| Intervening in the tendency to analyze recent war media on purely ideological grounds, "Framing the Fight: Post-9/11 Warfare and the Logistics of Representation," puts theories of affect and governmentality in conversation, while asserting the value of industries studies as a way of 'empirically' examining the impact of media and discourse on engagement with American post-9/11 warfare. If power is diffuse, then governmentality, or the "conduct of conduct," must be seen to function within extant socio-economic and cultural formations. Therefore, rather than interpreting texts as ideologically determinant, this project delineates how textual attributes such as aesthetics, and para-textual factors such as branded marketing campaigns interact with governmental rationalities to mobilize affect and conscribe common sense understandings of and engagement with the United States' recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, this project evinces the influence of industrial efficiencies, technological convergence and historical context on the process of rendering war imagery legitimate. In addition to detailing the development and acceptance of a discrete war aesthetic, I analyze how the pathos of war is intricately bound up with both the development and sales of commodities and parse how those commodities then help shape perceptions and engagement. This type of analysis evinces the participation of the private sector in shaping Americans' responses and opens up a space to examine the deployment of governmental rationalities across media sectors. In turn, brand culture can be seen as a crucial formation shaping the representation and reception of war; part of a broader socio-cultural assemblage through which the goals of governmentality are achieved. While the dissertation as a whole is ultimately concerned with the political ramifications of war representation, it does so in order to shed light on the both the limited accessibility of diverse media representations and our constrained ability to 'access' differing perspectives. |
