Global Media Crisis Theoretical Framework The proposed book conceives of crisis in a very different way to Beck's 'risk

society' thesis. Indeed, the proposed book uses the risk society model, particularly as it has been adapted by Simon Cottle (2006, 2009), to propose an alternative perspective of crisis, the media and globalization processes. Cottle's analysis of the news media's approach to the crisis is largely a supplement to the work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 1998), whereby the media is conceived as a responsible agency that must tell the truth about 'risk' and avoid the ideological imperatives of corporate and governmental interest. Beck's work on 'risk society' (1992) and later 'global risk society' (1999) has provided a template for the study of the negative consequences of globalization and its phasal distinctions. rejecting the amorphousness of the concept of 'postmodernism', Beck describes the current phase of globalization as the 'second modernity'. Thus, while the first phase of modernity constituted around enlightenment ideals believed that society would exercise reason and thus be able to control all social risk, the second modernity is characterized by the recognition that such ideals were fanciful. Thus,, the earlier phase of the Enlightenment and industrial modernity is superseded by the emergence of 'risk' society that is characterized by an endemic and somewhat pessimistic social knowledge about predominant global conditions of risk. In a sense, these conditions of risk represent the rupture between an attempt to control the future and the unintended consequences of that project (Beck, 1999: 3). Along with other global sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Joset van Loon, Beck sought to develop a parallel political theory which explains the dissolution of radical politics and the emergence of a new and convergent neo-liberal economic pragmatism which has come to dominate western (and hence global) geopolitical ideas. Thus, both Beck and Giddens observe the decline of the Left and the Right, as a new form of global capitalism comes to dominate world affairs. For both Beck and Simon Cottle (2006, 2009), however, it is the global networked media that is most responsible for the formation of social knowledge of risk. The anxiety and insecurity that has become widespread in world societies is largely the predicate of mediationas Beck calls it, knowledge, non-knowledge, information and misinformation

(Beck, 2006: xiv). Within this complex field of knowing and not-knowing, Beck argues that the new phase of modernity has created a radical shift in the ways in which modern societies organize themselves and their institutions; rather than the economic episteme being structured around the production and distribution of 'goods', the new society is organized around the production and distribution of 'bads'. This new mode of production contradicts the capacity of the 'nation-state' and governments to control and steer the economy and their embedded institutions. Thus, it is the very fact that societies have created security controlling institutions which gives rise to the perception of danger. Globalization, in fact, contributes to the multiplication of risk factors and the interdependence of global scale insecurities around military conflict, climate change or financial crisis. What becomes increasingly clear, particularly through the lens of the transnational media, is that state-based governments can no longer (if ever) 'control the uncontrollable' ' The truly epoch-making difference consists in the expansion of the culturally produced, interdependent insecurities and dangers, and the resulting dominance of public perceptions of risk as staged by the mass media' (Beck, 2006: 22). such views are shared by other sociologists, who describe globalization variously as 'savage' (Nairn and James, 2005), chaos ( McNair, 2006), 'myth' (Hafez, 2007) the end of organized capital (Lash and Urry, xxx) and the 'globalization of nothing' (2004). For media scholars like Simon Cottle, Beck's work represents a critical insight into the formation of globalization and the global networked system. By and large, Cottle views glboalization as a fundamentally negative condition: 'Global crises are an integral part of the global age, its dark side' (Cottle, 2009: 24). For Cottle, however, Beck and other sociologists of globalization and risk have not paid sufficient theoretical or empirical attention to a critical component of this crisis realismthe global news media. According to Cottle, news and news reporting of catastrophe are an integral part of the interdependencies and 'real-world processes' that comprise globalization. Limitations of Beck's Approach Both Beck and Cottle have made a significant contribution to the study of crisis and risk in a globalizing society. In keeping with the critical lineage of sociology, both scholars focus on the 'dark side of globalization' and the ways in which powerful groups assert their

interests over the general populace. This relatively bleak conception of globalization and the media is ameliorated somewhat by an interest in the possibilities of global governance and the democratizing effects of a 'cosmopolitan' outlook (Beck, 2006; Cottle, 2009). Having said this, however, the notion of a risk society and Cottle's own translation in 'crisis realism' offers very little hope for institutional or ideological renewal since the concepts themselves are set within a fairly rigid and pessimistic ontology. That is, the vision of the human that is offered by these theories gives us little reason to think that the micro condition of being human might contribute to a genuine and thoroughgoing refurbishment of the macro conditions that dominate world order and the mediation of social crisis. As already outlined, the current study begins from a very different perspective of human ontology and the processes by which the world is formed. In particular, this study focuses on the primacy of language in creating continuities between individuals and the phenomenal world, this book conceives of the 'real' in terms of the processes of human representation and mediation of the world as it is always and necessarily a contingency of themselves. Thus, in keeping with the fundamental precepts of poststructuralism, this book rejects the idea that the world can ever be objectively reported, but insists rather that the telling of the truth is always the predicate of human consciousness and the cultural politics with which we engage. This vision of the human experience , thus, insists on the primacy of language, giving greater sway to the potentiality of personal agency, creativity, and above all the human propensity for pleasure as personal as well as communal gratification. *****************

SUMMARY OF ARGUMENTS REGARDING RISK SOCIETY The current study conceives of crisis in terms of the conditions of human desire articulated both through the meanings inscribed on the human body and the processes of cultural and social asemblage . These processes of assemblage are formed in relation to mediation, economy and a cultural politics that works through the flows and counter-flows of globalization. I want to move away from a conception of 'risk society' as the negative consequences of globalization or a second wave modernity. Nor do I want to consider social change or 'history' in terms of the aleatory effects of what Badiou calls 'the event'.

The proposed book, therefore, argues that the notion of negative consequences or random events should be conceived in terms of a more pluralistic patterning of human desire. The proposed book begins with a conception of desire that draws upon and advances a Lacanian theory of desire that is situated within the specifics of social and cultural crisis and change. However, rather than considering crisis in terms of a negative-positive dualism, the proposed book conceives of crisis as the radical irruption of this dualism. This is not so much an accident or unintended consequence of modernizing processes: it is rather a form of social contusion in which desire exceeds itself through what Lacan calls the double entry matrix and joissance. Thus, rather than think purely in terms of alternative possibilities, the proposed book adapts a more Gnostic framework whereby a thing can have quite contrary meanings and social consequences simultaneously (cf the Hindu principle of rwa bhineda). The suggestion here is that an event, action or thing may not easily submit to a linguistic heirarchy or positive or negative consequences, but may bear multiple meanings and values simultaneously. Having said this, however, the proposed book is not satisfied with a politically neutral or even nihilistic account of this patterning, but seeks to expose and critique the evolving global economy of pleasure in terms of its own limitations and fallibilities. The critique offered in the proposed book does not seek to identify and erase unintended or negative consequences of a global 'risk' society and its misleading and dysfunctional media; its critique seeks, rather, to illuminate the language wars that form around desire and which shape contemporary globalizing culture. Through an analysis of desire and the mediated language wars, the proposed book will identify the ways in which crisis is shaped through the amplification of social hierarchy, oppression and the irruption of self. Within a globalizing economy of desire, these wars are implicated in the self-contaminating conditions by which pleasure is a contingency of human suffering. the following draft model indicates how crisis funcitons within a contemporary cultural setting

Material and Phenomenal Conditions

Continuities of the Human Sensate (non-linguistic, intuitive, the Real, corporeal) Social relationships formed through mediation as culture

Social and cultural dynamics

Crisis effects New crisis narrative Rapid de-bordering and re-bordering of meanings Psycho-cultural and sensate trauma Acute mediation activity Social and cultural change (Macro) Effects on the individual body (micro)

Imaginary (desire, loss, trauma, fantasy of pleasure, imagination, aesthetic-spiritual sensibility, liminal,)

Jouissance as the excess of desire and trauma=pleasure as pain Power , ideology and cultural politics (inc. patterns) in governance and economy The aleatory interventions (random or incidental alignments Acute language wars /Linguistic rupture

Language (discourse, representation, text, narrative,media, symbolic order)

Cultural Episteme/Social Knowledge

Figure 1.1 The formation of crisis