The afterlife of Osama bin Laden: performative pictures in the “war on terror”

ABSTRACT

In his interview with CBS News on 4 May 2011, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the power of images when he explained that his government would not release a photo of the dead Osama bin Laden due to moral considerations and security-related issues. How is it possible that a photo is perceived as too horrific to be published and as a powerful threat to national security? In this article, I argue that the concept of performativity helps to acknowledge the iconic power of an image as well as its discursive contextualisation. Yet, the meaning of a picture is not only discursively constituted but made possible by a performative act of showing/seeing. Empirically, I focus on pictures that refer to the killing of Osama bin Laden, based on a critical reading of three defining and prominent images in the US public discourse (that circulated worldwide): the Situation Room photo by Pete Souza, a photo-shopped image purporting to show the terrorist’s dead body and the iconic X-ing out of bin Laden on the cover of Time magazine. This reading looks at three dimensions of performative pictures: (1) their success and failure, (2) their self-reflexivity and sociability and (3) their performativity.

KEYWORDS:

• Performativity
• visual studies
• death of Osama bin Laden

Acknlowledgements

Writing this paper has been a long journey. I thank Maéva Clement, Anna Geis, Axel Heck, Hanna Pfeifer and Katarina Ristić as well as the anonymous reviewers for critical and helpful comments. All remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-on-bin-laden-the-full-60-minutes-interview/ (accessed 15 August 2017).

2. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-courts-binladen-idUSBRE94K0MZ20130521 (accessed 15 August 2017).

3. Readers can easily find Pete Souza's photo and the Time magazine cover on the internet.

4. Sharing a family resemblance with ANT, picture theory grants agency to the image itself. With its visual immediacy, a picture is able to directly confront a spectator, in particular, when we are looking at portraits of people. Granting agency to the image, however, does not mean to neglect its discursive contextualisation. While the production, display, circulation and approbation of images seem to imply that there is always a “doer” behind the image, the act of showing/seeing refers to the doing. I thank the reviewers for pertinent comments on this point.

5. A medium, Mitchell writes, is a “set of material practices that brings an image together with an object to produce a picture” (Mitchell 2004, xiii). Modality, in contrast, refers to the multiple communicative practices that are used to produce and convey meaning, such as textual, aural, linguistic, spatial and visual modes of expression (Kress 2010). A genre, then, is based on the conventionalised use of modalities. I’m primarily interested in the medium and its expression of modalities.

6. Performance theory and theatre studies play a rather marginal role as reference points in IR, see Edkins and Kear (2014).

7. A constative utterance relays information. Constitutive, though, refers to the fact that something is brought into being by saying and doing something. The latter is often used as a synonym for performative. I, however, prefer the concept of performativity as it expresses the active and productive dimension of doings. The act of showing/seeing is the actualisation of a social practice.

8. Historically, this gaze was primarily masculine. For an insightful reflection on the nude in art history, see Berger (2008).

9. Hansen, for example, refers to the sensual immediacy of images that works through emotions, authenticity and identification (Hansen 2015, 55–56). The literature on emotions and images is steadily growing but cannot be addressed in this article in more detail, see Bleiker (2015); Friis (2015) and Hutchison (2014).

10. Source: Obama, Barack O, Remarks by the President in Osama bin Laden, 2 May 2011, Washington D.C.; For a critical account of this story, see Mahler, Jonathan, What do we really know about Osama bin Laden’s death, New York Times, 15 October 2015.

11. The Newseum in Washington D.C. has collected and digitised a selection of front pages. For 2 May 2011, see http://www.newseum.org/todays frontpages/?tfp_display = archive-date&tfp_archive_id = 050211&tfp_page = 1 (accessed 8 February 2017); for 3 May 2011, see http://www.newseum.org/todays frontpages /?tfp_display = archive-date&tfp_archive_id = 050311 &tfp_page = 1 (accessed 15 August 2017), see also Freedman and Thussu (2012).

12. For the most prominent accounts by journalists, see Bowden (2012), Bergen (2012) and Hersh (2015). For an eyewitness account, see Bissonette (2012) and Fury (2012). For interviews and documentaries, see CBS News, 60 Minutes present: Killing bin Laden, 26 May 2012 (first aired on CBS); HBO, Manhunt: The Search for Osama bin Laden, 1 May 2013 (first aired on HBO); Fox News, The man who killed Osama bin Laden, 11 November 2014 (first aired on Fox News). For a movie, see Bigelow, Kathryn, Zero Dark Thirty (Columbia Pictures/ Sony Pictures, 2012).

13. I owe this insight to a reviewer. I do not claim in this article that I record the public reception of the images. My interpretation is informed by the methodological rules of iconology and (visual) discourse analysis.

14. As a depiction of governmental power, it also refers to an iconic photography of the Bush administration made by Annie Leibovitz that was published in Vanity Fair in 2008. For some examples of LoL pics, see http://www.wired.com/2011/05/situation-room-lol-pics/ (accessed 15 August 2017).

15. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse /albums/72157626507626189 (accessed 15 August 2017). Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. ›Brad‹ Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason [,] Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

16. For some examples of LoL pics, see http://www.wired.com/2011/05/situation-room-lol-pics/ (accessed 15 August 2017).

17. It is quite telling that Clinton, asked about her “emotional” gesture, responded that she covered her mouth to prevent a cough due to an allergy reaction. See Johnson, Ken, Situation: Ambiguous, in The New York Times, 7 May 2011; available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/weekinreview/ 08johnson.html?ref = osamabinladen (accessed 15 August 2017).

18. Source: http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2011/may/02/osama-bin-laden-photo-fake (accessed 15 August 2017).

19. Source: http://www.thewire.com/politics/2011/05/sen-inhofe-first-member-congress-view-bin-ladens-photos/37599/ (accessed 15 August 2017).

20. Source: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2069579,00.html (accessed 15 August 2017).

21. Although Time is regarded as politically balanced magazine (while it formerly had a republican bias), it introduces the X cover images with plain words as “A Gallery of America’s most hated enemies” (italics added). For the images, see http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,20697642272406,00.html (accessed 15 August 2017). Popp and Mendelson refer to an additional X-cover from 18 May 1998 depicting a cancer cell.

22. It can be rightly criticised that the distinction between success/failure and authenticity isn’t clear. Authenticity, as we see in the case of the manufactured photo, is a function of contextualisation while success/failure refers to the act of showing/seeing. I am grateful to a reviewer for this observation.

23. There is definitely much more to say about the relation between the reception of an audience (and how this reception differs), the truth-claim and truth–status of an image and performativity. In the case of the manufactured photo, truth is defined in technical terms and depends on the assumed genre of photo-journalism. As a piece of art in an exhibition, for example, the image would still be an act of showing/seeing, but its performative effects are different.

24. Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/05/01/cia-uses-twitter-to-reenact-2011-bin-laden-raid/ (accessed 15 August 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabi Schlag

Gabi Schlag is lecturer at the Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg. Her research is focusing on the intersection between visual cultures and political violence. Recent publications include a special issue on Visualising violence – aesthetics and ethics in international politics (Global Discourse, 7:2-3) and a book chapter on how to study emotional and affective images (in: Maéva Clement and Eric Sangar eds. 2018. Researching emotions in International Relations. Palgrave MacMillan).