Banal Phenomenologies of Violence: Media Work Cultures and Audience Engagement with Distant Suffering

There is a consensus in the academic literature that Western audiences are disengaged from the human suffering they encounter in their everyday media use. Whether this is a product of the commercialization of news or mediation itself is debated, but it is broadly agreed that ordinary people do not care as much as they should about faraway victims of political violence, war and injustice. Ongoing research investigates what can be done to reconnect audiences, which in theoretical terms hinges on the recognition of the full subjectivity of distant others. In particular, recent theorizations of violence drawing on Charles Taylor and ultimately Adam Smith have emphasized the role that imagination might play in fostering understanding of the subjective experience of violence in a manner unconstrained by conventional, dominant modes of political subjectivity. In contrast, this paper contends that both the pathologization of audience responses to mediated violence and the remedies intended to shake people out of their indifference rest on a misconception of how the recognition of other subjectivities plays out in quotidian life. It does so by way of an investigation of the experience of media practitioners who self-evidently do care about others: journalists and media activists in Beirut, Lebanon, whose work focuses inter alia on the casualties and refugees of the war in neighboring Syria. Seen at the level of the everyday, this experience can be similarly lacking in revelation, but its meaningfulness is not undermined by its banalities. The paper concludes that the dearth of intense moments of subjective recognition in ordinary contexts of media consumption is both rational and ethically defensible.