Publications by Marnie Ritchie
Media, War & Conflict, 2021
This article argues that the US War in Afghanistan, given its status as a Long War, must contend ... more This article argues that the US War in Afghanistan, given its status as a Long War, must contend with a specific visual form that threatens to disclose that the war is an irreversible failure: the 'visual quagmire'. A visual quagmire is a visualization of a nation's catastrophic, self-inflicted entanglement in war. In 'Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure' (2010), Linda Williams argues that the 'cluster fuck' is the 'most eloquent figure of the American entanglement in Iraq.' This essay proposes that the 'visual quagmire' is an eloquent figure of the failure of America's networked war in Afghanistan. To support this, this essay analyzes the widely criticized PowerPoint slide depicting counterinsurgency dynamics in Afghanistan, which was presented to the then Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A McChrystal in summer 2009. Elaborating on the form of the 'visual quagmire' underscores the importance of theorizing the processual emergence of quagmires and indexes that US military forces are responsible for strategic misguidance through how they visualize war.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2021
Critical affect theory continues to hold promise for rhetorical theory and criticism. This articl... more Critical affect theory continues to hold promise for rhetorical theory and criticism. This article revisits the so-called affective turn in rhetoric and addresses subsequent critiques of the idea of a turn. Accounting for scholarship published since 2010, this article then groups critical affect work into six subareas of research in rhetorical studies: feminist, queer, trans, and crip affects; race and affect; Black women's affective labor; affective publics and counterpublics; new materialism, materiality, and affect; and affective economics. This article outlines affective methodologies in rhetorical studies and highlights the affective dimensions of "theories of the flesh" in rhetorical inquiry. It ends by considering what is critical about affect theory in rhetoric.
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2021
This essay reads iterations of Pete Souza’s “Situation Room” photograph across media contexts as ... more This essay reads iterations of Pete Souza’s “Situation Room” photograph across media contexts as an effect of an overdetermined public desire for U.S. redemption in the War on Terror. I argue that repetitions of the photograph's “about to die moment” invite a visceral identification between citizen-subjects and militarized state action through the subjunctive tense. The image’s tension reflected through the public interpretation that Hillary Clinton gasps in the photograph, speaks to a collective excitability about war victory’s imminence. If legitimacy for war builds through emotional ties staged by visual tenses and tensions, a crucial task for media criticism is opening possibilities to decathect from cycles of war drama.
Surveillance & Society, 2020
This paper sets up a framework to assess how purportedly passive state surveillance comprises an ... more This paper sets up a framework to assess how purportedly passive state surveillance comprises an infrastructure of active racialization. Frantz Fanon’s concept of “racial phobogenics,” or the process of making a raced body into an object of anxiety, can be useful for scholarship at the intersection of communication, race, data, security, policing, affect, and biopolitics. To read how local state surveillance justifies the aggregation of data by means of phobogenics, I analyzed 120 hours of field observations and conducted fourteen interviews from June 2017 to March 2018 in one US Homeland Security Fusion Center, part of the integrated intelligence system and national security strategy after 9/11. I argue that Fusion Centers’ use of “situational awareness,” the trained ability to know what is deemed “suspicious” in everyday life, fuses race or taxonomizes what is out of place and what is inflammatory according to nonconscious racializing affects. I therefore urge for a critical scholarship that attends to “prelogical rationality and affectivity” (Fanon 1986:133) as exercises of power.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
Brian Massumi (1956–) is a contemporary political theorist of communication, critical and cultura... more Brian Massumi (1956–) is a contemporary political theorist of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics. One of the foremost thinkers of "radical empiricism," he is responsible for enabling the widespread use of Deleuzean philosophy in communication and inaugurating the so-called “affective turn” in the theoretical humanities. Massumi is Professor of Communication at the Université de Montréal and a collaborator with the experimental art and activism lab SenseLab, founded by Erin Manning. His most well-known translation is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and he is the author of ten books, including the widely influential Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002).
Massumi’s radical empiricist approaches concern the aesthetics of communication and power in the context of global capitalism. He opens the field of communication to the study of relationality, what he calls “being-in-becoming,” which he describes in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s “the actual” and “the virtual.” His critical embrace of becoming reframes the concept of “the event” as a processual unfolding of forces of expression, or experience. Instead of remaining wedded to communication models that limit language to designation, manifestation, and signification, Massumi’s focus on becoming calls for accounts of the extra-linguistic. Three key concepts include expression, affect, and perception. Through creative and experimental dispositions, Massumi position the fields of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics toward vibrant scenes of relations-already-underway, or how feeling, thinking, and being begin, again, in the middle of something already underway—a "happening doing."
Visual Communication Quarterly, 2018
TIME Magazine’s online 10-year commemoration of 9/11 "Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience" utili... more TIME Magazine’s online 10-year commemoration of 9/11 "Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience" utilizes narratives of spectacular resilience, which this essay defines as a visual stylization with four features: an economy of suffering based on media attention, loss figured in terms of a catastrophic event, a depoliticized national model for confronting loss, and superlative heroic action. I contrast the form of spectacular resilience in the memorial with minor forms of endurance visualized in periodicals about immigrant and migrant labor who cleaned Ground Zero and surrounding areas after 9/11. I end with the implications of linking resilience and visuality together in commemorative politics.
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2018
Reading repeats on readers something that we cannot quite stomach—an excessive something that, wh... more Reading repeats on readers something that we cannot quite stomach—an excessive something that, while confusing and repelling, calls readers back to re-reading. In the spirit of operationalizing this excess, this essay traces a form of regurgitative reading (chewing cud) in Friedrich Nietzsche's corpus that follows the reflexes and refluxes of a text. Though linked with the ressentiment of the herd, cud-chewing is also an interpretive process of engaging the affective excesses of everyday life toward the play of language—what Diane Davis calls an " affirmative purgative " —where disgust can more loudly belch a " no " to conventional reading practices. This essay wagers that this regurgitative reading style is best performed with Eve Sedgwick's indigestible insights on paranoid and reparative reading styles. The Nietzschean metaphorical apparatus helps us glimpse the banality and unbearable proximity of disgust within oscillations between paranoia and reparation. At stake through these re-readings is, first, an ethic of reading that rejects full assimilation and understanding, and second, an unleashing of creative reading in affect theory.
Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2017
This essay proposes that securitization is underwritten by stupidity, defined as a shared social ... more This essay proposes that securitization is underwritten by stupidity, defined as a shared social exposure to limits which condition the possibility of thinking, knowing, and communicating about threats and responses. This conceptualization of stupidity depicts security threats not as gaps in information that can be filled by a knowing subject, but encounters with difference arising from persons, communities, or nations which threaten that subject with awareness of its own stupidity. This essay subsequently reads two excesses of public discourse about ‘connecting the dots’ after 9/11, which have re-established US counterterrorism as a reliable source of knowledge. The first excess involves enhanced authorization of US decision-makers, intelligence analysts, and citizen-subjects to reliably discern threats. The second involves the figure of the terrorist threat, who is depicted as too stupid to challenge the authority of US knowledge. I conclude by considering how dubious Westernized security discourses and scholarly practices might be disrupted by placing them in relation to what Avital Ronell calls an ethic of stupidity ‘before the other’.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2015
This essay argues that Eye on Awareness™, a recent deployment of the If You See Something, Say So... more This essay argues that Eye on Awareness™, a recent deployment of the If You See Something, Say Something™ Department of Homeland Security campaign in US hotels, disciplines workers in order to organize their senses for the state, a process I term “feeling for the state,” by subtly redefining what it means to see the terrorist as what it means to feel the terrorist. I argue that feeling for the state throughout the training legitimizes expanded sovereign power and organizes affective labor to police racialized bodies and behaviors. I conclude by offering implications for readings of biopolitics that foreground affect.
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Publications by Marnie Ritchie
Massumi’s radical empiricist approaches concern the aesthetics of communication and power in the context of global capitalism. He opens the field of communication to the study of relationality, what he calls “being-in-becoming,” which he describes in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s “the actual” and “the virtual.” His critical embrace of becoming reframes the concept of “the event” as a processual unfolding of forces of expression, or experience. Instead of remaining wedded to communication models that limit language to designation, manifestation, and signification, Massumi’s focus on becoming calls for accounts of the extra-linguistic. Three key concepts include expression, affect, and perception. Through creative and experimental dispositions, Massumi position the fields of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics toward vibrant scenes of relations-already-underway, or how feeling, thinking, and being begin, again, in the middle of something already underway—a "happening doing."