Reviews

Jeff Lewis (2005) Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence.

London: Pluto Press, ISBN: 0-7453-2484-3 (pb).

Anyone attempting to blend together ideas drawn selectively from Virilio, Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Laclau, Žižek, and even Heidegger, runs the risk of incoherence, but in this intriguing book Jeff Lewis somehow manages to negotiate himself a relatively safe passage towards clarity, despite such eclecticism.

This book is concerned with some of the most prominent political and cultural problems faced in the contemporary world, in particular, the role of the mass media, its relationship with global terrorism, as well as the problems that political liberalism can encounter in relation to the limits of its pluralism. Throughout, there is evidence of a concern for the interactions between democracy, media networks, the nation state, texts, and audiences - the general convergence of which Lewis refers to as the 'mediasphere'. Because he views terrorism as a fundamentally communicative act that is dependent (and increasingly so) upon a relationship to global media networks, the book is driven by an interest in the relationship between this 'mediasphere', terrorism, and ongoing competitions over meaning.

As is clear from the above list of names upon which Lewis draws, this is a heavily theoretically informed account, and Lewis brings this weighty theoretical machinery to bear upon a variety of empirical examples to illustrate more general points about the 'language wars' - disputes over meaning conducted largely through the mass media - which he believes are increasingly significant in the contemporary world. Although Lewis does not engage in a close technical analysis of the texts used, the level of detailed discussion is entirely appropriate for work at this level of abstraction.

The book is structured in a fairly conventional manner, and sandwiched between the introduction and conclusion there are six substantive chapters. The first two of these are devoted to explicating Lewis' conception of, first, mediation and its relationship to the representation of terror(ism), and then, his versions of culture, history, and civilisation. The book then moves on to tackle firstly the meaning of '9/11', then the build-up to the recent invasion of Iraq, the Bali bombings and Indonesia's relationship with globalisation, and, finally, the occupation of Iraq and some of its vicissitudes.

In terms of the issues and examples discussed, there are relatively few surprises on offer. For example, there are discussions of the treatment afforded critical voices such as Susan Sontag and Jean Baudrillard in the post '9-11' discursive climate. The media's role in constructing 'weapons of mass destruction' as central in relation to Iraq is explored, as are the significance of the mass media in circulating images of the hostages taken by 'insurgents' in Iraq, and its distribution of images of the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, as well as their relationships to the contemporary 'imperative to represent' (p.242). Perhaps more interestingly, some important insights are generated regarding the 'heroization' of both the victims of terrorism, and the military, and some of their consequences.

Apart from the introduction (which ends with a list of key concepts and a brief paragraph or two defining each) and the concluding chapter, the other chapters all end with a concluding section structured as a numbered summary. Although occasionally useful in making clearer some of the central arguments made within each chapter, these tend to do significant violence to the sophistication of what precedes them, and sit rather disjunctively with the almost poetical quality of the rest of the prose.

At times the book is quite beautifully written. For example, when writing of the 'axis of evil' motif first used publicly in George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech, Lewis writes that: 'With arachnid proficiency the discourse of belligerent politics surrounded and entrapped Saddam and his regime into the web of terror' (p.131). While one might wish to disagree with this claim, as an overstatement of the situation, it is still possible to appreciate such elegance of expression. Occasionally this can also make the reader's head spin, such as when Lewis writes of the 'confluence of corporatised communications with the polemics of political positioning' (p.154)!

Less alliterative, and much less elegant is Lewis' slightly curious attempt to differentiate between 'Muslim' and 'Islam' based upon an associated 'mode of religious belief'/'political ideology' distinction (p.58). Although it is ethically entirely understandable to attempt to formulate a distinction, and has, indeed, become a standard rhetorical manoeuvre to engage in a differentiation of this type when discussing terrorist invocations of Islam, there is, nevertheless, something awkward about the specific way that Lewis draws the distinction, which leaves it open to misunderstandings and has some potential for offence if understood ungenerously.

Given the eclecticism evident elsewhere, it is surprising to see no mention of Niklas Luhmann's account of the operation of mass media in Lewis' discussions of the ways in which they tend to work via the perpetual deferral of meaning (p.34), accruing a 'meaning debt' (p.150) with the continual promise that things will become much clearer in the next bulletin or episode. The book perhaps underestimates the extent to which this has always been a feature of the mass media, which may have merely intensified more recently.

Lewis' argument ends with claims about the potentially positive character of uncertainty, since, for Lewis, it is absolute certainty that appears to be closely connected with almost all contemporary belligerence. Although this clearly important argument is implied throughout it is not deeply integrated with the rest of the book, and will hopefully receive more attention and elaboration in future work.

The book will be of interest to people working within political science, sociology, media and cultural studies, critical theory, and communication studies, and should be read critically, but taken seriously, by anyone interested in the intersections and interactions between terrorism, globalisation, media networks, the state, and how contemporary social theory can illuminate them. Although certainly not aimed at undergraduate students, selected sections may be of pedagogic use in demonstrating how some of the concepts drawn from the various theorists used can be usefully applied to contemporary events and processes.

Joseph Burridge, Loughborough University.