now seen,” says Lina Khatib. “The image is at the heart of political struggle, which has become an endless process of images battling, reversing, erasing and replacing other images.” Khatib, head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, will speak this coming Thursday at LSE about the evolution of political expression and activism in the Middle East over the past decade. The following text is mostly extracted from her latest book, Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (IB Tauris, 2012).Deutscher Bundestag. 2015b. Aufgaben und Arbeit. http://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/ausschuesse18/a20/aufgaben/260708. U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in February 2017. Images tap into attitudes, but not always in the same way for every viewer. Grix, J., and B. Houlihan. 2014. ‘Sports mega-events as part of a Nation’s soft power strategy: The cases of Germany (2006) and the UK (2012). The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 16 (4): 572–596.

Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. 2015a. https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/strategic-focus.html. Accessed 16 August 2015. Boulding, K. 1959. National images and international systems. Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (2): 120–131. This is a problem, because images tap into a fundamental element of human reasoning. They have a resonant power to stir strong emotions – of fear, dislike, love, hate, and everything in between. Widely shared footage of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi led to the first protests in Tunisia and the eventual fall of the Ben Ali regime. Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination.

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A different version of the same discussion can be found in the idea of ‘affective and communicative power of visualisations’ that Sarah speaks about in her post published yesterday. Perhaps as criminologists unfamiliar with the visual, we might locate this affect in the materiality of the image as distinct from text, a medium with which we are more familiar. Roland Barthes infamously speaks of the image’s punctum (its power to stir or provoke a personal (emotional) reaction) as compared with another side of a duality, studium (the image’s power to frame or situate a larger cultural or interpretive discourse). Yet, in either case, affect doesn’t exist qua image, but rather comes from the discourses within which we, as makers and viewers, situate it. The image as political is evidenced by the existence of a huge literature written by prominent intellectuals who work across the disciplinary divides of biopolitcs, art history, and visual culture, such as Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, Georg Didi-Huberman, and Jacques Rancière. It was after taking a filmmaking class himself, while working at Manchester University several years ago, that Professor Callahan first became interested in making short films. Although he had studied visual politics since his early career, he hadn’t previously worked on the other side of the camera. PIA/BMI (Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Bundesministerium des Innern). 2006. Fußball-WM 2006: Abschlussbericht der Bundesregierung. Berlin: PIA/BMI. Berbuir, N., M. Lewandowsky, and J. Siri. 2015. The AfD and its sympathisers: Finally a right-wing populist movement in Germany? German Politics 24 (2): 154–178.

Schulte, K.-S. 2000. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik im politischen System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Konzeptionsgehalt, Organisationsprinzipien und Strukturneuralgien eines atypischen Politikfeldes am Ende der 13. Legislaturperiode. Berlin: VWF. Jervis, R. 1970. The logic of images in international relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This exceptional volume examines “image events” as a rhetorical tactic utilized by environmental activists. Author Kevin Michael DeLuca analyzes widely televised environmentalist actions in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Image Politics also exhibits how such events create opportunities for a politics that does not rely on centralized leadership or universal metanarratives. The book presents a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age as it illuminates new political possibilities currently enacted by radical environmental groups. Major, C., and C. Mölling. 2014. The framework nations concept: Germany’s contribution to a capable European Defence. SWP Comments 52. Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. Bonatti, L., and A. Fracasso. 2013. The German model and the European crisis. Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (6): 1023–1039.Oelsner, K., and L. Heimrich. 2015. Social media use of German politicians: Towards dialogic voter relations? German Politics 24 (4): 451–468. This idea that images and other visual media have a critical role in global policy, is central to work by LSE academic Professor William A Callahan. In his recent book Sensible Politics: v isualising International Relations , Professor Callahan argues that the power of visual media and emotion is often left out of areas like academia and politics. The use of symbolism is widespread in the political sphere, as political actors seek to harness the power of social media for impression management. Such devices also prove effective, with even the simplest facial expression able to have a profound impact on people’s perceptions. Van Ham, P. 2001. The rise of the brand state: The postmodern politics of image and reputation. Foreign Affairs 80 (5): 1–6.