Humanitarianism and Modern Culture 9780271050454

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humanitarianism and modern culture

ESSAYS ON

HUMAN RIGHTS

edited by thomas cushman This series features important new works by leading figures in the interdisciplinary field of human rights. Books in the series present provocative and powerful statements, theories, or views on contemporary issues in human rights. The aim of the series is to provide short, accessible works that will present new and original thinking in crystalline form and in a language accessible to a wide range of scholars, policymakers, students, and general readers. The series will include works by anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, and those working in the more traditional fields of human rights, including practitioners. Thomas Cushman is Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. He previously edited a series for The Pennsylvania State University Press titled Post-Communist Cultural Studies, in which a dozen volumes appeared. He is the founding editor of two journals, Human Rights Review and the Journal of Human Rights, and he now serves as Editorat-Large for the latter. He is a Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. already published: Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (2006) other titles forthcoming: Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Can Globalization Promote Human Rights? John Rodden, Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of Human Rights Abuse Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory Nancy Tuana, Global Climate Change and Human Rights

keith tester

HUMANI-

TARIANISM

AND MODERN CULTURE the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tester, Keith, 1960 – Humanitarianism and modern culture / Keith Tester. p.    cm. — (Essays on human rights) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “An examination of humanitarianism in Western society. Argues that humanitarianism has become a staple part of modern media and celebrity culture”—Provided by publisher. isbn 978-0-271-03735-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Culture. 2. Celebrities. 3. Humanitarianism. I. Title. hm621.t477 2010 306.09 — dc22 2009038189 Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802 –1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the ­Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48 –1992. This book in printed on Natures Natural, which contains 50% post-consumer waste.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

vii



1 Out of “Africa”

1



2 Saving Birhan

35



3 Madonna and Child

72

Conclusion

111

References

117

Index

121

Preface and Acknowledgments



. . . my kin who trousered Africa —W. H. Auden

This book cuts across reportage of pop culture, literature, social thought, and postcolonial writings in order to cast light on one of the most significant phenomena of our times. Humanitarianism packs a punch in modern culture, but why? How? These are the questions this essay explores. Humanitarianism is a moral sensibility demanding action on the part of the safe and secure toward the suffering and endangered. Philosophers and political scientists have examined it in detail, but they often forget that humanitarianism is part of modern culture and needs to be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Humanitarianism is about how the West understands and acts out a sense of moral responsibility toward the impoverished parts of the world and their threatened inhabitants. The linkage between humanitarianism and culture is intrinsic and actually essential because humanitarianism means paying moral attention to others who are beyond one’s own immediate sphere of existence, and therefore it requires and involves an imagination about the world, about the relationships between the near and the far, “us” and “them.” Culture is the medium through which extended attention is imaginable.

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Humanitarianism is culturally shaped, but culture changes. Our modern culture is shaped by and around the media. Consequently, if we want to understand modern humanitarianism, we need also to understand modern media culture, because the two are inextricably entwined. To put this point more abstractly, this essay is written from the point of view of a critical cultural sociology of humanitarianism as an imaginary of moral relationships with social and cultural conditions of existence. The words “imaginary” and “imagination” are used after Charles Taylor: “I am thinking .  .  . of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (2004, 23). The institutions and technologies of the media facilitate the imagination of a Western responsibility toward “the rest.” They allow us to know about what is happening to others elsewhere and, moreover, urge us to help them. When I use the word “us” in that sentence and throughout this essay, I have in mind the West as the institutionally and historically consolidated community of the affluent of the world (which itself more or less maps onto Europe and its historical creations in America and Australasia). This community assumes for itself the weight of moral superiority because Western metropolitan centers (and therefore media centers) are postimperial nodal points in global flows and exchanges. Thus they are able to define the West as “us” and the rest as “others” on the periphery. This essay is offered by a Westerner and is largely aimed at a Western audience, just as it is written and published in the West. The motivation for this essay came from a long-standing confusion of my own. Like most (if not all) of the readers of this volume, I watch television and read newspapers. I am aware of the suffering experienced by people in other parts of the world. But ever since I watched Live Aid in 1985, I have been bemused as to how in the modern West coming to the assistance of the victims of humanitarian crises means listening to rock stars as opposed to experts, buying concert tickets rather than emergency nutrition packs, and watching Madonna push a young African woman around a London stage. I have also been astonished by the

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mix of humanitarianism and hubris leading celebrities like Madonna and Angelina Jolie to adopt children from the Third World. Such is the sense underpinning this essay. I am trying to work out the relationship between humanitarianism and modern culture, and what makes incidents like these appear to be “just the way things are.” After all, no rock musicians would listen to me if I gave them advice about how to write a song (and they would be right not to listen to me), but many of us read interviews and watch television series in which these same people speak with the authoritative voice of humanitarian concern, even though they have as much—and as little—knowledge as anyone else. Why? What I propose in this essay is that in modern culture there is a hegemonic form of humanitarianism so self-evident and so established in the media that it has come to constitute common sense. Ours is a world dominated in its attitudes toward distant suffering by what can be called common-sense humanitarianism. But the concern and compassion ­common-sense humanitarianism permits becomes very dubious once an interpretative unpicking begins; it appears to rest on myths and, more insidiously, the vestiges of a distinctly imperial mindset, which establishes the West as the only right actor in the world. These are the topics of chapters 1 and 2. The imperial legacy explains the geographical specificity of commonsense humanitarianism. Even though humanitarian disasters happen throughout the world, the focus of common-sense humanitarianism is on “Africa.” The scare quotes around the word “Africa” are important. I want to talk a little about them because they run through the essay. When I refer to “Africa” and its inhabitants, who are “Africans,” I am referring to the land and the people constructed by the West through a long history of imperial intervention—mythical and naturalized categories of the modern Western postimperial imaginary. “Africa” and “Africans” are fantasies consolidated by common sense and practice. Meanwhile, Africa and Africans (without the scare quotes) are political categories marked by the ability to act according to subjective volition. So “Africa” is a Western imaginary and the excuse for the West’s “being there,” whereas Africa is a political category in conflict with the hegemony of “Africa.” Africa rarely breaks into common-sense humanitarianism, and

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when it does, the space is opened up in the first instance by Western media culture. Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in the conceit of celebrities adopting babies. This particular peculiarity of modern celebrity culture is the topic of chapter 3. This essay focuses on “Africa” and Africa because the relationship between “Asia,” Asia, and common-sense humanitarianism is different. Perhaps this is because “Asia” has become commonsensically associated with its own forms of political action and economic prosperity wholly incompatible with any imaginary that says only the West can act in the world. This is the core of the Western debate about globalization (Tester 2008). Consequently, even though humanitarian disasters do occur in Asia, they do not fit too well with the modern Western common sense, and so they are often ignored. The matter of “Asia” is an investigation for another day. I hope this essay will inspire debate, thought, and maybe even disagreement. The essay is not complete and does not cover all of the ground of common-sense humanitarianism; it is an initial exercise in leverage. It seems to me the problem underpinning this book—the responsibility of the affluent of the world toward those who suffer—is far too important to be left to an uncritical acceptance of the commonsense humanitarianism the media institutions presently promote. I’m not sure what the alternative answers are, but the route to their construction is via politics, and not the mélange of humanitarianism, myth, and excuses presently prevailing. This essay is offered in the belief that if a political space is going to be created, it is first of all necessary to clear the ground of the exotic and often beautiful plants that are growing healthily but, in so doing, are poisoning the soil forevermore. It could be objected that this essay focuses on fleeting phenomena at the surface of life and will soon be out of date. My response to the possibility of obsolescence is that if the interpretation I propose has a critical purchase, it ought to continue to lever open themes and issues over time. As for the objection that the essay emphasizes the fleeting, I agree, because I also agree with the methodological principle of Siegfried Kracauer: “The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its

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inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgements about itself.  .  .  . The surface-level expressions .  .  . by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions” (1995, 75). Put another way, this essay is offered in the belief that the statements and expressions of musicians and the media representation of “Africa” and “Africans” say much more about the fundamental substance of humanitarianism in modern culture than all of the statements of the philosophers put together. Their judgements are merely “expressions of the tendencies of a particular era, they do not offer conclusive testimony about its overall constitution” (Kracauer 1995, 75). This essay is an attempt to uncover some of the aspects of the “overall constitution.” During the time I have spent writing this book, I have discovered that Sandy Thatcher is a prince among publishers and Tom Cushman is a forceful yet kind and friendly editor. I have been very fortunate to be able to work with them. I would also like to thank Barry Smart and Graham Spencer for all of the help they provided. Maria Cooke has made an exceptional contribution to the book, and anything good about its style and content is directly due to her. A version of chapter 1 was presented as a paper at the 2008 MeCSSA annual conference in Cardiff, and a paper based on chapter 2 was delivered at a symposium on “Humanitarian Communication in the Global Media Age” at the LSE in November 2008. I would like to thank the participants of both events who amiably asked very penetrating questions.

1 out of “africa”

What is common-sense humanitarianism? If recent debates are to be believed, it is possible to be absolutely sure about one thing. Humanitarianism is in crisis. David Rieff, for example, sees a noble ideal compromised by human rights and states. He believes the strength of humanitarianism comes from the simplicity of its fundamental premise, which is that humans are not made to suffer, and from the specific nature of the action following from the belief. The purpose of humanitarianism is to give a “bed for the night” to those who lack or have been deprived of such shelter and thus have been forced into a confrontation with the basic necessities of human being in the world (because obviously the phrase “a bed for the night” is not to be read narrowly or literally; it is taken by Rieff from Bertolt Brecht). From this point of view, humanitarian actors have no requirement to ask precisely why this particular person has no bed. For them it is sufficient that some people are without. To this extent, humanitarianism is at once pragmatic and practical. It is an acceptance that the world is not a land of milk and honey for all humans, and it is an attempt to ameliorate the impact of the harsh encounter with dull necessity. But humanitarianism is in crisis, Rieff says, because the clarity has been lost (2002).

2  preface and acknowledgments

Rieff’s definition of humanitarianism refuses to admit that the principle is the solution to the situations in which it intervenes. After all, to provide a bed for the night is to take it for granted that some people are deprived of their bed. The situation has to have already arisen, and therefore humanitarianism is to be understood as a response, as a reaction. At most, humanitarianism is an expectation on the part of its actors that there will be a response. Rieff’s definition also contends that the principle and its action are impartial. The point is to assist any and as many people as possible, purely because they are in need, without regard to who they are or why they are confronting necessity. Consequently, humanitarianism has to be distinguished from human rights since, according to one of its leading proponents, human rights action “means taking sides, mobilizing constituencies powerful enough to force the abusers to stop. As a consequence, effective human rights activism is bound to be partial and political” (Ignatieff 2001, 9). Humanitarianism consists in an outrage that humans are forced into some situations, a belief that to be human is to be a subject of one’s own action and not just an object in perpetual encounter with necessity, and a commitment to lift humans out of their confrontation with need as and when required. There is an acceptance that humans, or at least some humans, are to a degree historically fated—and fated by history— to come into confrontation with necessity. The ambition of humanitarianism is not to bring about a world without encounter with necessity, because that is far too grand and improbable a condition to achieve. To focus on such an ambition would be to paralyze action, since the moment of its achievement is always and inevitably receding. Humans suffer, and humans need, and humans die. The aim is, more modestly, to bring assistance to those who need it when they need it. Yet herein lies one of the ambiguities of humanitarianism. If humanitarianism is motivated by a belief that to be human means more than being forced to live in confrontation with overwhelming material scarcity, does it follow that some can only practice their humanity because others cannot? Is dehumanization a prerequisite for any appreciation of what it means to be human? According to Rieff, limitation and modesty are the strengths of humanitarianism, but there has been a loss of focus. He contends that

preface and acknowledgments  3

humanitarianism has become more than a little fuzzy because different players have harnessed it to their own concerns, although it allowed itself to be so connected because the other players solved issues that bothered humanitarian actors (2002). Specifically, humanitarianism has been connected with human rights and state power. According to the story Rieff tells, humanitarian actors initially welcomed a connection with human rights because it solved the problem of paternalism that haunts relief workers. Human rights enabled humanitarians to overcome the suspicion that they were merely the moral conscience of the affluent (or affluence’s conscience) by giving them a foundation of universal norms upon which to base their action. Instead of having to worry about whether they were wealthy philanthropists or latter-day imperialists, now humanitarian actors could point to norms applicable to all people, regardless of who and where they were. In other words, human rights gave humanitarianism the confidence that it is truly action in terms of a commitment to humanity and not just an expression of guilt or condescension. But this meant humanitarian actors were unable to avoid slipping into alignment with states that flattered them (if only with lip service) and that purportedly based military actions on human rights norms. States started to need humanitarian actors for both practical aid work and for legitimacy. One example of this is the way in which the discussion of global trade has been wrapped in the moral flag of debt relief and some human right to economic prosperity. And, of course, states also started to talk about “humanitarian intervention” as a justification for often preplanned military adventures. Rieff knows the seduction by states was hard to resist. Reflecting on his experience reporting humanitarian action in the Third World, Rieff (2003) says of the offer of money and support states offered to humanitarian actors,

That sounds very appealing. My problem with it, and the reason I think the marriage of humanitarian action and state power has been such a disaster, is that I think the logic of the human rights movement is imperialist. I don’t think it was necessarily intended this way. But once you talk about categories like international justice, or you talk about bringing

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people to justice, or an end to impunity . . . if you’re really serious about that, the only way to do it is by at least the possible use of force. The human rights movement, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has increasingly become a force for a recolonization of the world, in the name of rights. As such, it might be argued that human rights returns the accusation of imperialism that can be laid against humanitarianism, even as it simultaneously takes the charge away. Rieff has suggested that Western states probably do not care terribly much about many of the humanitarian disasters that happen, but by the logic of the so loudly trumpeted human rights case, leaders have to be seen “doing something” when the needs of others become unavoidable. They get humanitarian actors to do it for them. On the one hand, this is attractive to the actors (which are invariably grouped together under the umbrella term of nongovernmental organizations) because they get funding and profile, but on the other, it means that “states were involved as actors in humanitarian operations as well as funders of them: aid had political consequences” (Rieff 2002, 307). Put another way—put an obvious way—Rieff is arguing that whoever pays the humanitarian piper calls the tune accompanying the relief work. Consequently, there is a blurring of the boundaries between state policy and humanitarian action, a blurring made rather clear by Michael Ignatieff when he subconsciously links the two and says that “military or humanitarian intervention amounts to a moral promise to persons in need” (2001, 44). Whether or not this remark is valid is less pressing than the unquestioning way in which it brings together what are in fact two extremely different kinds of action: the military (when all is said and done, military action is about killing people, although Ignatieff’s remark does imply that humanitarian intervention, as he calls it, can justify the killing of some humans) and the humanitarian (which is often about clearing up the human damage created by armed forces). For Rieff, the answer to the crisis is for humanitarianism to return to its central tasks and to its minimal definition. He wants it to return to the core assumptions of “solidarity, a fundamental sympathy for victims,

preface and acknowledgments  5

and an antipathy for oppressors and exploiters” and thus to become independent of external considerations like state politics or human rights. Rieff continues, “Independent humanitarianism does many things well, and some things badly, but the things it is now being called upon to do, such as helping to advance the cause of human rights, contributing to stopping wars, and furthering social justice, are beyond its competence” (2002, 334). But maybe what humanitarianism does badly has become so overwhelming that this practical question is also part of the crisis. Fiona Terry has reflected on one of the moral difficulties of humanitarianism: what do you do if some of those who are face to face with necessity are the cause of the neediness of others? She points out that the humanitarian principle is deontological inasmuch as it is a view of morality primarily concerned with ideas like duty or obligation. It is a duty to provide a bed for the night to those who are without a bed. But Terry reflects on experiences in the field and contends that whatever it might once have been, presently “humanitarian action no longer represents the ultimate expression of deontological reasoning, but incurs consequences that, whether intended or not, can undermine the very logic on which such action is based” (2002, 217). Sometimes the bed can be taken away by force, and sometimes a bed can be given to someone who is responsible for the want of another. Terry reaches this conclusion after a detailed consideration of the implications of some notable humanitarian actions. For example, in the mid-1990s the defeated Rwandan government and its supporters, who had been complicit in the genocide of the Tutsi population, moved into the very camps in Zaire already occupied by refugees from the killing. They escaped to the camps in order to get the legal protection that comes from being recognized as a refugee, and physical protection, because the Tutsi militia, bent on revenge, did not chase them into Zaire (Terry 2002, 182). The effect was that conflict was displaced into the camps themselves, which quickly became extremely violent and militarized. This situation set the deontological position of humanitarianism against the consequences of humanitarian action, because it meant aid was being given into the control of the very forces that had caused the initial crisis. The refugees in the camps had gone to Zaire to escape the danger in Rwanda, only to find that

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violence followed them. “The humanitarian imperative to give aid wherever it was needed clashed with the responsibility to ensure that . . . aid was not used against those for whom it was intended” (Terry 2002, 195). Some aid agencies decided that ethical principles had to remain untarnished and withdrew from the Zaire camps, but most appreciated they were stuck in a paradox and decided to stay. Like most, if not all, professional humanitarian actors, Terry is no utopian. She knows these kinds of paradoxes cannot be overcome and are to some extent part of the humanitarian parcel. But she makes a compelling argument that it would be absolutely wrong to therefore conclude humanitarianism is always doomed to fail or is necessarily unethical in its consequences despite its good intentions. The point is that, even though it is riddled with problems, the humanitarian project must be maintained. As Terry says with brutal realism, “We can never construct the best world in which our compassion can immediately translate into an end to suffering, but we can try to build a second-best world based on hard-headed assessments of needs and options” (2002, 216 –17).

the humanitarianism of the inexpert humanitarians These are important debates, and they show that commentators and humanitarian actors are at once reflective and principled. For Rieff and Terry, the point is not to bury humanitarianism but to rescue it. They know there are no easy answers in such a messy world, but that does not stop them from struggling to do the best they can toward others who are confronting necessity. However, the eloquence of the commentators and activists, alongside their access to the media of debate, creates something of an optical illusion. Think of a kaleidoscope. If it is looked at one way, it is a collection of shattered moving pieces that occasionally come together into coherent patterns but spend a lot of time in a somewhat confused condition. This is how the commentators on humanitarianism tend to see the matter. They are committed to a coherent principle and to the action that follows from it, and yet they know that as soon as the tube is looked down, all that is likely to be seen is a chaos of overlapping

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parts, gaps, color clashes, and incoherence. They see crisis. Yet there is another way of looking at a kaleidoscope. Yes, all of the pieces are in a mess, but the circumference of the tube contains them and they often come together into coherent patterns, even though the coherence can and does disappear very quickly. From this way of looking, the kaleidoscope is taken for granted and is largely invested with trust, and quite how it all works is significantly less important than the fact it sometimes does. The kaleidoscope might not be looked at terribly often, but when it is, it shows what is looked for. Most people who would be likely to define themselves as good and committed humanitarians have not read Rieff or Terry (they have probably never even heard of them), and it is very unlikely they have ever met someone who has confronted necessity or been to a refugee camp. But they have almost certainly bought clothes or books at a charity shop, expressed outrage at television pictures, and quite possibly responded to appeals in the media. For most humanitarian actors, humanitarianism is not something in crisis, for the incredibly simple but obvious reason that it is not something thought about terribly much. It is just there, like the sports results, celebrity gossip, and television listings. Humanitarianism has become a naturalized component part of the ordinary Western cultural and moral milieu. For most people most of the time, it is not very special at all, but it is still important. Humanitarianism is part of day-to-day common sense. This is what is missed if the humanitarian kaleidoscope is looked at in the way the commentators look at it, but it is what comes sharply into focus if the shapes and patterns are seen without prior assumptions about how they ought to look. There is the humanitarianism of the professional humanitarians like Rieff and Terry, and there is also the humanitarianism of people who have had no physically immediate encounter with necessity or the needy. Tony Waters has rightly said that schoolchildren responding to Red Cross appeals share the humanitarian credit with more obvious actors like relief agencies shipping supplies to refugee camps (2001, 2). Nevertheless, what humanitarianism means to schoolchildren and aid agencies are two very different things indeed. Actually, the situation is rather similar to one identified by Antonio Gramsci in the case of philosophy.

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As Gramsci saw, it does not follow from the existence of a professional group called “philosophers” that the pursuit of the activity of philosophy is peculiar to it. Of course, philosophers seek to justify precisely that kind of assumption through the monopolization of institutional positions, publishing outlets, and the development of a specialist jargon. However, Gramsci pointed out, if the meaning of philosophy is broadened to include all thought about the world, then it is obvious that “everyone is a philosopher” because everyone thinks and acts in terms of a “specific conception of the world” (1971, 323). The difference is that philosophers have a self-aware conception of the world, in principle amenable to criticism, whereas the conception of “everyone” is unreflexive, based on a premise that “this is how things are,” and is taken to be a straightforward, “real” representation of the world. The philosophy of the nonprofessional philosophers consequently consists in a conception of the world that stresses practical knowledge, and it is immune to critique or interrogation. It simply is and is accepted as self-evident and true, in as far as it makes action practically possible. This latter kind of conception constitutes common sense. Gramsci defined common sense as “the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed” (1971, 419). From this it follows that common sense is not the same in all places and at all times, and it has to be understood as “a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential” (1971, 419). Common sense is not a coherent and unified theory like, say, utilitarianism or Kantian ethics. Rather, it is the diverse and often mutually contradictory mishmash of conceptions enabling social subjects to go about the business of daily life, to make sense of a world apprehended as always and already “there” and to some extent beyond their control and immune to their intervention. In terms of its dealings with the world, common sense is reactive rather than creative, and therefore the greatest reaction will come from whatever has the greatest impact upon moral individuality. The impact and reaction will be felt in a very immediate way, and, because common sense conceives of the world as almost thing-like, it will stress the sensate. The

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world has an impact on moral individuality to the extent that it directly stimulates moral consciousness and conscience; that is to say, in as far as it has a power to impinge upon the moral senses of the individual. It is the point of Karl Marx: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (1942, 356). The moral senses are no more innate or natural than the moral individuality of which they are a part. Rather, the moral senses are resources of interpretation and conscience within the social, cultural, and historical environments in which social subjects are situated. From this it follows that, just like common sense, moral senses are variable and, also just like common sense, their impact is felt to be “natural.” They constitute a practical morality. Gramsci said, “In common sense it is the ‘realistic,’ materialistic elements which are predominant, the immediate product of crude sensation” (1971, 420). As such, within the context of common sense, the immediate effect of something happening will be the sensate reaction that it generates, and the strength of the reaction will be taken to be a “real” and more or less accurate guide of the extent to which moral individuality has so responded. Put another way, the more social subjects are able to immediately demonstrate a response, the more “real” the stimulus will be taken popularly to be. Similarly, it can be proposed that from the point of view of the moral individual, in as far as the sensate response is minimal, the stimulus is lacking in charge and it is a less compelling “reality” (less, that is, in comparison to other stimuli, not in relation to some normative response). Common-sense humanitarianism therefore can be defined as the conception of obligations toward others that is uncritically constitutive of moral individuality by virtue of the situation of social subjects in specific social and cultural environments. It is not necessarily coherent or even necessarily acted upon, but it is constitutive of a fundamental—and fundamentally—moral conception of the world. The motto of ­common-sense humanitarianism is the call “something must be done!” The impetus behind the “something” will emerge in the first instance from sensate emotional responses to a world conceptually constructed as inevitable. Furthermore, the legitimacy for the action of the “something”

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will be provided by the immediate sensate responses of the social subjects (the moral individuals) who feel an obligation to help but who can only satisfy that obligation by facilitating the action of agencies or organizations present within their conception of the world, but external to their own individual, practical competence. Bob Geldof is the culturally established exemplary figure of commonsense humanitarianism, where an “exemplary figure” is she or he who is illustrative. Consequently, when it is said that Geldof is exemplary, the point being made is that he illustrates the conception of the world, and (re)action within it, that is characteristic of common-sense humanitarianism. The word “exemplary” is not being used in this context as an intimation of worth or its lack. Moreover, Geldof is significant in this regard as a cultural figure and not as a private individual; indeed, from the point of view of this discussion, Geldof’s personal life is largely irrelevant. The contention that Geldof is the exemplary figure of commonsense humanitarianism draws attention to some of his statements and takes it away from either outright condemnation or celebrations of his status as some purported “visionary leader” (Westley 1991). Equally, it means no great attention needs to be paid to the widespread debates among commentators about Geldof’s brand of humanitarianism. Yes, there is a popular discussion about Geldof that questions the sincerity of his motives, but this tends to take place within talk about celebrity as opposed to some (popularly marginal) debate about strategies and mechanisms of Third World famine relief or the efficiency of aid agencies. Geldof emerged in this field in 1984–85 thanks to his role in the Band Aid and Live Aid movements, which used the music industry as a vehicle to raise funds for relief of the famine then rife in Ethiopia and felt to be important because of the sensate responses caused by the broadcast media coverage. It is reasonable to contend that Geldof was the first celebrity of common-sense humanitarianism, a position he has maintained despite the appearance of others (such as Bono of U2). The passage in Geldof’s autobiography in which he talks about his response to seeing a television news report on the famine can be read as a foundational statement of common-sense humanitarianism. The report was by the BBC journalist Michael Buerk and came from

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the famine zone of Korem. It is worth dismantling the reaction Geldof relates. He says, “From the first seconds it was clear that this was horror on a monumental scale. The pictures were of people who were so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet” (1986, 269). There are two points to pull out of this passage. First, and implicitly, Geldof is taking it as given that it is possible and legitimate to engage with television news reports. He is distancing himself from any thesis of the passive observer or, indeed, the skilled semiotician who is able to spot polyvocality. Instead, Geldof is presuming that the news audience is active and actually or potentially engaged. This is because news reports have become a self-evident, naturalized, and in themselves uncritical part of everyday life (indeed, although there can be critique of what the reports show and how they show it, the validity of broadcast news in and of itself is not questioned). Moreover, polyvocality is rendered inadmissible by the self-evidence of the images. They are read uncritically as meaning what they show and showing what they mean. This leads to the second point in the autobiographical passage: for Geldof, what the news report has done is reveal the human impact of the confrontation with necessity, and the meaning of confrontation is stark and once again self-evident. When they are face to face with necessity, humans run the very real risk of dying, and in that context analytical high jinks are simply wrong. Geldof continues to draw a contrast between the necessity shown in the report and the context of the reception of the news. Recalling the famine victims, he says, “The camera wandered amidst them like a mesmerized observer, occasionally dwelling on one person so that he looked directly at me, sitting in my comfortable living room surrounded by the fripperies of modern living which we were pleased to regard as necessities” (1986, 269). The charge of the contrast between necessity and “frippery” is, then, derived from what Geldof takes to be the ability of the direct gaze to cut through cultural, social, and historical differences and to establish an immediate human bond consisting in a moral petition for help. That petition is presumed to stand outside of history and to be the basis of a direct interpersonal appeal regardless of institutions. It leads the moral individual to think about her or his personal responsibility for

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the tragedy and the assistance she or he might provide (Geldof 1986, 290). The moral individual is individualized in the recognition of the emotionally felt and legitimated need to “do something.” What Geldof did was contact friends and acquaintances in the music industry and facilitate the recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” from which all of the profits went to the famine relief effort. The profits were considerable because the artists performed for free and took no royalties, and the industry itself covered production and distribution costs. The release was accompanied by a media blitz, with radio, television, and press all engaging in incredibly heavy promotion. At the time of its release, the record was the fastest-ever-selling single in the United Kingdom (a title it eventually lost to Elton John’s version of “Candle in the Wind” for the funeral of Princess Diana), and it raised over £8 million for famine relief (BBC 2000). The success of the single resulted in similar efforts being made elsewhere (for example, the American “We Are the World”) and, fairly quickly, to the organization of the Live Aid concerts in July 1985 (at which time the Band Aid charity was also registered in London). Throughout, the audience was encouraged to consume the products of this more or less industrialized process, on the grounds that these particular acts of consumption were not selfish but were, instead, about helping the suffering of the world. Geldof’s “doing something” involved giving others an opportunity to do “something else,” but everything was ostensibly pulled together by the common and external cause. At this point, one of the contradictions of this common-sense position emerges. The Band Aid and Live Aid movements Geldof was instrumental in establishing stressed the practice of personal responsibility, in the first instance through the act of purchasing a pop record—in other words, by the consumption of one of the very “fripperies” that was revealed for him to be what it was by the direct gaze of the famine victim. “Doing something” was translated into the everyday demand to “go shopping.” It is also worth noting that when Geldof talks about this moral demand, something interesting happens to the camera filming the victims and, by extension, to the news itself, in as far as it is a generic broadcast program. It disappears. At first, Geldof’s comment suggests an implicit awareness of the selectivity of the camera. To say

preface and acknowledgments  13

it “wanders” is also to admit that it is choosing to see some things and not others. In this remark, the camera is seen as a piece of disembodied technology without a human operator. But as soon as eye-to-eye contact is established, the camera, with its implicit criteria of selectivity, completely disappears. All Geldof can see is the other human being, and it is as if the connection between them is as immediate and consequential as it would be with anyone else who happened to be in the same room at the same time. Television itself is presumed to become completely invisible, leaving only a human plea and neighborliness. Geldof repeated the theme of neighborliness a number of years later, when another famine was raging: “Oxfam tells me that about 400 people are dying a week. Can you imagine if that was happening around, for example, Oldham? .  .  . And one hears nonsense about how they’re different in Ethiopia; they’re different because they’re not just down the road, they’re 2,000 miles away. . . . 2,000 miles is just down the road” (Geldof 2000). But, of course, this presupposes the very technologies occluded by Geldof. As Geldof expands on his response to the news report, a political position does emerge. Looking back, he records his feelings at seeing the news from Ethiopia: “A horror like this could not occur today without our consent,” he writes. “We had allowed this to happen and now we knew that it was happening, to allow it to continue would be tantamount to murder” (1986, 271). This argument suggests a kind of collective responsibility for what is happening in Ethiopia, although it is noticeable that the responsibility only becomes guilt as soon as the event is known. Guilt is a sensate response to what is happening as opposed to a disposition of moral individuality. It is not that we are guilty; rather it is that we are made to be so by what we come to know. Guilt is felt uncritically. The famine itself is taken to be “our” fault, and the felt responsibility to do something about it is entirely reactive in the first instance. However, there is a question mark to be put against the constituency of the “our” that Geldof interpellates. At one level the collective “our” is self-evident. It comprises everyone who watched the same news report, and so to this extent the “us” underpinning the “our” is the community constituted by the television audience. But the interpellated “our” quickly becomes exceptionally more complex. Geldof goes on to ponder what could be done in the face

14  preface and acknowledgments

of what he now knew, writing, “I would send some money, I would send more money. But that was not enough. To expiate yourself truly of any complicity in this evil meant you had to give something of yourself. I was stood against the wall. I had to withdraw my consent” (1986, 271). Let’s think about that passage in a little more detail. First, it is clear that it contains a slippage from the communal “our” to the personal “I.” This either means Geldof was already and consciously establishing himself as the culturally exemplary figure of the response to the Ethiopian famine or, more likely, he was carrying out exactly the same dehistoricized and dehistoricizing kind of universalization that had run through his comments on eye contact with a person on the screen. Geldof is presuming that his reaction is identical with that of any and every other person who wishes to accept responsibility for the famine. In other words, what brings individuals together is not the social, cultural, or historical; it is the sensate. By this argument, social subjects are not brought together by common practices or interdependency. For Geldof, social subjects are more or less isolated and sovereign individuals who can be brought together by an external stimulus revealing a bedrock of common emotions and sensibility. Public issues are entirely collapsed into personal troubles, and thereby the space for any sociological imagination is denied. The sensate emotions are presumed to be pure since they are felt to emerge from “within” in response to an effective external stimulus, thus exacerbating denial. Put another way, the emotions are naturalized. The “our” becomes at once personally compelling and represented by Geldof himself. As he saw the matter, he became the leader of “a populist, non-governmental constituency. I represented nobody but myself and the millions who wanted to help. A constituency of compassion” (1986, 312). Here compassion justifies the slippage from the “I” to the “us,” and compassion is itself taken to be a natural emotion that does not need to be questioned, indeed cannot rightly be questioned because it simply is. Or as Geldof put it when reflecting on a later stage of the development of Band Aid, “The public began to see Band Aid as something which stood for common sense and common decency in a world marked by self-interest and double-dealing. . . . I became emblematic of Band Aid’s aims without ever wishing to encourage a cult of personality”

preface and acknowledgments  15

(1986, 396). The emotions are pure, as is the constituency ostensibly coalescing around them, and only the common-sense world is the site and source of the corruption and defilement of what it means “naturally” to be human. The soon-to-be Sir Bob Geldof wrote this in what was marketed as his best-selling autobiography, although, in the conception of the world that is common-sense humanitarianism, contradictions of such an order are quite insignificant. An emphasis on the sensate immediacy of emotion is a recurrent theme in Geldof’s statements. He once wrote, “The key thing is that people respond emotionally to images of others dying of starvation because there’s an empathy, a concrete shared humanness.” He said the response is not founded on “some abstract conviction about ‘humanity.’ It’s an emotional response. But it’s also a rational one. And it has the great merit of being right” (2000). But what is the criterion of this “being right”? Given that common sense establishes a divide between individuals on the one side and the world on the other, it is unsurprising that for Geldof the truth of the case he is making comes from the reduction of global issues to the personal level: “You need some pretty convoluted logic to convince yourself that it’s wrong to help another person when you can— that it’s really better that you do nothing and let them die” (2000). At the individual level, at a level that remains pure despite the corrupting world, social subjects just know what is right, uncritically and without any need for theory or abstraction. This is the nub of a contradiction in Geldof’s argument, because although he is making a case for the responsibility of individuals (with his interpellation of “you”), he goes on to contend that the help ought to be provided by the European Union because it has the ability to assist and sits on massive food surpluses. Consequently, just as the moral problem impacts individuality as an external force, so the role of the individual becomes one of a mediator who somehow or other (by withdrawing consent through the act of consumption) puts pressure on a monolithically conceived institution. Indeed, since common sense defines institutions as part of the world and, moreover, since it denies space to any sociological imagination that might make it possible to tease out the linkages between social subjects and institutions, the argument can only deal in opposites without nuance. At no point is any attention paid to how

16  preface and acknowledgments

the interpellated “you” relates to the institutions of the European Union, because those institutions are invested with an agency making them a “you,” too, and therefore entirely intelligible as being like an individual of sorts. This becomes clear when Geldof explains what the European Union ought rightly to do: “What the EU has to do isn’t difficult: just crank up the planes, float the boats and load the trucks—and do it now” (2000). In this way, the European Union is drastically misunderstood; it becomes a coherent and purposive monolithic actor and not a complex institution with its own bureaucratic rationality and irrationalities. For Geldof, the European Union is just like an individual, albeit a big and powerful one. Geldof is presuming an almost Manichean split between moral individuals and immoral institutions that hide the fact that Ethiopians are not different from Europeans: “They behave with their children exactly as you or I do. They behave with immense dignity and they give up every scrap of food to their children to try to keep them alive” (2000). Yet there is a second, and extremely interesting, theme buried within Geldof’s remark that giving money was not enough in the face of the Ethiopian famine. His point was that sending money could not possibly exculpate one from responsibility for the suffering. Something else was required. For Geldof, the situation was so outrageous and disgusting it was incumbent upon him to withdraw his consent from the system allowing it to happen. Geldof needed to do more than give money. But what did he want other people to do? The answer became clear at the Live Aid concert in July 1985. In a famous incident, a television presenter was telling the audience the postal address to which to send their donations. Geldof interrupted, “Fuck the address. Who’s going to write in with their money? . . . Listen, there are phones there just lying dead. If you’ve given your money already, go to your neighbor and bang on their door and tell them to send some too” (Geldof 1986, 384; emphasis added). Geldof felt he had to give more than money; he had to give time and effort to make sure everyone else gave, well, money. Indeed, throughout his discussion of the Band Aid and Live Aid appeals, Geldof is obsessed by the amount of money raised and by the size of individual donations. In short, he asserts the value for everyone else of a form of action he had decried as insufficient for himself.

preface and acknowledgments  17

Geldof expressed a need to withdraw consent, and yet the action that followed was precisely a form of consent. In particular, it was consent to the quantitative dictates of the market and therefore to the common sense of consumerism. As Geldof explained by way of justification for the absence of black acts at Live Aid, “The purpose of Live Aid was to raise money. If a band sold a million records, it meant more people would watch than if they sold a thousand. If more people contributed, more people lived” (1986, 364). Exactly the same argument reappeared twenty years later, when the Live 8 concert was held at the time of the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Geldof was obviously stung by criticism of the lack of black and African acts at the London concert and responded, “We had to use the biggest selling artists in the world, nationally and internationally. For all their great musicianship, African acts do not sell many records. People wouldn’t watch. Networks wouldn’t take the concert.” He went on to point out that the DVD of the London Live 8 concert was “the biggest and fastest-selling” ever, while one of a concert featuring African artists sold “only a few thousand” (2005a). This is moral conscience as accountancy, even though the publicly expressed intent of Live Aid was consciousness, not fund-raising. These contradictions were, and to some degree are, kept in check by the force of Geldof’s personality. His media appearances consistently present a self at once sardonic and sincere, safely rebellious and predictably unpredictable. To some extent, the incoherence of the commonsense humanitarianism he espouses and illustrates moves toward both crystallization and transcendence in the self he presents in the media. The force of mediated personality overcomes the force of argument, and displays of emotional veracity (“fuck the address”) at once stop all disagreement in its tracks and intimate a depth of feeling about the issue. Moreover, in as far as Geldof presents himself as the exemplary figure of an “us,” he indicates to all individuals who wish to be members of that “us,” who wish to be able to talk in terms of “our,” how they too ought properly to feel and behave. Displays of sensate emotional veracity and depth become demonstrations of how bad the situation really is, and of how outraged “we” are. Moral argument becomes identical with emotional display, and emotional display is naturalized and is “the way things

18  preface and acknowledgments

are” for “people like us,” thanks to the ability of television to establish a purportedly immediate and unmediated connection between those who can look into one another’s eyes or share feelings. In all of this there is absolutely no room for critical reflection. Displays of strong emotion through “plain speaking” and the presentation of a certain kind of moral self, one that is practically effective because it accepts a naturalized world only to rage against its selfish beneficiaries, became defining qualities of Bob Geldof. On the tenth anniversary of Live Aid, he reappeared in the media (not that he had ever really been far away) and made several pugnacious comments. In particular, he made it plain that his sphere of concern was quite different from that of professional humanitarian actors. As he said in a remark distilling the common-sense approach to complex issues, “The technicalities of aid distribution don’t interest me one bit” (Deevoy 1995, 32). They are someone else’s problem, and not Geldof’s, because they are not practically relevant to his situation. The remark would be impossible and unintelligible from someone like Fiona Terry, who is that kind of expert. But Geldof gave another rendition of his sphere of concern when he reflected on Live 8 and how it caused him to get involved in negotiations with many different players. Geldof presents himself as a selfless amateur, doing what has to be done because it is simply right: “I genuinely could do without all the grief, the numbing boredom of the endless briefings, reports, meetings, abuse, stats, smarming, word-watching, tie-wearing, brown-nosing and general crap that goes with all this ‘world-saving’ bollocks.” But he has no choice; his role is natural and naturalized, individualized and evidently without institutional support: “The thing is, I don’t know why or how, but I can do this stuff,” he says. “And in being able to do it, it would be the most grotesque irresponsibility to then turn away . . . it is unimpeachably boring—but somehow it works” (Geldof 2005a). But Geldof’s persona does reflect some of the incoherence of ­common-sense humanitarianism, although typically these paradoxes are presented as facts and simply part of the way things are. Nothing is really joined up, and everything is separated. This is represented in a magazine article that covered a return journey Geldof made to Ethiopia in 1995, on the tenth anniversary of Live Aid.

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First of all, in the large photograph accompanying the article, a s­ erious-looking, sunglasses-wearing Geldof is pictured in the foreground in focus, and in the middle ground looking at him are two slightly outof-focus Ethiopian boys. He dominates the picture and is framed as its center of attention, although the smiling boys have a weight of meaning behind them. They are established as the pictorial and metaphorical background for the story, and their evident happiness intimates the success of the humanitarian effort Geldof illustrates and symbolizes. Yet in the accompanying article Geldof says, “I loathe and detest aid films. . . . Whitey wandering through famine-torn Africa holding hands with the little black babies makes me sick. It’s patronising and grotesque” (Deevoy 1995, 32). This is “everyman” as the reluctant hero. And then, recalling a point from his autobiography, Geldof says that on the tenth anniversary of Live Aid he did not want to go to Africa: “I didn’t want to go, much like I didn’t want to go to Africa in 1984. I was highly resistant to it then. But it became incumbent upon me to go. I was a focus. If I went, then the cameras would go” (Deevoy 1995, 34). The point here is, of course, that the news cameras invariably deploy a repertoire of generic devices in order to communicate a complex situation speedily, and one of those is precisely the image of “whitey wandering through famine-torn Africa” (to use Geldof’s own phrase). Geldof actually played on this image when he wandered through an impoverished area of Addis Ababa: “Festooned with skinny kids who are evidently thrilled to have this lanky Irishman in their midst, Geldof saunters through Teklehaimanot Woreda, a cluster of shanty towns in Addis Ababa. It is a dirty, disease-ridden part of town” (Deevoy 1995, 34). Here, then, is Geldof in exactly the guise he claims to abhor. Second, the article narrates a little incident in which Geldof haggles with stallholders in the market (Deevoy 1995, 36). Admittedly, this is an ambivalent act that could be read as a refusal to patronize the local community, and it could be argued that Geldof is treating the stallholder with respect and according to custom. Such is the reading of the incident the article intends, with the added intimation that Geldof sees things for what they really and truly are and cannot be fooled by anyone. But the haggling can also be interpreted differently, as a refusal of the cosmopolitan “whitey” (Geldof’s word) to be ripped off. Whatever the reading

20  preface and acknowledgments

of this incident, it opens up some of the contradictions of common-sense humanitarianism. The attempt not to patronize the other leads directly to his poverty. After all, when all is said and done, the multimillionaire Bob Geldof is more securely able to avoid confrontation with necessity than any market stallholder in Addis Ababa.

common sense and myth Reading or listening to Geldof, it is impossible to avoid the matter of mythicization and his recurrent deployment of its devices. In this regard, it is worth noting Geldof repeatedly refers to “Africa” as if it were all one place. No attention is paid to differences, and it could be argued that this is an attempt to render the complexity of difference literally and visually invisible. Much the same thing happens to “Africa” as happened to the European Union: it becomes a monolith. But there is a difference. The European Union is a monolith refusing to act, whereas “Africa” is one that cannot act. In 2005 Geldof wrote a newspaper article that is interesting for two reasons. First, it contains the monolith of “Africa,” and second, it nevertheless shows how Geldof’s position had mutated in the twenty years since he emerged as the exemplary figure of common-sense humanitarianism. When he first became aware of the problems of the continent, Geldof was clear that the answer consisted in the immediate provision of humanitarian assistance. After all, people were starving now, and so that had to be the basis of any appropriate help that might be given to them. However, by the time of Live 8, he was focusing more on world trade systems. These two strands come together—and are inflected with an assumption that because “Africa” is not a full participant in the global economic system, it is being left behind—when Geldof says that, unlike India, “African states never developed from the skittish singlecommodity market into a more balanced economy, and fell into a condition of seemingly inexorable decline with all its attendant and baleful consequences. Hunger, disease, conflict, lack of education and opportunity.” Admittedly, Geldof goes on to identify South Africa and Nigeria as

preface and acknowledgments  21

“the stirring giants of the African continent” (2005a), but it is clear that “Africa” is being treated in terms of a default position identifying it as all one place. It is also noticeable that this position identifies the confrontation with necessity as the consequence of economic underdevelopment. Then something dubious happens in the argument: none of this is the fault of the “Africans.” They are presented as victims who are struggling to be equal players on the world stage, but the World Trade Organization prevents them from taking their place. “Africa” is a place corrupted and defiled by external factors. The hint is that had it been treated as an equal, “Africa” would now be a full member of the world community because it possesses the material and human resources that participation in world trade networks requires. Yet “we” are the beneficiaries of a system destructive of what “Africa” could have been, and hopefully might become again. From this it is taken to follow that it is the interpellated “us” who ought to feel “shame at our moral and political failure” because “we” have not applied sufficient pressure on the WTO (Geldof 2005a). Pressure, then, is the point of contact between “us” and institutions like the European Union and the World Trade Organization. Since they are conceived through what amounts to a category mistake as being like big individuals, like any individual, they can be influenced by peer group pressure. Or at least, that is the common-sense argument. Running through this presentation of “Africa” is an implicit contrast between the purportedly impoverished and violent continent existing today and some noble and pure past that is the foundation for universal humanity. “Africa” is “our” home, the place from which “we” all came: “If you ever get the chance, go there. It feels like . . . going home” (Geldof 2005b, 7). This is the mythic “Africa” of ancient origins. Geldof has observed, “Humankind started in Ethiopia. .  .  . Traces of our earliest human ancestors have been found here” (Deevoy 1995, 34). On the benign side, it could be suggested this comment is an attempt to show that common roots connect all humans, these roots go back to Ethiopia, and therefore all humans share a moral responsibility toward their true homeland. But if that line of thought is pursued with a less benign mind, then it also promotes a forgetting of the history of Ethiopia’s impoverishment and, indeed, ignorance about cultural differences. The

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identification of common roots stresses what we share, but the moral problem of famine is actually a sign of historical difference, and this is what Geldof denies. When he does recognize difference, it is in purely aesthetic terms. For instance, he remarked that Ethiopians are “one hundred per cent drop-dead gorgeous” (Deevoy 1995, 34). The mythic “Africa” is also the “Africa” of ancient truths; there is a biblical dimension to the mythicization. It was played upon by Michael Buerk’s original BBC news report from October 24, 1984, and Geldof has returned to this theme. In the BBC report, which put the Ethiopian famine into Western conscience, Buerk intoned the now famous line, “Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century.” Buerk was obviously trying to capture what he saw in a description possessing a measure of immediate sensate emotional impact, but the reference to the “biblical famine” also manages to remove the famine from history. It becomes an occurrence from outside of history, and the implication of the biblical reference is that the world operates according to different principles of action and therefore history. There is the active and historical world of progress watching television, and the eternal world without history and action of the remorseless confrontation with necessity shown on television. In his autobiography, Geldof fastened on to the biblical dimension and skirted around the implicit division of the world into different principles of history and action, when he spoke about watching Buerk’s report: “A famine of biblical proportions. There was something terrible about the idea that 2,000 years after Christ, in a world of modern technology something like this could be allowed to happen as if the ability of mankind to influence and control the environment had not altered one jot” (1986, 271). The references to the Bible serve to make famine nothing other than an eternal and unchanging aspect of human being in the world. When the famine is called “biblical,” the intent is to raise moral outrage, but there is another implication: “This is the reign of gnomic truths, the meeting of all the ages of humanity at the most neutral point of their nature, the point where the obviousness of the truism has no longer any value except in the realm of a purely ‘poetic’ language” (Barthes 1973, 101).

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Geldof gives the biblical angle another twist in the context of his aesthetic regard for the “drop-dead gorgeous” Ethiopians. It is not too hard to find a variation on the theme of the purity of primitivism when he comments, “The Ethiopians believe they are totally different. They see themselves as direct descendents of Solomon. Full stop. They are the chosen people, the beautiful ones” (Deevoy 1995, 34). Now, apart from indicating that Geldof misinterprets the concept of “beautiful” as referring to physical appearance alone, the comment is important because it mythicizes “Ethiopians.” They become special and therefore worthy of attention because they are exotic. For the Western watcher at least, their aesthetic appeal redeems their neediness and perhaps even makes it slightly appealing. In this way, their aesthetic appeal links to their existence in an unchanging world to guarantee a kind of purity (a purity reinforced in a horribly paradoxical way by the material starkness of their confrontation with necessity; famine victims are often shown naked). When Geldof watched Buerk’s news report, he saw that some of the starving knew they would not be given food: “There was no anger in their faces, no bitterness, no clamouring. There was only the hollow dignity of waiting for death in silence” (Geldof 1986, 271). This remark brings to mind another, far more coruscating description of dying “Africans” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.” And there are eyes, too, in this alternative description: “Slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly” (1990, 14). But from Geldof’s point of view, the dying were an exotic species, whose minds remained closed to the observer, and all that mattered was how they looked. The distinct possibility that at least some of these people were so furious they were beyond action, so bitter they were apathetic, so tired they could not clamor is inadmissible because it does not fit the narrative of mythicization.

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Indeed, mythicization of this kind is one of the most important aspects of common sense. Underpinning common-sense humanitarianism is a “myth of the human ‘condition’ [that] rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.” That is the contention of Roland Barthes, who continues, “Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins . . . one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature” (1973, 101). In a beautifully barbed aside, Barthes wonders if the parents of Emmett Till, who was lynched by white racists in the United States, would agree with this, and the same aside might be addressed to the surviving families of those whom Geldof saw waiting to die with “hollow dignity.” Barthes made these remarks in the course of an essay on a photographic exhibition that sought to emphasize the unity in diversity (and the diversity in unity) of all humans throughout the world. But he pointed out that the pictures denied “the determining weight of History: we are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behaviour where historical alienation introduces some ‘differences’ which we shall here quite simply call ‘injustices’” (1973, 101). When Barthes considered the photographs, he saw a myth of the human community having two stages. In the first stage, the photographs stressed human differences, but all the time in the name of an exoticism emphasizing “the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs.” The second stage of the myth pulls the rabbit of unity from out of the hat of this representation and recognition of diversity: “Man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least . . . there is underlying each one an identical ‘nature’ . . . diversity is only formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould” (Barthes 1973, 100). These are the stages of a myth of human community because they reduce human being in the world into something approaching an assertion that escapes— or is immune to—history. The point is, however, that these strategies of mythicization are not peculiar to one photographic exhibition held in Paris in the 1950s. They are also intrinsic

preface and acknowledgments  25

to the conception of the world that established common-sense humanitarianism. More specifically, they can be seen in the extraordinary book Geldof in Africa (Geldof 2005b). This lavishly illustrated book was published to coincide with the broadcast of a BBC television series in which Geldof toured thirteen countries in the continent. Although the precise geography of his tour is a little vague—because everywhere is simply “Africa”—it appears from the photographs (which are attributed to Geldof and are certainly presented as his own visual diary of the journey) that it was focused on subSaharan Africa and the Great Rift Valley. The reason seems to be that for Geldof this is the Africa of ancient origins: “One day, a group of huntergatherers wound up at the north end of the valley somewhere around the present-day Horn of Africa. . . . They were camping in what was then a wet part of the world.” The homeliness is, however, awe inspiring and a transcendence of history: “I stood at that place too . . . and wondered at all of this. At Africa. At its total beauty. Spiritual and physical. How it exercises that same mind that formed here. How the ancient memory and smell of it draws you back. Draws you home” (Geldof 2005b, 115). It is worth noting that this “Africa” excludes the emerging economies of South Africa and Nigeria, and therefore, this “Africa” is a choice and a construction as opposed to any real place. The “Africa” of Geldof in Africa is, actually, Geldof’s personal Africa, and it seems plausible to media audiences because it fits in with the common-sense conception of the world in which their moral individuality is formed. The photographs constitute something approaching a case study of the mythical and common-sense “Africa.” They can be put into three dominant categories. First, there are half- or quarter-page pictures of consumer products like bottles of Cola or quasi-surreal oddities such as a memorial with a jet fighter on the top, in front of which stand a donkey and cart (Geldof 2005b, 106). Within this category there are also photographs of abandoned Western technology, and often these are more than a little like illustrations from a collector’s edition of Heart of Darkness (see, for example, Geldof 2005b, 188). Indeed, there is a photograph of rusted railway machinery for which the only appropriate caption is one not given: “I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass. . . . The thing

26  preface and acknowledgments

looked as dead as the carcass of some animal” (Conrad 1990, 12; Geldof 2005b, 198 –99). Second, there are landscape shots of barren yet beautiful wildernesses, housing, or “Africans” in context. One instance of the latter kind of photograph shows a Masai man and two boys, dressed in colorful shawls and tunics, in the middle of a vast plain with their herd of cattle to their left. There is no intimation of modernity in this picture, except for the deliberate incongruity of the plastic water bottle the man is holding (Geldof 2005b, 120 –21). Third, the book features a lot of admittedly beautiful full-page photographs of individuals looking straight into the camera. At least, these photographs are beautiful from the point of view of commonplace Western aesthetic ideals. For example, one closecropped picture, titled “Nuer Refugee,” features a young woman standing in front of a thatched roof. She is wearing a colorful “tribal” necklace (of the kind known to any Western consumer of “ethnic” craft) and a slightly flamboyant cream dress printed with pink flowers and embroidered with lace edging. Who she is, why she is a refugee, and the contrast created by the combination of the dress with the cultural meanings of the word “refugee” is never explained. But there is something else of note about the picture: the woman’s forehead is beaded with sweat, and there is what appears to be a teardrop in the corner of her right eye (2005b, 221). Is she crying and, if so, why exactly? The only answer the photograph can admit is that she is crying because she is a refugee; her tears are a sufficient assertion, and no more historical explanation is necessary. Another example of this kind of picture is titled with no sense of cultural clash: “A Muslim Mona Lisa.” This is a close-up of a woman, her head haloed by a gray and white shawl. Her skin is slightly pebbly, and her mouth is in an area between smiling and weeping, presumably justifying her identification with a work of Western art. Again, there is no explanation of who this woman is, the context in which she was encountered, or the reason for her expression. It is true that this woman possesses a kind of dignity, but the reasons why are subordinated to her emotional and sensate appearance (2005b, 117). These close-ups of isolated and individualized faces are examples of the tendency of mythic representation to exoticize. There is an emphasis on the diversity of skins (although only of skin textures; in this world, all

preface and acknowledgments  27

“Africans” are “black”) and customs, although they tend to be reduced to the color of fabrics or, in some cases, the differences between styles of dancing. Indeed, it is noticeable that for the most part the people in Geldof’s pictures do not do very much; they stand around a lot looking sad or grinning. If they move, it is for a reason, never on a whim: “Young men looking for work crowd the shantytowns clinging to the edge of the bursting metropolises, which overflow with people, untreated sewage, bad water and crime” (Geldof 2005b, 270). Yet when Geldof’s pictures show work, it is always rural, and cities are only ever places of consumption or personal display in slightly out-of-kilter imitations of Western fashion. According to this way of looking, Africans only move when they are engaging in universal human actions such as work. Rarely is an “African” shown doing what Geldof does in one picture: sleep in the back of a van (2005b, 257). A photograph that is incredibly dubious provides the only exception. A man is pictured napping at the foot of a tree in the midst of a verdant forest. His right arm is over the top of his head in a pose familiar to anyone who has watched wildlife programs (2005b, 289). Of all of these “Africans” it is pertinent to observe, “They wanted no excuse for being there” (Conrad 1990, 11). It appears that life in “Africa” is either feast or famine. Consequently, there is a kind of movement in the meaning of the photographs. Even as they exoticize, they also intimate a unity of humanity, or at the very least a unity of “Africa” (so the geographical specificity of Geldof’s version of the continent becomes much less important than its mythical and common-sense validity; indeed, the geography of Africa is replaced with the myth of common-sense “Africa” to such an extent that the former is more or less unnecessary). The book suggests that despite its exotic and aesthetic diversity, everything in “Africa” pulls together through universal actions. Geldof in Africa has a typically mythical and very consistent tendency to transform the relationship between “Africa” and modernity into a fact of nature rather than of history. It is just the way things are, and ambiguity is transformed into an asserted aesthetic exoticism. One full-page picture with no caption shows a large, smiling, bare-breasted woman standing in a dusty street. To one side of her there is a motor scooter, and

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on the front of the ramshackle mud-colored building behind her is the bright blue sign “Cybercafe” (Geldof 2005b, 39). There is no explanation of how or why a cybercafe has appeared here, what it means culturally or, for that matter, socially. The contrast between modernity and “African nature” (as signified by the woman) is simply shown and therefore transformed into an aesthetic incongruity. Perhaps the most subtle and yet self-evident example of this tendency is found in a half-page photograph of a green-gray salamander hopping between rusting green-gray-black iron spheres, which appear to be old cannonballs. The picture is simply titled “Salamander,” and the cannonballs are there, unmentioned, purely because of their quality as a pictorial background (2005b, 66). It is tempting to wonder whether they are from a companion to the French battleship Conrad’s Marlow saw off the west coast of Africa, firing artillery shells into the forest (Conrad 1990, 11). The counterpoint to this image, “Sisyphus,” provides the clue that the cannonballs are purely aesthetic. It depicts a black beetle making tracks in the yellow sand of the desert. The top third of the picture contains a steely blue sky (Geldof 2005b, 211). Cannonballs and desert become interchangeable landscapes for the wildlife of “Africa.” Running through the book is a mythic contrast between Western modernity and “African” primitivism. According to Geldof, the two can coexist if the modern fits in with “African” ways. For example, Geldof praises plastic. He sees plastic as a modern product, “which has not only provided most Africans with footwear and impenetrable building materials, but also the revolution that is the plastic bottle” (2005b, 159). Do “most Africans” actually wear plastic shoes? Children have the job of collecting water and have to go many miles to the well, but plastic bottles have evidently changed this burdensome chore for the better. Geldof says, “In the past, children had to walk, carrying the heavy earthenware jars to this source, returning home heavily laden. Thanks to plastic bottles the journey to the well is light; coming home more can be carried and less spilt” (2005b, 159). Above this little text there is a photograph of a child around six or seven years old, wearing an orange robe and carrying a stick and two bottles of water. In order to make this child’s life a little easier, the readers of the book (the interpellated “you”) are enjoined

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to “Go plastic,” presumably without heed to the environmental costs of such a move (2005b, 159). Yet this appeal only “works” if it is accepted that “Africa” is a dumping ground for Western waste. The plastic bottles become another part of the out-of-kilter fashions, which are perhaps not imitative of Western style for the simple reason they are really Western, having been thrown away as out of date by Western consumers and then dumped on African markets by the ragpickers of global capitalism. But more often than not, the primitive is infected and destroyed by modern Western incursions. For example, the West has done little to arrest the spread of AIDS: “Africans frequently remark on the linguistic similarity between ‘AIDS’ and ‘aid.’ This is more than a not-very-good joke. It reflects a widespread suspicion that AIDS is something that has been foisted on them by Western scientists. Dismissing this notion as barmy might work in the Western world but in Africa it resonates with the profound ambiguity that Africans have about the nature of the power that emanates from the West” (Geldof 2005b, 295). Western incursion has also brought about the collapse of effective social systems. According to Geldof, “our part of the world” has stressed individualism, and this principle was exported to “Africa,” where “the opposite is true. . . . Everything is done through the collective. Which is why, whenever our world has tried to interfere with Africa, whether in an aggressive or benign manner, it has so often gone wrong. We have transplanted ideas developed under one notion of life on to another contrary view. It can’t work and it never has” (2005b, 158). Yet even in this context, which Geldof implies is the direct cause of death being “everywhere” in “Africa,” it is possible for modernity to provide benefits, so long as what it gives is put into existing “African” arrangements and not allowed to crush them. In this vein, Geldof argues that mobile phones are a positive boon because they allow “people” to continue practicing eternal traditions concerning death. To stay in touch with families is to honor and love the dead. Hence Geldof says, “The biggest expanding market for mobile phone telephony in the world is Africa and a lot of that market is driven by the need of people who have migrated to the cities to stay in touch with their villages and find out who has died” (2005b, 156). Note how, in that passage, “Africa” is once again lumped into one monolith without internal differences,

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and note also how “people” are identified in a way stressing primitive origins (“their village”) over the “cities” that are therefore implicitly identified with rootlessness and loss. Just beneath the surface of this primitivism runs a very questionable current. Looking at the photographs in Geldof in Africa, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the book is promoting a common-sense view of “Africa” as the home of pure humanity, of a purified humanity, demolished by an overly arrogant modernity and hidden from the West by an overabundance of the “fripperies” of consumerism. In this regard, it is worth paying some attention to a photograph toward the beginning of Geldof in Africa. It is given the title “Sudan” and shows two naked children, a tall girl of around ten years of age holding the hand of a chubby child of three or so. They are photographed from behind as they stand in the desert. The tall girl is the interesting one. Her legs are incredibly long and spindly, but her back already has muscular definition, her waist thin and her buttocks firm. This girl is statuesque and perfect. She is at once our great ancestor, what we in the West have lost, and also the threatened future. She is a primitive, somehow present before the gaze of modernity (Geldof 2005b, 11). This girl is exemplary of some pure nobility lost to the corrupted West: “Consider an African walking. You will rarely see one do anything as provocative as run. There is an effortless, upright elegance.” This girl is possessed of “a huge poise against the endless whiteness of the sky” (2005b, 27). Yet she is also noble in sentiment; at once our ancestor and a future we in the West threaten, she holds the hand of a toddler, and they walk together with “a slow rhythmic steadiness of unhurried ease wholly different from the flustered, busy, jerky, spasmodic rush common to the European” (2005b, 27). Here, then, Europe too is turned into all one place and subjected to a monolithic conception of the world, and this has to happen because it acts as the narrative other to “Africa.” Only the individual— only the interpellated “you” or “us”— escapes the monolith. Geldof’s “Africa” is the opposite of his Europe. There is a contrast between the “clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical” (Sontag 1980, 88). Common-sense humanitarianism’s conception of the world identifies

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“Africa” as a place pure yet rendered impure by Western illnesses; incorruptible yet defiled by greed; physical and not too concerned with questions beyond the immediate life world (except where those questions have been imported from the West and sit incongruously in local settings); and utterly joyful except where it is forced into a direct encounter with the necessities of life. This is a world of the self-evident and contemptuous of the “reflective, the critical, and pluralistic” (Sontag 1980, 89) because those cognitive attitudes destroy the primitivist ideal and defile the pure. The girl in the “Sudan” is nothing less than a hero from the pure past, come to haunt “our world.” She is a reminder of what we once were and what we have lost and can be no more, except as tourists or through the sensate emotional bond of common-sense humanitarianism. She is the perfection common sense adores.

conclusion The dependency of common-sense humanitarianism on myth has remained constant. It probably must remain so, because any engagement with Africa as opposed to “Africa” would open up a space within which common sense itself would have to be transformed into something more critical. But then it would likely crumble and collapse. It would almost certainly become less popularly compelling. There has been one significant shift in common-sense humanitarianism from its emergence in the mid-1980s to the present. When Band Aid and Live Aid first appeared, Geldof was arguing forcefully that sensate emotion was the glue for a “constituency of compassion” that could achieve a withdrawal of consent from a system producing famine, through the expedient of consenting to purchase a product of the culture industry. However, by the end of 2005, Geldof was critiquing the sensate emotions he had previously lauded. In ostensible terms at least, the shift happened because the recalcitrance of the world of institutions had called the bluff on emotional truths. In other words, the reliance of common-sense humanitarianism on the sensate had, in the practical terms of “getting something done,” proven to be rather impractical. Yet

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this acknowledgment created the space for a split in the constituency made by common sense, since it meant different individuals now had to do different things and accept different demands. There was now an implicit division between the masses and the exemplary figures. Geldof argued, “The politics of emotion can take you only so far. All the tears in the world have never kept a human being alive. Practical action does that. Cash and politics. Charity and justice. Morality and realpolitik. Oil and water” (2005a). In the mid-1980s this now self-evident contention would have been identified as a deliberate obfuscation of simple realities, or it would have been the launch pad for a condemnation of the institutions complicit in the production of “the nightly pornography of poverty trailed pruriently across our teatime television screens” (Geldof 2005a). But now it was presented as a reflection of the harsh reality of a world possessed of a natural presence all of its own. In the context of this newly accepted reality, Geldof implies a division between those who carry out the business of cash, charity, morality, and water and those who are in a position to deal with institutions on their own terms of politics, justice, realpolitik, and oil. From this claim, Geldof moves on to argue that “practical action” therefore requires focused and knowledgeable engagement with political structures and institutions. In the 1980s institutions were either obstacles to be pushed out of the way because they were the source of the damage, or they were the home of the self-seeking and of a selfishness “other” to the “constituency of compassion.” This is why the organizational knowledge of common-sense humanitarianism was limited; the very ignorance was a sign of purity of intent. But now institutions and structures have to be taken into account. And as Geldof justifies this point, it is clear that he has moved away from his earlier position about the withdrawal of consent. Now he can be found arguing that since the causes of poverty are political, “you must engage with the process as it is. Not as you imagine it to be, or as you would wish it to be, or even as you think it should be—but as it is” (2005a). The nub of the message is that there is no alternative, and consent cannot be withdrawn since to do so would be to ignore “the process as it is.” Geldof continues, “You must engage with the power and the persons and institutions and methods that

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wield that power. It can be a tiresome process, but ultimately that is irrelevant if that person you saw last night on television can just stop hurting one second” (2005a). In this passage, television is still the unproblematic and self-evident medium through which the human confrontation with necessity is known, but there has been a shift in the interpellated “you.” In the mid-1980s Geldof’s “you” was more or less identical with an imagined constituency of individuals who experienced the same sensate reaction to news reports (reactions quantifiable through donations and acts of consumption). By 2005 the “you” has become more pedagogic; this “you” is Geldof himself explaining to others what is required of someone like him. The “you” is no longer “us”; now it is “those who engage with the process as it is.” The “you” has become a reflexive device as opposed to the intimation of community it used to be. In short, Geldof has naturalized his own position and become separate from the “constituency of compassion” he once claimed to represent. In a rather bombastic passage, he tries to distinguish himself from the institutions with which he now deals, presumably in order to continue to stake a claim to being pure and selfless. Geldof deliberately uses an obnoxious metaphor to make his discourse quite distinctive from that of institutions and to try once again to connect with common-sense conceptions of the world. He says there are three attitudes to adopt toward the structures with which it has become necessary through experience to engage: “There are those who will stand outside the tent peeing in, there are those who will be inside the tent peeing out—and then there are the others who will stand inside the tent peeing on the ground where they stand.” Geldof identifies himself as one of the latter group because he has learned a bitter lesson: “Sometimes, by being momentarily allowed inside the tent, you can help to change it. By peeing so wantonly, so copiously, you can stink the place up so much that they want you out—at a reasonable price” (2005a). With phraseology like that, Geldof is clearly seeking to bolster his “outsider” persona even though he now negotiates with the kinds of people he once disdained, people like British government leaders: “Blair and Brown . . . have consistently shown world leadership. . . . They work well together and share a passion for Africa” (Geldof 2006). He has also published

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an article about a tour of “Africa” with George Bush so sycophantic the White House was probably a little concerned it might seem like too much of a put-up job. For example: “I read it [the ‘Bush regime’] has been incompetent. But not in Africa. It has created bitterness. But not here in Africa. Bush can’t do oratory. He can in Africa” (2008, 3). Yet, using his own metaphor, it is only possible to pee in the tent if, first, the tent always-already exists and, second, one is let in. The first point means that structures have to be naturalized and the second that Geldof accepts his separation from the very constituency he previously claimed to represent. Something else happens if you pee on the ground on which you are standing. What was previously solid ground turns to mud, and you can slip up. For the exemplary figures of any position based on common sense, this is the ultimate difficulty. Common-sense humanitarianism emerged with an emphasis on an emotional desire simply to help others who were face to face with necessity. The relationship between the sufferer and the aid giver was presumed to be immediate and direct thanks to the sensate bond created by television, and existing institutions were presumed to be obstacles in the way of humans coming together on the basis of a bedrock of shared origins. But the more the same people repeat that position, the more they shift from exemplary figures to experts. Consequently, the Geldof who once claimed with pride that he knew nothing about the logistics of what he was arguing about ends up being an expert member of the British government’s Commission for Africa. Whatever else he might be (for example, celebrity or owner of media companies), Geldof becomes, precisely, a professional humanitarian. As such, the very common sense upon which his exemplary status was once based can become the ground from which he is attacked. Perhaps this is one of the greater inconsistencies of common-sense humanitarianism. What is common-sense humanitarianism? It is the humanitarianism of media audiences who rely on unquestioned myths to make sense of the suffering of others. Common-sense humanitarianism is the naturalized cultural creation through which we make sense of the news from out of “Africa.”

2 saving birhan

How is common-sense humanitarianism possible? What does it do to “Africans”? In his reflections on the twentieth century, looking forward to the twentyfirst, the historian Eric Hobsbawm suggested the most fitting memorial to its victims would be a statue of a mother and her children. The image has universal validity and at once symbolizes human fragility, compassion, and hope (2000, 158). But there might be a far more poignant image, one much less tied to Western traditions of the Pietà and its many secular refashionings. It is the image of the abandoned child, the child with no mother, left to fend for itself in the face of a hostile world and failing. Such is the guise in which Birhan Woldu filtered into Western conscience and consciousness, perfectly unknown to herself. In 1985 Birhan Woldu’s face appeared on giant screens at the end of the Live Aid concert at London’s Wembley Stadium. She was a three-yearold victim of the Ethiopian famine who was close to death by starvation when a Canadian team led by Tony Burman and reporter Brian Stewart filmed her. The film with Birhan was first aired on CBC on November 1, 1984, and it was introduced by the news anchor Peter Mansbridge as a story about “people without food, people without hope.” Her neck was a spindle, her split lips dry, and her heavy eyes vacant. This became one of

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the iconic images of the Ethiopian famine, and it was taken as a reminder of what famine relief was all about: saving the lives of malnourished children. However, quite why the picture of the then and long namelessto-audiences Birhan was chosen over any other is unclear. Presumably it was because her picture fit more readily with news and representational values than the competitor images. After the iconic appearance at Wembley, which never gave Birhan’s name or circumstances but just used her photograph in a context imposed upon it by the meanings of the event, she disappeared, her job evidently done for common-sense humanitarianism. Birhan was deindividualized and significant purely as a specimen of human material neediness. Her photograph was a means to an end, and she was not at all treated as an end in herself. Her identity and personal integrity were denied by the focus on her suffering face. The demand her face was made to make actually swamped the identity of the individual whose face it was. However, on the twentieth anniversary of the original Band Aid single in 2004, Birhan Woldu reappeared. A British national newspaper had flown her over to London so she could be introduced to the performers of the new version of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Bob Geldof acted as her go-between in the city and said, “Birhan is proof that we can make a difference. This beautiful intelligent woman and thousands of others like her are here today because of what Band Aid did 20 years ago.” She was a symbol of success, transformed from a specimen of naked humanity into living, moving proof that “something can be done.” Geldof continued, “It was a very emotional moment, seeing this woman who was this scrap of humanity barely able to lift her head. Her mother died and her father brought her up” (Harvey 2004). The whole point was simply that she was alive. Yet she was alive in a certain way. The newspaper noted she arrived at the recording studio “dressed in traditional robes” of white. Birhan’s face is remarkably photogenic, and in photographs she is presented as a symbol of purity resonant with the myth of “African” primitivism so important to common-sense humanitarianism. She was reported as saying, “I remember when the nurses held me as a baby. They were so caring. Now I want to help others in Africa so they don’t have to go through the pain my family went through.” She can help in a

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very practical way, the report pointed out, because she is an agricultural student “supported at college by Leicester charity the African Children’s Educational Society Trust” (Harvey 2004). A few months later, in July 2005, Birhan reappeared, again wearing what might be called “traditional robes” yet this time onstage at the London Live 8 concert. Bob Geldof introduced her to the audience. She thanked the audience for their support, after which Madonna encouraged a visibly uncomfortable Birhan to stay with her onstage. Holding Birhan’s hand, Madonna performed “Like a Prayer,” singing the contextually bathetic lyric “Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone / I hear you call my name / And it feels like home.” Madonna then pushed Birhan around the stage until she was quietly ushered off. Neither Madonna nor the crowd seemed to notice Birhan’s absence, and the performance continued. Once again her job had been done. But Birhan’s work was not entirely over. She was flown to Chicago, where she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and received a standing ovation from the audience simply because she was alive and there (Stewart 2004). Of course, Birhan’s story is much more complicated than this, although it only became clear as a result of Brian Stewart’s understandable pique at being excluded from the story of her “rediscovery.” Not least, she did not survive because of Band Aid, and neither did a British newspaper rediscover her (despite its claims to the contrary). Brian Stewart had been in contact with Birhan and her family in a personal capacity since 1995, and he had found a “pious, shy young woman, close to her family and father, Ato Woldu,” quietly getting on with her life. It was her father who had brought Birhan to the feeding center in 1984, although he was cut out of the close-cropped pictures that made his daughter what Stewart calls “the legendary face of famine” (2004). In one of the widely used pictures of little Birhan, the masculine presence is not her father but a white thumb on her forehead, performing a kind of pastiche-secular anointing of the sick. Stewart’s initial report established Birhan as being about to die, but it went on to show that she had been rehydrated by medical staff at the Catholic feeding center. One nurse was quoted at the time as saying, “I think she will live now” (Stewart 2004). In other words, Birhan Woldu was saved before Band Aid had even been

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established. But these are mere facts, of relatively less cultural importance than the diverse ways in which Birhan Woldu has become “a living symbol of famine, and also hope.” Geldof told Birhan she was “a beacon of hope and an inspiration to millions” (Stewart 2004). Against such weight of cultural investment, frail facts stand no chance. The cultural symbol of Birhan Woldu, and not the living person, is interesting for our immediate purposes. In this way, the chapter seeks to use the case of Birhan Woldu (the symbol, not the person) as a way of deepening the analysis of common-sense humanitarianism and of exploring how it is intricately woven into the cloth of contemporary culture. The stakes of Birhan as a cultural symbol are enormous, since what emerges here is a question of how suffering and indeed humanitarianism are narrated, and more precisely of who is positioned as a legitimate or illegitimate narrator. In the case of Western dealings with “Africa,” this inevitably resonates with debates about culture and imperialism. As Edward Said noted, “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them” (1993, xiii). Common-sense humanitarianism raises this question in a particularly stark way because, just like the novels Said examines, it contains an unchallenged principle: “The source of the world’s significant action and life is in the West, whose representatives seem at liberty to visit their fantasies and philanthropies upon a mind-deadened Third World” (1993, xxi). These “fantasies and philanthropies” are seen as valid and appropriate because the very activism of the West and its ability to come to the assistance of “Africans” confirms “Africans” as necessarily in need of Western help and incapable of doing things for themselves. Since common-sense humanitarianism denies the possibility of action to any constituency other than the West, but also assumes “Africa” is the mythical homeland of humanity itself, the problem emerges of explaining why the West acts while “Africa” ostensibly suffers, even as “Africans” are supposedly pure and possessed of primitive wisdom and beauty when left to themselves. In his reflections on Italian history and politics, Antonio Gramsci grappled with a similar problem: if all Italians were the same, how could the difference between the industrial and affluent North and the impoverished

saving birhan  39

rural South be explained? He argued that the Northern industrialists opted for a naturalized explanation focusing on a myth of the South: “the organic incapacity of the inhabitants, their barbarity, their biological inferiority” (1971, 71). Common-sense humanitarianism establishes the same binary divide between “us” and “them,” but, crucially, where the Italian industrialists put a negative sign against their impoverished compatriots, humanitarianism puts a positive mark against its mythical roots. Even though common-sense humanitarianism and common-sense racism are very far apart in terms of their arguments, intentions, and outcomes, as narrative structures they are fairly similar. This chapter has three sections. First, it is clear that common-sense humanitarianism is a way of imagining the world with certain sociological preconditions of existence. This is perhaps where its connections to a cultural imperialism are strongest, especially since, following Said, “‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory” (1993, 8). How are those attitudes possible, and what is the exact nature of the metropolitan domination? In its second part, this chapter follows the theme to return to Birhan Woldu and to wonder if, as a “symbol of hope,” she has become the famine survivor as an anti-celebrity (with the paradox, of course, that to be an anti-celebrity actually is to be a kind of celebrity). In the third section, the chapter returns to a crucial point made by Said. He said imperialist narratives were historically opposed and resisted by reference to their own standards: “The grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection” (1993, xiii). But alternative narratives by the victims of crises, and more simply the free and maybe even dissenting voices of those who are helped by Western action, are remarkably absent from the structures of common-sense humanitarianism. For example, most every recorded remark by Birhan Woldu is grateful. The “why” is fairly easy to explain, but the “how” is less so. In its third part, the chapter will confront the question of how common-sense humanitarianism blocks the formation of other narratives, especially those of “Africans.” How does common-sense humanitarianism resist the transformation of mythical “Africans” into political Africans?

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the preconditions of concern Quite simply, common-sense humanitarianism takes it as given that “we” have a responsibility to ameliorate the suffering “they” undergo. Even recent history (such as the Western nonresponse to the Rwandan genocide) implies this responsibility owes absolutely nothing to a fanciful conceit of “human fellow feeling” or “solidarity.” Neither is there any direct “black box”–type connection between the awfulness of an input into moral conscience and the production of an appropriate response. Things are much more interesting. In order to begin to appreciate quite how interesting the preconditions of common-sense humanitarianism are, it is only necessary to consider in general terms a couple of the statements Bob Geldof made and, indeed, took to be based on such self-evident foundations that there was little or no need to think about them in any great detail. First, he was shocked by the news from Ethiopia, but he was not at all surprised that sitting in London he was able to see what was happening in another part of the world. Second, he asserted that the distance between the United Kingdom and Ethiopia is not so great and that we are all neighbors. It is worth comparing these presumptions to those Said identifies in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. He cites a passage in which Dombey is defined by the conceit that the world existed for him to generate profit, and asks, “How could Dombey think that the universe, and the whole of time, was his to trade in?” Said says the imagination with which Dickens invests Dombey “depends on the tried and true discourses of imperial free trade, the British mercantile ethos, its sense of all but unlimited opportunities for commercial advancement abroad” (1993, 14). If Said’s reading of Dickens is kept in mind, it becomes pertinent to inquire: how could Geldof take it for granted he is aware of what is happening in Ethiopia, how could he believe geographical distances have been overcome, how could he be sure the plea “something must be done” translates into something actually being done? There is more to the answers than mere hubris. There is something special about the subject position from which Geldof was speaking and imagining the world. He was situated at the center looking out to the periphery, and it is only because of such positioning

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that he could make the claims and presumptions he did, engage in the kinds of action he did. From the periphery Birhan Woldu occupies, the world looks very different indeed. Geldof did not doubt the ability— and indeed the responsibility and maybe even the right— of the “us” he interpellated to roam imaginatively and physically throughout the world with “our” “fantasies and philanthropies,” but before coming to London, Birhan Woldu had never left Ethiopia. The Canadian journalist Brian Stewart reported with some dismay that she had “never heard of a photo op.” Birhan’s interpreter said, “She had no idea who Bob Geldof was or who these people are or why is she meeting them. She didn’t have any idea” (Stewart 2004). We knew her, but about us she knew absolutely nothing. Birhan was culturally mediated as a subject of the West’s narration and narrative possibilities, and not her own. She comes into narrative as a slate blank unless it is inscribed by Western action (for example, allegedly she is able to go to agricultural college only because of support from a UK-based charity), although it is Birhan who is narrated because she was saved (and, of course, the saving is narratively constructed as a Western action, too, and has little to do with her father taking her to the feeding center). Birhan is constructed in terms of projections of fantasy and philanthropy. Indeed, if there is one recurrent theme in the narratives about Birhan, it is her innocence and purity, her untainted unworldliness. Perhaps even her primitivism: “Just a few months ago Birhan had never ridden on an elevator. Now she’s flown, briefly, into worlds she could not imagine. She asks for no fees and feels her destiny is now to give” (Stewart 2004). It is hard to know what was intended to signify Birhan’s innocence most powerfully: her lack of knowledge of elevators or her failure to charge appearance fees. A good way of thinking about these differences of perspective and imagination is in terms of a telescope. Geldof has a position at the small end of the telescope, and he is able to look at a unified world greater than his own sphere of existence. He knows all about airplanes and photo opportunities. Birhan is at the big end looking down, and she discovers her world is small and quite confined when it is considered from that point of view. She has no access to the other end of the telescope and is only allowed to conceive of its very existence if others pull her into their

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world. For Geldof, everything is integrated and holds together, whereas for Birhan the world is a vast and presumably completely fractured (and fracturing) place. One wonders how she has managed— or failed—to integrate back into her previous life since riding in elevators and meeting Madonna. Interestingly, Birhan was prompted to reflect on this issue in a BBC Radio interview. When asked what she would tell her friends about London, Birhan replied she would not be able to tell her friends anything at all except that “she was there,” because she did not have the words or concepts and her friends would not be able to understand what she was describing even if she did (Woldu 2005). Birhan had been forced to confront a collapse in the value of her experiences (Benjamin 1973, 83) in a way Geldof and Western media audiences never had to. For Birhan, nothing made much sense anymore, and for Western audiences everything remained well integrated. European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries laid the foundations for the integration of the things of the world into a totalized whole, initially dominated by imperial metropolitan centers that “made the world one.” Said puts the point well when he says imperial domination “laid the groundwork for what is in effect now a fully global world. Electronic communications, the global extent of trade, of availability of resources, of travel, of information about weather patterns and ecological change have joined together even the most distant corners of the world” (1993, 4). Geldof and media audiences more broadly can imagine “Africa” as a place in which they— or their representatives— can act because of the legacy of this groundwork. Moreover, it is only because Geldof and media audiences are situated in the same postimperial metropolises as the institutions of global communication that they (we) are able to imagine an integrated world in which it is possible to move around and act. Equally because Birhan Woldu is at the periphery, outside of the metropolitan centers, she is not able to imagine the world in that way and hence can only appear in it and travel through it if the postimperial metropolitans pull her into their world and narrate her for themselves. Geldof can be a latter-day Dombey for the simple reason he and Dickens’s character are both situated at the center of the institutionalized world. Dombey lived in the center constituted by Empire, and Geldof lives there because

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of the spatial location—and therefore ­narrative-making power— of the media institutions that are the agencies of the rather disembodied category Said calls “electronic communications.” Roger Silverstone has rightly proposed that the media are absolutely central to the constitution of the contemporary world. The media also constitute the environment, the conditions of possibility, through and in which Geldof and his interpellated “us” are capable of imagining the world as a place of action. More specifically, Silverstone makes it clear that the media are of profound moral significance because they constitute the environment in which encounters with others take place. Those encounters are possible because the media allow for the other to appear before “us.” For example, without the media, Birhan Woldu would have been completely unknown to the “us” of Western media audiences and she would not have become a symbol of anything whatsoever. The media made it possible for Western media audiences to enter into a moral relationship with Birhan precisely because she appeared before audiences, through the media themselves (the circularity of the sentence is quite deliberate). As Silverstone puts it in a somewhat convoluted and Dickensian passage, “It is because the media provide, with greater or lesser degrees of consistency, the frameworks (or frameworlds) for the appearance of the other that they, de facto, define the moral space in which the other appears to us, and at the same time invite (claim, constrain) an equivalent moral response from us, the audience, as a potential or actual citizen” (2007, 7). By this argument, then, the media were the framework for the appearance before Geldof of starving “Africans” (where “Africa” can be identified as one of Silverstone’s “frameworlds”) as others within a continuous moral space (“Ethiopia is just down the road”) inviting or claiming a moral response from the audience (“something must be done”) because we are imaginatively constructed as fellow citizens of the same space. If the conceptualization is followed through, it becomes clear that Silverstone moves from an insightful analytical position to a liberal politics presuming precisely what he needs to prove. Silverstone presumes audiences and the others who appear through the media are all “potential or actual citizens” of a same moral space he then conflates with a political space through the use of Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the politics of

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appearance. On the one hand, this presumes an identity between morality and politics, and, on the other, it presumes the media constitute a space for the action of a liberal cosmopolitan citizenship. Silverstone argues that this form of citizenship is presently viable because the media environment “has brought with it an intensification of the condition of the cosmopolitan and an increasing legitimation of the cosmopolitan’s status. . . . In the ideal world such a figure is no longer seen as marginal but rather as central to the civic project” (2007, 11–12). Such a civic project, “as an ethic, embodies a commitment, indeed an obligation, to recognize not just the stranger as other, but the other in oneself. Cosmopolitanism implies and requires, therefore, both reflexivity and toleration. In political terms it demands justice and liberty. In social terms, hospitality. And in media terms it requires . . . an obligation to listen” (2007, 14). Silverstone does what ethical thought seeks to avoid: he conflates the “is” with the “ought” (or more exactly, he elides an “ought” with an “is”) and, with conflation, reduces his position to wishful thinking. As he puts it, “The media are becoming the crucial environments in which a morality appropriate to the increasingly interrelated but still horrendously divided and conflicted world might be found, and indeed expected” (2007, 8). The analytical point about the media being the place where such a morality might be found is interesting and insightful, but of itself provides no justification whatsoever for an expectation. Expectation comes from elsewhere and is analytically invalid even if it resonates well with the opium of the post-political intellectual going by the name of cosmopolitanism. After all, the expectation is Silverstone’s and probably not Birhan Woldu’s, and so despite all of his good intentions, Silverstone “writes as a man whose Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations” (Said 1993, xix). Silverstone’s cosmopolitan expectations merely reflect his position at the metropolitan center of global media networks. His expectation is nothing less than a naturalization of imperial history and, by extension, a sign of the emergence of a common sense of the Western intellectual. The slippage from the useful analysis to the banal recitation of cosmopolitanism become common sense is demonstrated when Silverstone brings the media together with the philosophical category of the polis to

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coin the neologism mediapolis. He accepts that the mediapolis is internally fragmented by the presence of different forms and cultures of the media, but nevertheless Silverstone identifies it in the singular—there is a mediapolis—and defines it as “the mediated space of appearance in which the world appears and in which the world is constituted in its worldliness, and through which we learn about those who are and who are not like us” (2007, 31). (It is worth noting how the definition uses the unproblematized “us” as its point of reference.) Indeed, “contemporary media enable a face-to-faceness which, both in broadcast and interactive modes (and of course the differences are not insignificant), involves the coming together of speech and action, and, albeit in the symbolic realm of mediated representation, they reproduce, though of course in an intensely technologically mediated form, the discursive and judgemental space of the polis.” In the mediapolis, then, the coming together of the plurality of social subjects is possible because “the world and its players appear in the media, and for most of us that is the only place they do appear” (Silverstone 2007, 30). Silverstone denies that the mediapolis is “dependent on a specific location” and presents it as more or less independent and deterritorialized: “It does not need nor depend on the nation-state, or arguably the regulation of specific national institutions. It emerges in the interaction of human beings within the space of mediated appearance” (2007, 31). Against this definition, it is only necessary to return to Said’s question: how could Dombey see the world in the way he did? How could Silverstone present such a deinstitutionalized and, it must be said, sociologically naïve category of the mediapolis? The clue to the answer is provided by the way in which Silverstone’s definition ignores questions of power, representation, and institutional flows, and stresses instead an abstraction. Silverstone says the mediapolis emerges “in the interaction of human beings,” but some “human beings” find it much easier to appear than others, and some only appear in guises imposed upon them. Furthermore, Silverstone’s blindness to institutions leads him to make a category mistake. The mediapolis can only emerge because some institutions have control of the expensive and complex means of media communication. Consequently, the mediapolis does not emerge “in the interaction of human beings” at all. It emerges out of

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relationships of control, communication, access, and representation. This is one of the many dimensions of the story of Birhan Woldu. Silverstone would see Birhan’s appearance as a case study in cosmopolitanism, such that someone living in London can now engage in a relationship with an other who lives in Ethiopia. He would see Birhan’s appearance as the sign of the emergence of “a shareable culture and a framework for common understanding, for making sense” (Silverstone 2007, 53). But the questions remain: Whose sense? Who or what creates and imposes the “framework”? Does everyone share this purported culture equally? Silverstone is writing from a position his terms of analysis serve to mask. The mediapolis is deterritorialized, because he does not have to move to access it and because he has the cultural capital enabling him to act within the media environment. Similarly, the mediapolis is reduced to “the interaction of human beings” because it is such a selfevident environment from his subject position that it does not need to be thought. Silverstone’s category reflects and expresses a typically metropolitan perspective on the world. He is at the center, and from there he is blind to the existence of peripheries. Birhan Woldu could not possibly develop the same analysis as Silverstone because, situated at the periphery, she would be more attuned to the realization that she can only appear if a number of conditions are met: first, she has to be noticed by Western news broadcasters in order to appear in the global news; second, to be noticed she has to be present before the broadcasters in a manner fitting their “framework” of understanding; and third, she has to be willing to uphold— or more pointedly, she has to be unable to resist—the cultural meanings applied to her. Put another way, Silverstone’s approach needs to be able to explain what it is blind to; Birhan could appear before him, but he could not appear before Birhan. If the mediapolis is as Silverstone implies, and if it has the cosmopolitan potential he argues it does, he needs to be able to explain how Birhan Woldu had absolutely no idea who Bob Geldof was, and the explanation then has to be used to reconsider the purported chance of cosmopolitanism. The periphery is visible to the center, but the center is invisible from the periphery, and as the center becomes institutionalized and naturalized as common sense, it is invisible to itself. As Said says, “In our time, direct colonialism has

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largely ended; imperialism .  .  . lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practice” (1993, 8). More specifically, imperialism lingers in the metropolitan centers in their relationships with the postcolonial peripheries. Indeed, it is appropriate to identify common-sense humanitarianism (just like Silverstone’s mediapolis) as a postcolonial yet imperial metropolitan narration of vestigial Western hegemony in the world. Here, the word “metropolitan” is used in both a descriptive and a conceptual sense. First, a metropolis is a chief or capital city such as London, Paris, or New York. In this sense it is interesting that most of the protagonists of cosmopolitanism are inhabitants of the capital cities. But the simple empirical observation feeds into the conceptual definition of a metropolis. Secondly, then, a metropolis can be understood as a center in the network of flows and exchanges underpinning the communication and trading networks constitutive of the institutionalized preconditions of the ability to narrate the “modern world.” By this aspect of the definition, then, a metropolis is conducive to a cosmopolitan sensibility because, as an institutionalized gravitational center in symbolic and capital flows and exchanges, it is established as a more or less unifying principle in the world. In this sense, a metropolis is a social and cultural “black hole” inasmuch as it is so powerful nothing can escape its gravitational pull once it has become an “event” in symbolic and capitalistic flows and exchanges. As a form, the metropolis unifies the world, even if the content of flows and exchanges can cause fractures. Not least, fractures occur because there is a plurality of metropolises and not one. Each metropolis competes with the others to achieve a position of control and hegemony over flows and exchanges, but imperial legacies continue to shape those struggles in the present. This is the reason why London, for example, remains a nodal point in global stock exchange flows even though its centrality to global trading relationships, as it was formerly the imperial foundation of the stock market, has significantly waned. Similarly, despite the global proliferation of media technologies and communications, old imperial metropolises such as New York or Paris remain institutional centers against which other media outlets struggle for their own

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power to narrate the world. For example, Al Jazeera most certainly narrates the world in non-Western terms and thus presents a challenge to Western hegemony over interpretation, but it is obvious that Al Jazeera also presents itself as an alternative to the narrations emerging from the postimperial metropolises and institutions and thereby actually confirms their vestigial power. Al Jazeera’s English-language channel reflects this situation when it states in its Web site’s “Corporate Profile” that it “is destined to be the English-language channel of reference for Middle Eastern events, balancing the current typical information flow by reporting from the developing world back to the West and from the southern to the northern hemisphere.” The metropolises retaining and maintaining hegemony over symbolic and capitalistic flows and exchanges can be identified as world cities. Georg Simmel said that early twentieth-century Berlin was a world city because it was a point of attraction for global production. According to Simmel, a world city is “a single city to which the whole world sends it products and where all the important styles of the present cultural world are put on display” (1997, 256). The definition can be modified to include media institutions too, in as far as news and symbols can be identified as “products.” Products are sent to these world cities because they are the hegemonic markets; they are the centers defining the places from which products are sent as peripheries. Writing about the Berlin Trade Exhibition, Simmel speculated, “Perhaps it has never been apparent before how much the form of modern culture has permitted a concentration in one place . . . how through its own production a city can represent itself as a copy and a sample of the manufacturing forces of world culture” (1997, 256). Of course, Simmel’s emphasis on manufacturing and production is rooted in the time and circumstances of his observation, but it continues to resonate. For example, the case for cosmopolitanism made by metropolitan academics can be interpreted as nothing less than an ethnically diverse city “representing itself as a copy and a sample” of what the world ought to be according to the cosmopolitan criteria embraced by those academics of the world cities. Since these metropolises are postimperial Western centers, this is in effect to say that cosmopolitanism is another dimension of

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the Western narration of the world. Judging by her recorded statements, Birhan Woldu is remarkably uncosmopolitan in her understanding, aspiration, and “frameworld.” Silverstone identifies cosmopolitanism as consisting in being “free from the tying and oppressive loyalties of the singular community” (2007, 11–12). Yet Birhan is absolutely rooted in loyalty to the “singular community,” and there is little evidence that she considers it at all “oppressive.” In the end, perhaps, the cosmopolitan argument is remarkably intolerant. This definition of the world city can be applied to the metropolises at the center of the flows and exchanges of the media environment. Since the institutions of the media environment are situated in the vestigial imperial metropolises, and because this concentration makes those metropolises world cities, it can be proposed that the media environment is institutionally concentrated in the hegemonic centers of flows and exchanges. Inasmuch as those centers retain a hegemony borne of narrative power and institutional inertia (reinforced by control of the means of technical-­rational violence), they establish the rest of the world as more or less peripheral. The more an “other” place is construed as peripheral, the greater will be its inability to resist postimperial narration and the action initiated from within the world city. The world city becomes a concentration point (a “black hole”) in the web of flows and exchanges, and it is able to represent itself as identical with the animating “forces of world culture.” “They form a momentary centre of world civilization, assembling the products of the entire world as if in a single picture. Put the other way round, a single city has broadened into the totality of cultural production” (Simmel 1997, 256). What happens in and because of the West thus becomes the meaning of the story of Birhan Woldu, and anything not fitting the story is ignored or made mythical (and therefore immune to change, unchanging; her lack of cosmopolitan worldliness becomes a sign of her naturalized primitivism). Consequently, media institutions squabble about who first found Birhan and say little or nothing about those they failed to notice. Those who were not noticed actually cease to exist in narrative terms (just as they possibly ceased to exist in material terms). To this extent, the ignored raise the same question as each individual object in the Berlin Trade Fair about which Simmel wrote. The resonance

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between humanitarian demands in the media environment and commodities at the Trade Fair is indeed remarkable. Quite simply, in the Trade Fair and in the media environment, supply exceeds demand, and for Simmel this means that each thing has to make itself more attractive than others if it is going to secure attention. He talks about the “shopwindow quality of things” and goes on to say that things need to “show a tempting exterior as well as utility.” Indeed, “where competition no longer operates in matters of usefulness and intrinsic properties, the interest of the buyer has to be aroused by the external stimulus of the object, even the manner of its presentation” (1997, 257). These consequences of the excess of supply over demand do not just apply to the representations, or to Silverstone’s “others,” appearing in any given production of the media environment. After all, there is an increasing proliferation of media platforms (even though ownership might be concentrated), and there is competition between them for access to the finite number of viewers (which are then sold on to advertisers). As such, each outlet has to arouse the interest of audiences, and this is achieved through stimulation as opposed to simple needs-satisfaction. No one needs to know about starving children in Ethiopia; they have to be made to want to know. How is the wanting achieved?

sacrifice and cynicism In his remarks on the Berlin Trade Exhibition, Simmel said the close proximity of so many products leads to a kind of switching off. There is so much to see and take in that sooner or later the individual’s senses simply fail to cope. This experience is familiar to anyone who has spent too long in an art gallery. There comes a point when it is impossible to notice any more. A more embodied variation on the theme is provided by the Stendhal syndrome sometimes overtaking tourists in Florence (evidently usually women under forty who are traveling alone), who become so overwhelmed by the historical presence of the city that they develop giddiness, chest pains, and faintness. But, Simmel said, the Exhibition got around this problem by means of a “petty but psychologically subtle

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arrangement: every few steps a small entry fee is charged for each special display” (1997, 255). Charging a small fee inspired and reproduced a sense of curiosity on the part of the visitor, a sense exacerbated by the presence of the many things available for free. If this can be seen without paying, what has to be paid for must be exceptionally exciting. According to Simmel, this leads to an emphasis on amusement, and he said it “is more effectively achieved by having to make a small sacrifice, which overcomes one’s inhibitions to indulge, than if a higher entry price, giving unrestricted access, was charged, thereby denying that continuous small stimulation” (1997, 255). He believed this stimulation is effective because it creates the impression that “modern man’s one-sided and monotonous role in the division of labour will be compensated for by consumption” (1997, 256). These lessons seem to have been learned by the media ­practitioners who are so fundamental to common-sense humanitarianism. The repeated images and news of the victims, especially if they are “African,” can too easily “paralyse the senses” (Simmel 1997, 255). The paralysis is exacerbated when the display of the suffering is easily available through the thoroughly domesticated media, and when its availability requires no trace of an effort on the part of the audience. This is precisely the case with the media in the West; through institutionalization, technology, and commodity fetishism, they have attained a status of being always and already at hand because they have been naturalized. The media are common-sense constituents of contemporary cultural life (this is one of the claims Silverstone is probably trying to make in his discussion of the media environment). When media are readily available and when they broadcast come what may, the audience is positioned as passive in a division of labor. One odd consequence of the passive positioning of the audience is the cult of the journalist. Journalists are not popular and well known because of their reporting skills so much as because they seem to lead exciting and active lives that contrast with the passivity of audiences in front of the screen and their restriction by the necessities of the division of labor. Journalists offer vicarious compensation, especially when they report from the killing or dying fields of the world. (The corollary of this argument is that it ought historically to be possible to plot continuity

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between the cult of the journalist and the rise of tourism as a cultural form, since both offer compensations for the constraints of the day to day.) Without its being called upon to make a sacrifice of some description, the audience is not inspired toward curiosity. Its position requires it to do no more than absorb what is given or dream of the evidently exciting lives led by others. However, the situation fundamentally changes as soon as the audience is interpellated to make a kind of sacrifice. Now the senses are engaged, and the audience is transformed into an active consumer. This is the great discovery of mediated charity events like Live Aid or Live 8, which are structured around audience interactivity and are able to continuously reproduce a sense of purposeful engagement. Live Aid involved a sacrifice of money and Live 8 of time. A media and broadcasting genre has emerged in which humanitarian demands are linked to amusement in the form of interactivity, and the interpellation of the audience is reproduced by means of its being repeatedly asked to make a small sacrifice in order to justify the continuation of engagement (or to allow for consumption of the broadcast with a clear conscience; one has made a sacrifice in order to get an entrance ticket, itself providing a kind of right to be amused). The strident appeals, which tell the audience to donate more money, of course have a pragmatic dimension in as far as events like Live Aid are about fund-raising. But something else is going on. Even if the appeal to donate is rejected by a particular audience member, the very making of the appeal consists in a kind of stimulation because the audience member is put in a situation whereby he or she must actively decide whether to accept or deny the demand made. Passivity in the face of such media events is impossible. Moreover, the structure of the genre establishes recurrent cycles of demand-sacrifice-reward relationships. Events like Live Aid and indeed television telethons are structured in this way. First, images of suffering are shown; second, the appeal is made (the audience is called upon to make a small sacrifice); third, the audience is rewarded by a music act or other performer who provides amusement, and then the cycle begins all over again. Within the cycle of demand-sacrifice-reward, it does not really matter who the performers are, and neither is the nature of the suffering terribly

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significant. What matters is that the cycle is reproduced. In the first case, the reproduction perpetually facilitates audience engagement and thus establishes a media event contrasting with genres that can be passively taken in without a sense of sacrifice (for example, news, soap opera, and so on). It compensates for the passivity of other media use and intimates a connection between active consumption and self-assertion, itself recompensing for the demands of labor. By this argument, then, it is necessary always to be aware of something that too much writing about the media tends to forget: social subjects do not just sit in front of the television, and they are not just members of media audiences. Second, since the reproduction of the cycle is predictable in advance and without regard to particularities (humanitarian broadcasts and their modes of interactivity are more or less formatted and most certainly generic), however confusing and diverse things might at first appear, “different impressions [are] brought together so that overall there seems to be an outward unity, whereas underneath a vigorous interaction produces mutual contrasts, intensification and lack of relatedness” (Simmel 1997, 256). The generic cycle of demand-sacrifice-reward establishes a unity in which no attention needs to be paid to the precise nature of any appeal or the people who appear in it. Critics often mistake this lack of attention as a sign of “denial” or compassion fatigue on the part of the audience (Cohen 2001; Moeller 1999), when in fact it is intrinsic to the situation of appeals in the media. Such critics err in taking the symptom for the cause. Furthermore, the act of sacrifice intimates a unity between the demand maker and the donation giver symbolically expressed in the soon-to-be-broadcast performance, which is passively consumable as a reward. It is a reward because it is an instant of amusement in which a decision as to whether to accept the demand or deny it can be put to one side. However, the intimation of unity cannot be too encompassing, because if it were, the “us” and “them” difference upon which commonsense humanitarianism depends would dissipate and the demand that “we” help “them” would be impossible. At this point the cycle recovers what it would otherwise deny. Because the demand-sacrifice-reward cycle is reiterated, it reproduces difference and contrast, although difference is increasingly naturalized and mythicized through its becoming exotic.

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These points run through Birhan Woldu’s appearance with Madonna on the Live 8 stage, albeit in a somewhat time-delayed way. Birhan was first pressed into Western conscience and consciousness as making a demand. Her initial appearance in the CBC news report was fleeting, but then she became a symbol of famine and, as a symbol, demanded a sacrifice on the part of those before whom she had appeared. Within this relationship, Birhan’s exact identity was absolutely beside the point. She appeared symbolically as the natural and essential demand maker, as the abandoned child. The initial reward for the audience’s sacrifice was provided by the Live Aid event in 1985 with the amusement it had to offer through the concert form. However, the reward was magnified in 2004 when Birhan reappeared, perhaps necessarily wearing “traditional robes” that were essentialized and naturalized but were also white, intimating innocence, untaintedness, and rebirth. Our sacrifice resurrected her. She embodied redemption. Her being there was the ultimate reward (as the Oprah Winfrey audience glimpsed when it gave Birhan a standing ovation). Furthermore, when she appeared with Madonna, Birhan intimated a unity between donors and recipients and yet also revealed the unity to be superficial by her exoticism: her robes, her unworldliness, her silence. Consequently, even as she redeemed the sacrifices of twenty years before, she simultaneously made a demand for more sacrifices in the future. Madonna was the symbol of the amusement available as a gift to audiences if they made the sacrifice. The song she sang also spoke of the unified “home” purportedly following. Indeed, Madonna had appeared at the 1985 Live Aid concert, and her subsequent transformation into a global brand signified what might follow from sacrifice. Helping others might also be the best way of helping one’s self. Yet if amusement is the reward, what is the sacrifice? Geldof was absolutely clear about the necessary sacrifice: time and money. In commonsense humanitarianism, the role of the audience is not to get up and go to the disaster zones; rather it is to watch the broadcasts and perform the sacrificial act of donating money. There are obvious pragmatic reasons for this. The worst thing to happen in a humanitarian crisis would be for lots of unskilled and more or less inept individuals to turn up offering to help. It is best if the amateurs provide the resources for the professionals

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to go about their business. But in being asked to make a sacrifice in the form of a money donation, the audience is positioned in a certain way in relation to the suffering, specifically as a consumer that does not need to be overly concerned about the details of whatever it is being invited to engage with. Inasmuch as common-sense humanitarianism establishes a relationship between “us” and “them” cemented by money, it is also denying any chance the relationship might be human. Simmel teased out the consequences of money for human relationships in a profound and moving essay on modern prostitution. He said that even though prostitution itself has a long history, there is something unique about its modern form. Modern prostitution is centered around the direct exchange of money for sex. Simmel wrote, “Where money becomes the standard for everything and anything, where, with money, one can have a universe of the most varied things, money takes on a colourlessness and lack of qualities that . . . devalues everything for which it can be an equivalent. Money is the most impersonal thing that exists in practical life,” and so “every time a man buys a woman for money, a piece of respect for humanity is lost” (1997, 264). Consequently, every time the audience is positioned as a money giver, “a piece of respect for humanity is lost” in two ways. First, the humanity of the donor is diminished because his or her conscience is reduced to a quantifiable value without nuance or variation. What it means to be “good” in relation to others is thereby restricted and turned into an accounting exercise (with the corollary of status comparisons in which it is insidiously implied that if I give more than you I must be a more caring person). Second, the humanity of the suffering is diminished too. Just as the prostitute has to sell herself in the marketplace by offering either an appearance or services, so the demand maker in any broadcast appeal has to appear in a guise likely to be purchased. Hence an abandoned child or photogenic young woman appears in white “traditional robes,” not some emaciated pensioner or slightly aggressive young man. (In order to avoid a potential willful misreading of these points, let it be made absolutely clear that the argument is not that Birhan Woldu or any other symbol in an appeal is a prostitute, and neither is it being suggested that humanitarian appeals are forms of prostitution or pimping. The claim is that wherever money is involved

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humanity is assaulted, and therefore there is a point of formal comparison between prostitution and common-sense humanitarianism.) The result is cynicism, and it has its roots in money’s ability in contemporary culture to be the means of exchange for anything. After all, if money can be exchanged for anything, any other kinds of claims to value must be inadmissible or plainly fraudulent. Hence cynicism: “This mood can be most effectively supported by money’s capacity to reduce the highest as well as the lowest values equally to one value form and thereby to place them on the same level, regardless of their diverse kinds and amounts” (Simmel 1990, 255). Cynicism means there is indifference or even incredulity toward all claims of extra-monetary value. As Simmel said, when “honour and conviction, talent and virtue, beauty and salvation of the soul, are exchanged against money . . . the more a mocking and frivolous attitude will develop in relation to these higher values that are for sale for the same kind of value as groceries” (1990, 256). By extension, the only way of measuring if something is more important than something else is by means of what it costs or, in the case of appeals, how much money was raised. Geldof can be identified as actively promoting this kind of cynicism every time he says the only important matter is the generation of money to solve a problem. This is more or less to say that the measurement of the validity of an appeal is the amount of money it raises. Consequently, Geldof was quite clear that some acts ought not to appear at Live Aid and Live 8 because they lacked monetary value. This is cynicism parading as moral effectiveness. Yet the challenge it draws upon itself is mockery. Cynicism is the defining temper of a sketch the comedian Ricky Gervais made about charity appeals and the predictable appearance in them of characters like Geldof and Bono. It was broadcast on the BBC’s Comic Relief Day in 2007. The sketch begins with Gervais walking against the backdrop of an “African” village before being invited into a hut where a man gives him a cassette of music by U2 that originally belonged to his dying brother. The pinch comes, however, when it becomes clear that Gervais is not in “Africa” at all, but in a studio in London. As Gervais says, there is no point going to “Africa” because the audience will not guess they are being tricked, and in any case he prefers home comforts

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to dirt and disease. Various people now enter the scene (including Geldof ), and after expressing dismay at what Gervais is doing, they ask if they can also get involved because they need to increase their media profile and sell new products. For example, Geldof says he has a new disc to market. One of the other people is Jamie Oliver, a television chef, who offers everyone some of the food he has just bought at McDonald’s (he is also carrying a heavy bag from the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain; Oliver is the star of Sainsbury’s television adverts). In the end, it turns out the man in the hut is Bono in disguise; he is there to market a new U2 album. Only one black personality appears: a television presenter who sits in the shadows semi-naked. The sketch is amusing and complex because Gervais is mocking the world of which he is a part and, moreover, pulling the rug out from under broadcast appeals like Comic Relief itself. He is castigating the pretensions and deceptions of the very spheres of cultural production in which he goes to great lengths to make himself a central figure. But the sketch is also an example of cynicism in Simmel’s sense because everyone is involved in buying and selling something or other, and between those things there is no real qualitative difference. There are no higher or lower values, there is no distinction between the moral and the commercial, the human and the commodity. Money is the center of everything, and all human qualities are exchanged for it (including the dignity of the characters who appear with Gervais). Yet the cynicism actually seeps out of the film too. It goes beyond the canned laughter used to make it clear to the audience that the film is a “joke” not to be taken too seriously. The sketch is saying to audiences there is no difference between the “African” who is making a demand and figures from the culture industries. Everyone is trying to sell something, and there is no position external to the media from which appeals based on non-­monetary values might be made. The bag Jamie Oliver carries signifies the lack of an external sphere of values. It implies that even in a sketch parodying celebrity endorsements, there is, actually, a celebrity endorsement. Gervais’s sketch is saying that if the surface is scratched, all humans are pretty much the same inasmuch as they (we) are all in it for the money. Nothing is immune from being mocked, even human suffering: “The

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only significance of what is highly valued consists in its being degraded to the lowest level” (Simmel 1990, 255). The discussion returns to the “symbol of hope,” Birhan Woldu. Gervais’s sketch provides the cynical counterpoint to her representation as an exotic innocent. By virtue of its very cynicism, the Gervais sketch reveals that Birhan’s purity is valuable because it intimates the chance of a degree of veracity the media deny. More specifically, Birhan can be called an anti-celebrity because, unlike the celebrities who appeared in Gervais’s film and, indeed, unlike Gervais himself, she is presented as needing “no excuse for being there.” Contrary to the complexity, manipulation, and hard sell Gervais simultaneously parodies and applauds, Birhan is a symbol of the essential, the naturalized, the uncomplicated; she enables the audience to believe they “[belong] still to a world of straightforward facts” (Conrad 1990, 11). Chris Rojek says that in order to understand contemporary celebrity, it is necessary to move away from any focus on “innate qualities or characteristics” because “mass-media representation is the key principle in the formation of celebrity culture.” He continues, “Celebrities often seem magical or superhuman. . . . that is because their presence in the public eye is comprehensively staged” (2001, 13). According to Rojek, the contemporary cultural dominance of celebrities is due to the confluence of processes of democratization, which led to an emphasis on the individual; secularization, which transferred notions of the sacred to the cultural; and commodification, which uses celebrities to humanize consumption and to embody the desire for commodities (2001, 13–14). All of these processes come together as soon as a person becomes amenable to presentation as a celebrity. The media associate them with talents or qualities that laud individualism and standing above the profane, and that invest the commodified “thing” with intimations of desire and desirability. As soon as a person cracks under the pressure of such a burden of meaning or becomes out of date, they are abandoned and another celebrity takes their place, as if there is a conveyor belt (which to some degree there is). Consequently, celebrity culture is not at all a site of “straightforward facts,” and the sort of cynicism running through Ricky Gervais’s sketch demolishes any other remaining facts. For example, the honesty

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of Geldof’s dealings with “Africa” is called into question, and the audience is left with the message that common-sense humanitarianism is just a useful marketing strategy. Birhan Woldu evidently contradicts all of that. She is presented as a “straightforward fact” and as an emissary from the peripheral world of “facts” to the cynicism of the metropolitan media environment of the centralizing world cities. She appears in a form implying that it is possible to be present in the manipulative media environment and remain indubitably “factual,” or unmediated. Birhan is from the “outside” of the periphery. She calls the bluff of the celebrity staged within the media environment and thereby stands as something approaching an anticelebrity. The theme of her coming from the periphery, from a “straightforward” world, is dominant in the stories told about her. This explains why celebrities were keen to be seen in her presence. Birhan’s very anticelebrity and appearance from a peripheral sphere of “facts” (facts such as famine, “traditional robes,” farming, and embarrassment) lend media celebrities a measure of veracity their staging otherwise lacks. Birhan has this power because, unlike celebrities, she needs no excuse for being there. Her presence requires no justification. But ironically, Birhan’s anti-celebrity is nevertheless staged in and by the media, and so as a symbol she is not “straightforward.” Her not being staged is her staging. Even if Birhan can be identified as an anti-celebrity, she can also be seen as an anti-celebrity, and so as a symbol she is as much a part of the media environment, and as implicated in what she otherwise seems symbolically to undermine, as the likes of Ricky Gervais. The difference is that Gervais comes from the metropolitan center and has control and a high degree of agency in relation to his appearance in the media environment, whereas Birhan comes from the periphery and is pulled into the media environment in terms of representations and cultural values imposed upon her. She is denied any active role not determined by the center. Birhan is saved from the fate of Geldof, Bono, and Gervais himself— the fate of being a cause for audience cynicism—by two incontrovertible and “straightforward” facts about her appearance in the media environment. First, she is too important to the metropolitan center to be allowed

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to become the site of cynicism; as a “symbol of hope,” Birhan is the embodiment, evident redemption, and the justification of all the excuses for “being there” that the center requires in its relationships with the periphery. Second, Birhan remains as a “fact” created by metropolitan significations because she invariably remains completely silent. The silence is ambivalent. It is clear that Birhan’s experiences in London and the United States devalued her understanding of the world to such an extent that there was little or nothing she could say. But on the other hand, her silence is necessary because if she spoke, if she appeared in the media environment as a subject with her own agency (if she appeared as a human and not as a symbol), she would cease to fill her given cultural role: having the factual presence of merely yet exotically “being there.”

silence and representation Said says that historically there was and has been resistance to Western colonialism and imperialism. He distinguishes between “primary resistance,” consisting in the armed struggle against intrusions by the West, and “secondary resistance,” which is carried out in the field of ideology and which involves attempts to recover the endangered culture from the impact of colonialism (1993, 253). Both kinds of resistance require the locals to be able to mobilize themselves to fight and thereafter use common discourses of community and identity to withstand definition and situation by the Western power alone. And yet there appears to be little “African” (or more precisely, African) resistance to the “fantasies and philanthropies” of the West’s common-sense humanitarianism. Why? A number of answers spring to mind immediately. First, perhaps there is resistance, but given the exceptionally close relationship between common-sense humanitarianism and the media, and the extent to which the relationship is mutually profitable, it could well be the case that any resistance is simply not reported. Perhaps because it cannot be accommodated within the perceptual field of common-sense humanitarianism, it is not registered or, maybe, it is even completely invisible to media institutions. Second, perhaps there is no resistance for the simple reason that

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the people who are assisted by common-sense humanitarianism are in such physical need they are too weak to resist. Indeed, perhaps they do not resist because they are genuinely grateful for the assistance given to them. By this explanation, the famine victims and other sufferers truly are as they appear in the media environment: appreciative. Third, and following the last point, there may be little or no resistance because its sociological preconditions do not presently prevail. Resistance does not happen when there is nothing to lose; rather, resistance expresses a sense that there is something in danger and in need of protection. The “something” can be territory, wealth, cultural practices, or identities, but famine victims are often reduced to a state of such nakedness that they have nothing more to lose. Consequently, they have no reason to resist the meanings and practices imposed or visited upon them. The irony is, of course, that as soon as resistance does begin to emerge, the formerly helpless and grateful are repositioned in the Western media as “insurgents” under the control of “warlords” toward whom the only suitable response is armed force under the banner of “humanitarian intervention.” Common-sense humanitarianism does not contain voices of resistance from “Africa,” although it does contain voices of cynicism from within the media environment. “Africa” cannot be acknowledged as the basis of any resistance because it is not a political category involving a principle of action and neither is there an interpellation of “Africans” as actors. “Africans” tend to become the same and interchangeable because they are the targets and objects of action rather than its subjects. They become mythical because they are constructed as having no history of their own making. The dependence on mythical and naturalized categories “abstracts individual experiences of displacement from the political, social and historical context, while putting in their stead a depoliticized, dehistoricized and universalized figuration of the refugee as mute victim” (Rajaram 2002, 248). In other words, the logic of these categories is a denial of individual experience and, by extension, a denial of the difference of “Africans” from one another. They become a massified “them.” Without any attribution of an ability to act of their own volition and therefore to be political, famine victims and refugees like Birhan Woldu in the feeding center can only appear as a corporeal body upon which

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Western meanings might be inscribed without resistance. Individuals are rescued and named only through the prism of Western action, and the point at and through which those individuals might be known is Western also. For example, it is claimed Birhan only attends college because of Western charity donations. This remark explicitly denies her agency and moreover establishes her own community as restricted and restricting since it could not provide the wherewithal for Birhan to attend college. “With the capacity for agency, for presenting an oppositional discourse, suitably pacified, refugee events and experiences become a site where Western ways of knowing may be reproduced and recycled” (Rajaram 2002, 251). The case of Birhan perfectly illustrates this point. First, the events of her suffering were either naturalized through the imagery of the “biblical famine” or Westernized through tales of the aid without which she would have died. Second, her experiences reproduced the hegemony of the West because, in the face of the metropolitan centers to which she was taken, Birhan’s experiential categories of understanding more or less completely broke down. She was left literally and metaphorically almost mute because she could make no sense of what surrounded her, and her near silence was reinforced as soon as she returned to the periphery because she could not possibly communicate to her neighbors and friends what she had encountered. This confirmed metropolitan hegemony inasmuch as figures from the center took or put upon themselves the ability (if not the right) to speak confidently on Birhan’s behalf. By way of illustration, it is only necessary to witness the attempt of Brian Stewart to make it clear that only he might speak the truth of Birhan. No experienced practitioner within the media environment seemed to realize that maybe Birhan could speak for herself, at least when she was at home. All of this explains why Birhan’s own recorded comments are banal or tentative, silent even as they are heard and mediated by a male (always a male) interpreter. Her understanding had been devalued to such an extent she could no longer exchange her experiences, and she could not at all act as a storyteller (compare Benjamin 1973, 83). Yet this was why Birhan’s voice could be heard as a presence in the Western media environment, however quietly. Birhan was forced to speak in such broad terms about wanting to help others and being grateful that her voice

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approached the status of “a dehistoricizing generality that makes it difficult to understand that there are individual politics and histories behind the pictures of teeming masses of bodies” (Rajaram 2002, 252). Her voice could become the site and occasion of Western projections because it was not evidently rooted in a history independent of Western narrative and action, and its utterances were so general it could be believed it was only speaking of and in terms of universal human qualities. As such, whatever she said of “us” became a statement of “our” truth and, by reverse, her gratitude became an expression of “their” feelings. But we can understand her and thus believe that, whatever her failings, we know what she really means. According to Walter Benjamin, when experience is devalued, only “the tiny, fragile human body” remains (1973, 84). The body remains in a certain way, however. In particular, it remains in its helplessness and nakedness (to this extent it is worth noting once again the peculiarity that many famine victims are represented naked or wearing the barest rags), as it did in the case of Birhan in 1984. This is the body as a remainder stripped bare of all social and cultural attributes, and thus it is depersonalized, dehistoricized, and transformed into an apparently natural condition of human being. The paradigmatic appearance of this embodied fragility is the refugee, and it is a mythical presence that corporeally “factualizes” the evident universality of dehistoricized statements. Liisa Malkki says the emergence of the category of the refugee has led to a “dehistoricizing universalism.” It “creates a context in which it is difficult for people in the refugee category to be approached as historical actors rather than simply as mute victims” (1996, 378). To this extent, Birhan is an especially powerful mythic figure because in her Western representation she brings together general speech, which intimates a universal human community, and the tiny frail body, as what purportedly remains when humanity is stripped of history. If the value of Birhan’s experiences had not collapsed and had she been capable of making more than general statements, it is improbable she would have become a “symbol of hope.” Instead she would have been forgotten or she would have appeared in the media as an embryonic insurgent or victim of some custom of her allegedly freedom-denying community.

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If Birhan can tell no stories because her experiences have been devalued and because she can only appear as a virtually speechless speaker of general truths, then it is impossible to enter into any shared relationship with her. She is collapsed into the category of which she has become the symbol. And no symbol has a voice of its own; to be a symbol is to be denied history, personality, individuality. It is to be a representative and representation of something greater than oneself. It is actually to be crushed as a person. Consequently, while no relationship is possible with Birhan, one is possible with the mythical being she represents inasmuch as she is mutely present to represent it. Presence can only take the form of visibility and, thus it can only consist in appearance in the media environment. After all, any movement beyond the merely visible begins to pull the rug out from under the feet of myth. Symbolic presence is not at all a political appearance in some mediapolis. It is just a mediated presence and mythical visibility. But what then is the precise form of presence? A significant part of the pinch of the symbol of Birhan Woldu comes from her status as someone who was plucked from out of a mass by a Western news reporter. In this way, as a symbol she confirms Western action (and excuses Western presence in “Africa” because it evidently redeems and saves) and, moreover, consolidates the massification of the others. If this one is saved, all of those are not; if this one is plucked from out of the mass, then all of the others must be indistinguishable. Liisa Malkki says media representation and humanitarian initiatives both involve “the systematic, even if unintended, silencing of persons who find themselves in the classificatory space of ‘refugee’” (1996, 386). This point is reinforced by Prem Kumar Rajaram, who shows that Oxfam’s attempt to allow refugees to speak in their own voices actually meant the reduction of their experiences to helplessness and implied a need for external assistance to such an extent that the attempt unintentionally reinforced the victim’s silence (2002, 256). Put another way, the voices with which the refugees spoke and what they were quoted as saying meant that as individuals they were silenced. The only voices intimating an ability to act and the possession of a rounded life beyond material needs were those of the Western aid workers (Rajaram 2002; compare Malkki 1996, 386). In

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short, the voices of those who are classified as refugees actually serve to massify and link them to common needs and aspirations operative at the level of the “tiny, fragile human body” as opposed to complex, individual social and cultural experience. This is the basis of the victim’s representational presence, her or his mere visibility and appearance. According to Malkki, the silencing is reinforced by the emergence of what she calls “a vigorous, transnational, largely philanthropic traffic in images and visual signs of refugeeness,” and she observes that Western agencies rely on these images much more than testimonies in order to substantiate what it “means” to be a refugee (1996, 356). Consequently, if refugees are present in Western consciousness and established as objects of humanitarian concern through representation, the visual language of appearance is determined by Western agencies. Furthermore, if the representations are implicated in a “transnational traffic,” as Malkki would have it, then they are also required to maintain immediacy in broader flows and exchanges. This is a significant point for journalists inasmuch as they are seeking to market their products within those flows and exchanges. As such, their product has to fit in with standardized expectations if it is going to be noticed. There is pressure against originality and complexity. Appearance is thus rendered formally predictable. From Malkki’s description of one very common form of appearance, it is possible to picture in one’s mind the television and press images. What she describes is completely predictable, unoriginal, and generic. Drawing for inspiration on one typical photograph, Malkki says refugees appear as a mass: “Black bodies are pressed together impossibly close in a confusing, frantic mass. An utter human uniformity is hammered into the viewer’s retina. This is a spectacle of ‘raw,’ ‘bare’ humanity” (1996, 387­­). With this massification the individual is quite lost. In representations like these, there is no chance of individual presence (in Silverstone’s terms, there is no possibility of the appearance of a political actor in some mediapolis) because “it in no way helps one to realize that each of the persons in the photograph has a name, opinions, relatives, and histories, or that each has reasons for being where he is now: inside the frame of the photograph” (Malkki 1996, 388). In the face of the appearance of this mass before the media audience, only two positive reactions are possible:

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either the image is consumed for its aesthetic properties or there is the intimation of a dehistoricized and mythical all-encompassing community of “humanity” (but of course “we” are different from “them” because “they” only appear, whereas “we” can see and act). Malkki says media representations establish that “‘the refugee’ is commonly constituted as a figure who is thought to ‘speak’ to us in a particular way: wordlessly. Just the refugee’s physical presence is ‘telling’ of his or her immediate history of violence. So we tend to assume, at any rate” (1996, 390). The representational constitution of women refugees tends to be especially tight. First, the woman is invariably reduced to her body, which is then made visually available in isolation from others except for children. Second, there is an exaggeration of physical characteristics such as facial expression or, commonly, flaccid breasts, which themselves become stereotypical or a visual shorthand for something else (for example, of “a people without food”). This theme runs throughout the images of women in Geldof in Africa (where refugee women always look sad; therefore, women with sad faces are refugees) and hegemonic media representation too. Third, the woman becomes an object to be used according to meanings external to herself (Rajaram 2002, 253). It is possible to have incongruous appearances of refugee women under such headings as Geldof’s “Muslim Mona Lisa,” but it also becomes possible for Birhan Woldu to appear. First of all, she appeared as a naked and tiny starving body; second, she was reduced to stereotypes (the empty eyes, dry lips, the anointing white thumb); and third, she was used as an object regardless of her own identity. She became a “symbol of hope” without ever knowing or being asked. According to John Taylor, news representations of “Africa” are now so generic they have come to possess common-sense meanings. Taylor’s point can be expanded to develop a typology of themes of presence. First, there is the suggestion that “Africa” more or less naturally produces refugees: “Natural or so-called ‘native’ African products include disease, misery and atrocity. Refugees are lumped together with these other ‘native’ products and all are presented as natural, endemic and unfathomable” (Taylor 1998, 136). In this vein, it is worth remembering that Michael Buerk reported on the Ethiopian famine in 1984 without going into the

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reasons why it was occurring; the reasons why were “unfathomable” and just the way things are in “Africa.” Second, “Africa” is a place in which death is visible in ways and in numbers unfamiliar to representations of the West. Visibility is taken to show that existence “there” is stripped back to its most fragile basis. “Africa” is a place where it is possible to see the universal foundation of humanity because all masks have been removed: “These foreigners are cyphers in the press, standing for the elemental” (Taylor 1998, 131). It is almost certainly the case that the CBC news camera focused on Birhan in 1984 in the first instance because it was thought she could be filmed actually dying. On the one hand, there was little moral concern about showing a process of dying (as there would have been had this been a Canadian child), and on the other, Birhan’s survival was completely beside the point when the camera was pointed at her. Third, the presence of Western aid workers in so many representations of “Africa” intimates that “the survival of Africans depends on Western aid agencies, supported at times by armies.” Taylor says this layer of meaning is required by aid agencies. He remarks, “The rhetoric of humanitarian aid to some degree requires the constant reproduction of abject images both as a justification for intervention and as the necessary restatement of a basic difference between donors and recipient” (1998, 136). The generic representations make the suffering seem inevitable and natural, and moreover, even as they might imply some common humanity linking us all, they also establish a distinction between “us” and “them.” “We” are posited as the actors and “they” are helpless objects. “We” are historical agents and “they” are mythical symbols. “The distance of audiences from sufferers encourages non-identification, and even allows audiences to draw some satisfaction from the image of suffering as it belongs to others and not to themselves” (Taylor 1998, 138). Representations of this sort do not, however, serve wholly and decisively to dehumanize the victims. If they did, the humanitarian charge would simply evaporate. Some vestige of humanity must always remain. In this spirit, representations identify those who are present through their media appearance with a specific kind of humanity: “What these representational practices do is not strictly to dehumanize, but to humanize in a particular mode. A mere, bare, naked, or minimal humanity is set

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up” (Malkki 1996, 390). This form of appearance has a number of resonances. First, it establishes a mythical foundation for dreams and commitments to a common humanity. Second, minimal humanity becomes the moral good faith of what might, by contrast, be called an excessive humanity surrounded and protected by “frippery” (to use Geldof’s word) in the West. Third, minimal humanity becomes the excuse for Western presence. Fourth, because minimal humanity is bare and naked, it is stripped of all social, cultural, and political weight and thus can have symbolic meanings imposed upon it. What are those meanings? Humanitarian campaigns launched by aid agencies often tend to assume what Malkki calls a “magical naturalism” about the silenced “natives.” Malkki uses the phrase during a discussion of an environmental campaign in America, but it can be extended without distortion to Western narratives about “Africans” in humanitarian need. Magical naturalism stresses the close, if not symbiotic, connection between “natives” and their territory, and it involves the argument that this connection has been established over so many millennia it is mutually beneficial for people and land alike. It has become part of nature, or at least it has become naturalized, and the “natives” are said to have roots in a determinate soil expressing and embodying moral and spiritual needs. The flip side of this narrative is its implicit critique of the West as uprooted and restless, as “out of touch” (Malkki 1992, 30). Once again, Geldof comes to mind as providing an especially clear statement of this magical naturalism with his critique of the West and his fantasy of “Africa” as home. But magical naturalism of this sort has some interesting implications. Inasmuch as there is an emphasis on purportedly natural roots, magical naturalism suggests each human group has a unique connection to a particular place, expressed in equilibrium between humanity and nature. However, humanitarian crises such as famines are proof that this purported balance has been upset. If the “Africans” are rooted and have been so without harm for millennia, then the cause of the upset can only come from an external force outside of the circularity of magical naturalism. The external force is Western colonialism, capitalism, and metropolitan existence. Yet if the cause of the upset has come from the

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West and if the “Africans” who are allegedly naturally linked to a specific territory are unable to withstand the virus, then neither can they repair the harm. Consequently, the agent of reparation has to come from outside too, from the very West that caused the initial imbalance. The West becomes the active subject because it is uprooted (and one expression of activity based on uprootedness is the very cosmopolitanism Silverstone applauds; moreover, it once again becomes possible to see points of narrative, although emphatically not moral, connection between commonsense humanitarianism and racism). Within this kind of magical naturalism, “Africans” appear in a number of guises. First, they are noble savages who can teach the West about the true value of roots and rootedness. This is a dimension of the myth of primitivism. Second, they are helpless victims whose rooted immune system is being attacked and destroyed by an external virus. This theme resonates with identifications of bodily perfection and purity known to be pure only because they are threatened with defilement. Third, they are heroes who endure and, in endurance, reconfigure the noble savage as the innocent victim. This space is filled by the representation of Birhan Woldu, who is, just as Western hegemonic discourse would probably choose to have it, training at an agricultural college and thus reconnecting with her “natural” roots (relatively little attention was paid in the media to Birhan’s own announcement in the BBC radio interview that she actually wanted to be a nurse). All of these meanings of magical naturalism are based not on history but on what Malkki calls “the metaphysical and moral valuation of roots in the soil” (1992, 30). Put another way, the myths are all-encompassing and so sophisticated that resistance is impossible from within the field of common sense they map.

conclusion Rwandan refugees in Zaire who fled the genocide of the 1990s were cajoled by aid organizations and journalists to return “home” despite their genuine fears of what would happen to them if they did. Understandably, there was great resistance on the part of the refugees to the

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plan, and they sought to speak out with unsanctioned voices; of their own volition, many refused to be repatriated. They resisted. Liisa Malkki outlines what happened next. Journalists took over the story and painted “the refugees’ refusal to comply with the repatriation policy as a symptom of their hysterical, superstitious, overdramatic frame of mind” (1996, 295). This incident clarifies the positioning of refugees, famine victims, and “Africans” in the field of common-sense humanitarianism. They are either passively grateful and symbols of a magical naturalism or they are undeserving; or, more sharply, they are potential opposition possessed of a kind of mindset metropolitan culture finds at once bewildering and threatening. When the victims are constructed and construed as opponents, the myth of primitivism, which humanitarianism renders positive, turns abruptly to its negative pole and becomes the root of their “barbarism.” This turn is possible because it, too, draws on a repertoire of representations just like humanitarianism: the starving child is replaced with the gun-toting boy; the famished mother with the rape victim; the man in rags with the man in exotic and irregular uniform (unlike “our” armed forces, who dress in regular and regulation— orderly—fashion). In both cases, however, the effect is the same in terms of the appearance of “Africa” in the media environment. The possibility that mythically symbolic “Africans” might be transformed into politically active Africans, and the possibility they might be able to occupy a space in which to speak with their own voices as opposed to being silenced or mere ventriloquists’ dummies, is denied. Africans cannot emerge out of “Africans” because their narrative-making potential, their ability to narrate themselves, is blocked by the vestigial hegemony of the Western metropolitan centers over their peripheries. According to Edward Said, contemporary Western discourse about the peripheries of the world “assumes the primacy and even the complete centrality of the West.” He remarks upon “how totalizing is its form, how all-enveloping its attitudes and gestures, how much it shuts out even as it includes, compresses, and consolidates” (1993, 24). This is the position from which Birhan Woldu appears in the media environment and why she appears in “traditional robes.” It is also the reason why her experiences were devalued and why she speaks only silently or in the words

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the metropolitan centers deem it appropriate to hear. Birhan Woldu was saved by and for a world actually unwilling to accept—if not incapable of accepting—that she might be possessed of her own agency, and might be something more than the symbolic embodiment of its all-encompassing “fantasies and philanthropies.” Common-sense humanitarianism is possible because of the media; it is the way of imagining the world that is available only to those who are at the center of global media flows. The “Africans” who appear in the media only do so if they do nothing to challenge the myth that only the West can act.

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Why is common-sense humanitarianism so rewarding for the West? Birhan Woldu is not the only “African” to be ignorant about the Western celebrities who change lives. Yohane Banda is a farmer in Malawi. When his wife, Marita, died at the age of twenty-eight, evidently of AIDS, Yohane placed his young son, David, in a local orphanage because he had neither the time nor the money to look after the baby. “I was alone with a baby. I had no money. I couldn’t buy him milk. That’s why I surrendered him to the orphanage,” he was quoted as saying (Mitchell 2006). Yohane knew what could happen if he did not do something. He had already lost two sons, one at the age of two and the other at eighteen months (Bloomfield 2006). In October 2006, however, Yohane Banda was catapulted into the Western media environment when Madonna decided to remove his then thirteen-month-old son from the orphanage and raise the child in London as her own. Thirty-two-year-old Yohane appeared as quite a small man, confused and sometimes confusing, and all the time speaking through an interpreter. By no stretch of the imagination was he welcoming his enforced appearance. This matter also raises the question of how Birhan Woldu was encouraged to appear, and of what leverage the hegemonic players at the center of the media environment applied to her. After all,

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she had no idea she was a beacon of anything at all, so how was she persuaded to leave the world that made complete sense to her? Yohane only spoke when he responded to questions asked by Western journalists, and there was a flavor of the legal prosecution about his positioning. Indeed, both he and Madonna were viewed with suspicion. Why would he have given up his son, and had she circumvented normal procedures to get him? But the only thing to really become clear over time is that a Western celebrity of long duration and great wealth is a much more skilled media operator than an impoverished Malawian farmer. She continues to appear while Yohane has completely disappeared, and this is probably to the relief of each. At the beginning of 2006 Madonna had helped to set up the Raising Malawi charity, which, according to its Web site, exists to “revitalize the lives of hundreds of thousands of orphaned and vulnerable children in Malawi, Africa.” Madonna established the project with Michael Berg, the co-director of the Kabbalah Centre, with which she is closely associated. She made her first trip to Malawi in April 2006 and her second in October of the same year. According to Vanity Fair, Madonna was encouraged to visit “after Victoria Keelan, a native Malawian businesswoman, reached out to her because of the work Madonna has done with Spirituality for Kids, a nonprofit organization which aids children in impoverished and devastated areas across the globe” (Hutton 2007). This way of presenting the invitation extended to Madonna is perfectly accurate, but it is willfully ambiguous. It rather glosses the fact that, as quick Google research shows, although Victoria Keelan was born in Malawi (and is therefore a “native,” to repeat the very loaded word), she is white and the managing director of the local arm of Yara International, the demerged multinational fertilizer concern of the global company Norsk Hydro. In other words, the “African,” or the “native,” who acts is actually of Western descent and integrated into the flows and exchanges of global capital and resource exploitation. She is a metropolitan. (Of course, this does not at all devalue Victoria Keelan’s personal work; this essay is a discussion of cultural representation and narrative, and it is interesting to note the ambivalence of her presentation to Vanity Fair readers.) Meanwhile, and as its own Web site announces, “Spirituality for Kids is about the

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human spirit—its connectivity to the world at large—and how our personal decisions influence the world around us. It’s an idea that goes far beyond any one specific faith and affects each of us regardless of race, gender, and socio-economic status or education level.” In an interview with the BBC, Yohane Banda said he had never heard of Madonna. Apart from once again demonstrating how a cosmopolitan imaginary presupposes situation at the metropolitan centers of the flows and exchanges of the media environment, Yohane’s lack of knowledge was invested with another layer of meaning. Unlike Birhan, who was treated as an unworldly and pure innocent, he was narrated as ignorant about the world, ignorant about to how to raise a child, ignorant of family ties, and ignorant about what it means to love. Yohane was positioned as the kind of “African” from which “Africa” needs to be rescued. The BBC quoted Madonna as saying, “According to the reverend who ran the orphanage that David came from, his father never visited him” (BBC News online, November 11, 2006). Yohane Banda’s own poverty and extremity was bracketed out of the media environment, and he was narrated as the irredeemable symbol of an “Africa” from which his son had to be saved if he was going to be able to live. After all, and as Madonna puts it in her “Letter” on the Raising Malawi Web site, “Everyday in Malawi, hundreds of children die from preventable illness, thousands are affected by abuse and neglect, and millions face a lonely struggle for survival without parents, or adult supervision.” Yet they can and ought to be helped because “Malawians possess resiliency and great spirit” (2006a). However, this “resiliency and spirit” is mythically linked only with children because the adults are, in this passage, narrated as beyond redemption. If the children suffer so badly, this can only be because of the adults like Yohane, and therefore the argument about “resiliency and spirit” only holds good if it is presumed it is somehow corrupted and defiled when, as Spirituality for Kids would have it, personal decisions are not connected “to the world at large.” The adult Malawians are selfish and unaware, and it is up to the West to come to the assistance of the children before they follow in their parents’ footsteps toward ignorance about wider “connectivity.” The Raising Malawi Web site presumes the narrative of Western action that is the defining principle of common-sense humanitarianism.

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Apart from a link to Google Earth, it is impossible to find any information on the Web site about exactly where in Africa Malawi is to be found. It simply is in “Africa.” Malawi is only located very vaguely as “subSaharan,” and of course this is precisely the “Africa” of Bob Geldof’s common-sense fantasies and philanthropies. Furthermore, a pop-up window giving facts about the country emphasizes colonialism, rickety infrastructure, and a culture based on tribalism. In these ways, Malawi is narrated as a synecdoche of “Africa” inasmuch as it is the part standing for the whole. But the synecdoche goes even further because just as Malawi is “Africa,” so “Africans” populate “Africa.” But these are “Africans” of a particular sort. They are abandoned children who look directly at the Web page viewer with alternatively imploring or redeemed eyes. The only adults in the foreground on the Raising Malawi Web site are Western, and the children come to represent all “Africans.” Yet the reduction of “Africans” to the signifier of the nameless abandoned child of course raises a question: exactly where are their parents? Why have they left their children? The answer is provided by a turn to evidently straightforward facts. Madonna writes, “With one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world and one of the lowest rankings in the Human Poverty Index, Malawi and her children are at the heart of a humanitarian crisis in sub-Saharan Africa” (2006a). The parents, then, are dead, dying, or failing to provide the material security the children need. They exist in the face of material necessity and are swamped by it, or they are the victims of uncontrolled sexual urges, which are often their own. The parents are narrated as promiscuous, as failures, or, at the very best, as in desperate need of external—Western—assistance. They too are like children, and so a hierarchy of paternal competence is established, with affluent Westerners who control appearance in the media environment at the very top and struggling fathers like Yohane Banda at the bottom. Madonna was quoted by BBC News as saying that Yohane “lived 50 or 60 km away, had no car, had no money and, as far as I was told, had remarried and moved on with his life” (BBC News online, November 2, 2006). In this unintentionally revealing narration of Yohane, he becomes incomprehensible because he has no car (thus naturalizing Western affluence) and he is also of dubious character

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because he “has moved on” to another woman. Yohane was also made rather questionable when Madonna told NBC reporter Meredith Vieira that she had been willing to give him financial support for David, but the offer had been turned down (Madonna 2006b). Yohane was given no right of reply. From its hegemonic position, the West is able to narrate the needs and problems of “Africa” for itself, thus reinforcing the silence and intimated dependency of “Africans.” Evidently straightforward facts are situated and narrated in the context of a myth of magical naturalism: “Malawi is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Unfortunately, it is also one of the poorest—suffering from famine, drought, extreme poverty and deadly diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis,” Madonna says (2006a). There is a slippage at once naturalizing and primitivizing. Malawi is identified as “beautiful,” presumably according to Western aesthetic criteria as opposed to local labor-based standards, and it is also seen as a land suffering from poverty and disease. But, of course, Malawi itself does not suffer from disease at all; Malawians as humans suffer from poverty and disease, and the country cannot be imagined as doing so unless the people and the land are tied to one another and rendered mutually and magically metaphorical. Yet if the people are metaphors for Malawi, and if Malawi is beautiful, then Malawians must also be beautiful either despite or because of their suffering. The demand for Western activism is in the first instance aesthetic. Of course, Bob Geldof also aestheticizes when he says Ethiopians are “drop dead gorgeous,” but he did not immediately personalize the appeal of the visual. Madonna did, and she was criticized quite viciously when it became clear that her relationship with David Banda might have had an aesthetic dimension. This was because she accidentally revealed the sheer contingencies common sense seeks to naturalize and render without alternative. According to one widely reported version of events, Madonna chose David after she asked for the photographs of twelve “suitable” baby boys to be emailed to her by Malawian authorities. The Independent newspaper reported, “Madonna picked David out from a preselected group of 12 ‘contenders’” (Bloomfield 2006). Many questions remain. Who did the “pre-selecting” and according to what standards?

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What criteria did Madonna use to pick David? Were all of the photographs the same or were some of the boys smiling and others glum? (For a discussion of the importance of smiling or sad faces, see Tester 2001, 82 – 86.) Whatever the factual answers, if this story is correct, it indeed puts aesthetics at the very heart of moral choice, just as it had been earlier in the case of Birhan Woldu. Specifically, the aesthetic questions devolve upon issues of the Western representation and reading of pictures of “Africans” and upon the assumption that mediated visuality is itself a means for a morally sufficient knowledge of an other. In other words, this version of the David Banda story reveals the contingencies and relationships of domination prevailing in common-sense humanitarianism, and because it pulled aside the curtain to reveal the unsayable truth that aesthetics are pertinent in mediated moral relationships with “Africa,” there was a tendency to denigrate Madonna as an individual. She became the personal focus distracting attention from a more cutting and less comforting realization that maybe there is something questionable about the form of Western concern for “Africa.” Madonna herself tells the story of how she encountered David rather differently. Although she does not completely avoid the question of aesthetics, she does seek to replace it with something else, with a kind of emotional veracity. She identifies the beginning of the relationship with David as resulting from the fact that she was financing a documentary film about orphans in Malawi. Madonna told Oprah Winfrey that she was “allowed to view footage and photographs of a lot of the children. An 8-year-old girl who is living with HIV was holding this child. I became transfixed by him. . . . I was just drawn to him” (Madonna 2006c). The story was continued in an NBC news interview when Madonna told Meredith Vieira, “I kept saying, ‘Who is that baby? And who is that boy?’. . . . I was drawn to his face and something about him, his eyes, and he seemed perfectly fine and healthy” (Madonna 2006b). Of course, this version of events is not of itself incompatible with the story that David was chosen from a short list of twelve, but there are other interesting things going on in these quotations from Madonna. It is initially worth thinking about the distinction very deliberately made between the HIV-positive girl and the evidently healthy baby. Since

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Madonna makes this distinction about health, it must have been influential in her decision-making process, but what does it signify? More starkly, why not choose the girl? Of course, some of the answers might well be very simple. The girl might have gotten lost, maybe fallen ill, died, or ran away. Perhaps Madonna did not get a chance to help the girl but would have done so had such an opportunity arisen. In any case, it could be argued that Madonna did help the girl inasmuch as she was at an orphanage that Madonna was helping to fund. But still there was something special about baby David. In the film footage, he had something the girl lacked. What? Perhaps Madonna felt it might be more resource efficient to give assistance to a healthy baby than an older girl who was likely to die fairly soon (and in the spirit of brutal honesty, it has to be conceded that in terms of a return on an investment, that is indeed the case). Yet this is not the whole answer; it might not even be part of the answer. Aesthetic appeal is also significant, and there is the question of narration and the ability to narrate without hindrance. Maybe Madonna is prone to be “transfixed” by babies as opposed to older children, especially because she is the mother of a small boy, Rocco, who was five at the time of the David story. Then again, Madonna is also the mother of Lourdes, a girl who was then nine (and therefore more or less the same age as the HIV-positive girl). Perhaps the baby boy inspired a sense of absence and lack in a way another young girl did not, because David remained to be narrated whereas the girl had already been narrated by her HIV status. In other words, maybe the boy was transfixing because he offered no resistance to fantasy. David and the girl are understood through the prism of their illnesses, which could only have been known to Madonna through other sources. After all, there is no common physical sign of people who are living with HIV. Consequently, it can be proposed Madonna was drawn to the boy’s eyes because she saw them without the filter presumably preventing her from seeing the girl’s quite so clearly. HIV is presently positioned in Western consciousness and sensibility as a condition under control “here” (even if it isn’t), rife “there,” and without redeeming features. In the West, HIV is emphatically not positioned aesthetically (although, as Sontag has shown, it is positioned metaphorically [2002]). To this extent, then, what the girl lacked was an

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ability to be narrated as suffering in a redeemable way. Her status as HIV positive meant she was not a blank slate to be narrated by Western fantasy. According to fantasy, “African” suffering is different from visually healthy but ill young girls holding really healthy but endangered babies. The fantasy is what Madonna says she saw: “a child lying listlessly, you know, on the pavement . . . in a pool of urine with flies buzzing around their head or children wandering around like in almost a comatose state with like really distended bellies, and . . . women sitting on . . . porches of their little huts . . . with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions all over their bodies” (2006b). This description of suffering might well involve a measure of reportage, but it is also aesthetic and fully consonant with Western myths and media appearances of “Africa.” For instance, it can accommodate the first appearance of Birhan Woldu and all famine victims, but it cannot contain HIV-positive children who presently have no signs of illness. Indeed, it is because of the consonance between the fantasy and these children lying in their own urine that Madonna was able to see them as morally relevant. The girl did not fit, and so to a significant extent she was not seen. Furthermore, in these terms, David’s evident good health could stand as a sign of his temporary freedom from suffering and corruption. He was “African” but without the hurts of “Africa” and with only its mythicized “spirit.” He was another “beacon of hope,” whereas the girl was a symbol of the corruption of “African” purity beyond recovery. In a major interview with Oprah Winfrey, Madonna made it clear that David “tested negative for tuberculosis, malaria, HIV and other common illnesses striking African orphans” (Madonna 2006c). A pediatrician who visited the orphanage at Madonna’s expense to check on all the children confirmed David’s health, but it is possible to spot an interesting slippage in the argument. It implies “African orphans” are less a social group and more a natural category defined by their illnesses and by their suffering. “African orphans” become sui generis and naturalized— except for David, who is not ill and therefore in need of extraction from a group that might only corrupt him. He is endangered and in need of help his own father willfully declines to give. David’s health had declined by the time Madonna actually met him in the orphanage. He was running an extremely high temperature due

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to pneumonia and was having considerable difficulties in breathing. Through Madonna’s intervention, David was taken to a clinic, put on a bronchial dilator, and pumped with antibiotics, and he started to recover (Madonna 2006c). Once again, this is a simple story of Madonna’s understandable care for a small child by whom she had become “transfixed.” David was ill, she could help make him better, and so she did. But there is another level of signification too tempting to ignore. Whereas the HIV-positive girl could not be purified, David could. There is almost a sense that his being made well by having Western medical technology applied to and pumped into him was also a moment of the redemption of his body from the physical suffering of “African orphans,” into which group he was beginning to fall. Moreover, if the illness of “African orphans” is intrinsic, then by stopping David from suffering, Madonna was doing nothing less than transubstantiating him. He stopped being a natural victim and instead became an object of social salvation. And, of course, the agency of the salvation and transformation is the West because of its dominance over the local and its ability to infiltrate its technology throughout the peripheries of the world. In the case of Madonna, the dominance has two dimensions. As a subject who is situated in the metropolitan center of postimperial flows and exchanges, she is able to move about the world with relative freedom. Her ability to move is taken entirely for granted. Madonna talks about her feelings when she met David in Malawi, but she does not think about how she was able to visit Malawi in the first place. For Madonna, Yohane Banda’s lack of a car is incomprehensible. She has a spatial competence and consciousness quite lacking among the inhabitants of the peripheries. For example, Yohane Banda was quoted in the Western media as saying that David “will be very happy in America” (BBC News online, October 11, 2006). But David is being looked after in London, not America. This raises the question of whether Yohane Banda assumed Americans only live in America, whether he simply misunderstood, or whether for him “America” is the synecdoche for “all of the world where white people live.” Since he was ignorant of Madonna, it is not impossible that he used the word “America” in the last sense. After all, Malawi

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is narrated in more or less the same way, so perhaps he was just unwittingly repaying the compliment in kind. Second, as a figure at the center of flows and exchanges in the media environment, Madonna has the ability to appear in the West easily. She is a celebrity. As Chris Rojek speculates, celebrities have a central place in modern Western culture because they at once crystallize and imply an overcoming of the consequences of “the rise of a money economy and the growth of populations concentrated in urban-industrial locations” (2001, 74). Celebrities reflect the cynicism following from the dominance of the money system and the fleeting encounters of metropolises, while at the same time intimating the transcendence of those very experiences through their erstwhile veracity. Celebrities give to abstract and confusing processes a smiling and stereotypically attractive face. Rojek draws out this point when he says modern culture contains three themes of the achievement and consolidation of celebrity status. They can all be seen through the prism of an overview of Madonna’s career, but more particularly, they can also be found in the case of Madonna and the baby David. First, Rojek identifies the theme of elevation, “the social and cultural processes involved in raising the celebrity above the public” (2001, 75). In the case of Madonna, this is achieved by the longevity of her career, now spanning generations, as well as her wealth. Since Madonna became a global celebrity in the wake of her performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert, she has rarely been absent from appearance in the media environment and has thus become a more or less natural, or at least inevitable, component of modern culture. She is simply there, and seems to have been so for living memory. This longevity translates into valid public imaginations of considerable, if not incomprehensible (but certainly enviously regarded), wealth. A recurrent theme in the adoption stories is Madonna’s status as the West’s “material girl” (the allusion to one of her song titles was presumably too tempting for journalists to ignore), who stands above nearly everyone else because she can buy what she wants. Her ability to purchase everything, evidently including babies, was also the cause of some of the cynicism about Madonna’s dealings with David. One British commentator reflected on this aspect of the story—and

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pulled it together with celebrity and the dominance following from the ability to control media appearance—when she wrote, “The whole ugly mess has been played out in the glare of the media, showcasing the powerlessness of an entire African people when faced with the might of one rich woman from the West” (Kite 2006). However cynical commentators might attribute her motives as being, Madonna nevertheless signifies a high point of material success in modern culture and is regarded enviously in a world valuing consumerist measures of status. Second, Rojek identifies the theme of magic and says it consists in the “performance of various tricks and undertakings” (2001, 77). The prime illustration of this aspect of Madonna’s celebrity is her connection with the Kabbalah movement. For example, Madonna wears the red string bracelet that followers of Kabbalah believe offers protection for the wearer from the envy of others and spiritually destructive feelings of resentment and jealousy in ourselves. One was spotted on David’s wrist, and when she was asked about it in an interview, Madonna replied, “If David decides he wants to be a Christian then so be it. . . . I believe in Jesus and I study Kabbalah, so I don’t see why he can’t too” (Madonna 2006b). Here, then, Madonna does not just wear magic; she also achieves something magical by her ability to reconcile Christianity and aspects of Judaic mysticism and, moreover, transform them into things to be chosen through an act of will, itself rather consumerist. Yet one of the crucial dimensions of consumer culture is the extent to which intimations of magic are connected with advertising and the commercial act of selling products. Madonna was keenly aware of this too. Around the time of the adoption story she was also on a world concert tour, and at one point in the show she was elevated on a crucifix surrounded by disco lights. She justified this part of her act on the grounds that the attention she thus secured helped sell records, but her argument then moved onto a magical terrain. Just as David had been transformed ontologically by his rescue from the naturalized category of “African orphans,” so Madonna on the cross became Christ-like (the theological muddle of the sentence is deliberate and mind-boggling). It is estimated there are twelve million AIDS orphans in “Africa,” and Madonna said, “The entire time I was singing on the cross, there are numbers flipping over my head, you

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know, starting at one and going up to 12 million” (2006b). She took on the sufferings of the world. Third, Rojek talks about the theme of immortality surrounding celebrities (2001, 78), and while he means this in the sense of their reputations lasting beyond their physical death, immortality might be thought of in another way too. Madonna has achieved a level of immortality because of the speed and relative ease with which she changes her image and has managed repeatedly to rebrand herself in accord with the times. She has never suffered the death of celebrity— of being out of fashion. Madonna has achieved a level of immortality in modern culture because she has become a brand. One marketing consultant has said, “Brands are under pressure to demonstrate values beyond mere money-making, and there is a sense that the adoption is the Madonna brand moving with the times” (PR Week 2006). It is indeed noticeable how part of Madonna’s rebranding around 2005 to 2006 was of herself as a mother, or at least a woman who is connected with children. Around this time she produced a series of children’s books under the collective title The English Roses, one of which, Too Good to Be True, was published in the United Kingdom at the time of the adoption incident (free copies were given to the children when Madonna visited the orphanage where David was then living). By rescuing an “African” orphan from suffering, the Madonna brand was able to live on. This chapter is a discussion of the meanings of the case of Madonna’s adoption of David Banda, and it is written in the belief that whatever the motivations of the protagonists (which are largely besides the point), the story has a cultural leverage of such magnitude it can open up yet more of the terrain of common-sense humanitarianism. In particular, the story says a lot about how the West chooses to engage with the victims of humanitarian crises. Many commentators would like the engagement to be based on rational political action or at least the possibility of consciousness-raising about the causes of suffering so it might not happen again (see, for example, Boltanski 1999). Yet Madonna acted on the basis of a personally compelling sense of emotional connection and veracity that ostensibly cut through all politics and established for her at the most direct level what had to be done. Moreover, because the

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connection is identified as immediate and compelling, there is a denial of space for cynicism, even though the action following from the connection often devolves upon money. This purported direct connection is made powerful in modern culture when it is multiplatformed in the media environment through the medium of celebrities as brands and cultural producers. Furthermore, the story of Madonna and David contains a narrative that naturalizes Western values (specifically family values) and establishes the recipient of assistance from the West as simply fortunate and, therefore, as without moral worth in and of themselves. They are valuable purely as they are appealing to Western activism. The chapter concludes with a return to the question of celebrity and power within the media environment. One of the fascinating dimensions of the story is how Madonna’s action caused a momentary crisis for commonsense humanitarianism because it allowed for attacks from within rather than without. The autoimmune system negating critique in modern culture temporarily started to devour itself. Her action permitted cynicism to appear against common-sense humanitarianism. Whereas there can be cynicism about Bob Geldof, say, that leaves the edifice untouched, the Madonna-and-David story opened space for doubts about money and thus unsettled the whole relationship of exchange and flow upon which common-sense humanitarianism rests.

music When Madonna says she was “transfixed” by David, she is repeating a rhetorical device she also used to justify her concern for Malawi. She has written, “People have asked ‘Why did you chose Malawi?’ I always answer ‘I didn’t. Malawi chose me’” (2006a). In both cases, then, Madonna identifies herself as being compelled to act according to a force external to rational explanation. Perhaps this is the reason why she did not choose the girl; she was simply not “transfixing” in the way of David, and similarly this may be why she does not help any other “African” country with its own orphans. Madonna helps inasmuch as, and precisely because, she has no alternative other than to help.

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The emphasis on emotional truth is more or less the same move carried out by Bob Geldof. He reported that when he saw the news of the Ethiopian famine he simply felt he had to do something even though he was not previously engaged with the problem, and Madonna is saying something similar. Her argument is that as soon as Malawi came into her field of consciousness, she had to help. The difference between Geldof and Madonna is, however, that whereas the former stresses the role of the media in bringing the famine to his attention, it is not impossible Madonna would be more likely to stress the spiritual “connectivity” coming from her studies of Kabbalah. But in both cases the effect is the same. The public issue of suffering in “Africa” is collapsed into a personal problem of feelings. Madonna has said, “When I went to Africa, I was reduced to floods of tears everyday” and, as soon as she saw David Banda, “I became completely, you know, fixated on, ‘I have to help him,’ whether he is my child or not” (2006b). Her contention is that it was through feelings she knew what she had to do, and those feelings could be known to be true because they were rooted in sensate and evidently natural emotions. Put another way, Madonna helped because she was moved to tears, and had she not been so moved there would have been no compulsion to assist. With Geldof, this kind of emphasis on the sensate emotions resulted in the dismissal of institutions and organizations because their rational operation allegedly gets in the way of direct connection. Again, a similar contention can be found in Madonna’s positions. For instance, the Raising Malawi charity’s Web site boasts it is “unhindered by obstacles such as bureaucracy and red-tape.” Quite explicitly, then, “bureaucracy and red-tape” are identified as disabling and as hindrances to help. There is absolutely no sense they might be enabling, and indeed the conflation of “bureaucracy” with “red-tape” semantically denies the very possibility. Instead the emphasis is on “volunteers” as freely acting individuals who give their time and money, presumably because they too have sensate emotional reactions to what Madonna enables them to see through her appearance as a celebrity in the media environment. The assumption is that all individuals who are in contact with their true feelings will react in the same way as Madonna, and this argument

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in turn underpins a belief that everyone is pretty much the same if only they can be persuaded to connect with themselves and others. In a mythical way, it is presumed that social attributes just get in the way of connection. This myth explains Madonna’s “upset” at the newspaper coverage of the David story: “I’m disappointed because it discourages other people from doing the same thing—for anybody who had the idea that they, too, would like to open their home and give a life to a child living in an orphanage who might not live past the age of 5” (Madonna 2006c). It is worth rereading the quotation because it is far from straightforward. Putting aside the rather blatant blackmail of the last few words, lurking within Madonna’s statement are some of the conceits of common-­sense humanitarianism. First, Madonna is intimating anyone can do what she did. Questions of her material affluence are pushed off the agenda, and what becomes important is the strength of sensate feeling that equalizes us all regardless of social and cultural status. As such, even as “Africans” are naturalized as passive and in need of Western assistance, so the West is naturalized too as the home of all of those who can do what Madonna did. The West is the home of those who can choose to act. Sociology and philosophy are replaced by spiritual connection or, at the least, the dehistoricizing myth of a common humanity binding us all as soon as it is recognized without the blinkers of society, culture, and institutions. Second, Madonna talks about people who “would like to open their home.” In other words, the action is motivated by naturalized emotions, but the principle of action is recovered from any hint of reaction because it devolves upon a preference. Presumably all people who are connected with their true feelings would want to help because that is what connection means, but it is possible for Western actors to resist those feelings, so they have to be encouraged to prefer to open their homes. Hence Madonna becomes an inspiration who shows what can be done, and her role becomes one of persuading others to do it too. As she said, “If everybody went there, they’d want to bring one of those children home and give them a better life” (BBC News online, October 26, 2006). Third, the media are given a central place because they are “doing a great disservice to all the orphans of Africa, period, not just Malawi, by turning it into such a negative thing” (Madonna 2006c).

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Here, then, Madonna is making an argument once again emphasizing feelings, but the intimation is that only those who can see without the media can experience true feelings. Madonna has the ability because she is a celebrity and wealthy. She has achieved connection, as proven by her tears, and she wants to take a child into her own home. The intimation is that anyone who achieves connection would also cry and want to do the same thing. But not everyone can have direct connection by going to “Africa,” and so they have to rely on seeing the veracity of Madonna. She is not just a celebrity, she is also our moral exemplar; but she can only be exemplary because she first of all appears in the media environment as an already-constituted celebrity. It is only because she is a celebrity who appears in the media that those other than her traveling companions can see Madonna’s true sensate feelings. Yet the very media needed in order for Madonna’s feelings to appear persuasively before others also distort the truth by questioning her motives, and so they are in effect denying help to the orphans. The only way around this paradox is for Madonna to use her cultural resources to play the media for her own purposes. In short, the argument is that it is necessary to make social subjects want to like and prefer to act in relation to orphans or, more mythically, “Africans.” There can be certainty the preference can be inspired because, the argument runs, we are all the same; therefore, if Madonna wants to take an orphan into her home, everyone who is like— or who likes—her might prefer to have the same opportunity. Her individual action demonstrates a general condition. Consequently, the role of a celebrity such as Madonna is not to make a moral case for humanitarian assistance. Such a case is not needed because, by definition, everyone wants to assist since Madonna’s individual action proves everyone wants to assist. Rather, her role is to persuade others that the provision of assistance is a course of action they might like if only they have the chance to “connect” spiritually. This is morality reduced to the condition of emotivism. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, emotivism dominates the moral discourse of the present and it represents a collapse of all moral judgments and criteria into expressions of preference and feeling (1985). G. J. Warnock provides a summary of the emotivist position. He says that within emotivism it is taken to be the case that “it is the distinctive feature of

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moral judgement not to convey the speaker’s beliefs, but to evince his attitudes and not to add to or alter the beliefs of the person addressed, but to influence his attitudes and hence, in all probability, his conduct.” As Warnock puts it, for emotivism, “Moral discourse (in a nutshell) is primarily not informative but influential; it may modify beliefs incidentally, but attitudes primarily” (Warnock 1967, 23; for a sustained treatment of emotivism, see Urmson 1968). This is precisely what Madonna is attempting to achieve. She is not trying to change anyone’s beliefs (it is worth thinking back to her relaxation over whether David will grow up a Christian, a follower of Kabbalah, or a mix of the two). Beliefs do not need to be changed because the emphasis on sensate emotions ostensibly shared in common means that “naturally” we all have the same beliefs. Rather, what Madonna is trying to do is change attitudes leading to a lack of connection with “African” orphans. She is trying to bring about a transformation of the attitude encouraging “us” to believe “we” might not like to welcome “them” into our homes. She is positioned as an agency of influence. It is a positioning entirely compatible with her status as a celebrity. “Let’s face it,” Madonna told NBC’s Meredith Vieira when she was asked a question linking her concert tour with the adoption story. “I’m putting on a show to sell my record, to make my points” (Madonna 2006b). Selling products and espousing attitudes are taken to be the same, and the concerts are shows in the business of persuading consumers to purchase either the record or the latest version of the Madonna brand. One of the major implications of emotivism is that moral judgments devolve upon the individual and, in particular, upon the socially constructed self. But as MacIntyre makes plain, this emotivist self is of a very specific kind. Now if, as emotivism claims, there are no criteria behind moral judgments and if, instead, all moral statements are nothing more than expressions of preference, then the self is deprived of any definite moral continuity and integrity: “The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgement for such limits could only derive from rational criteria of evaluation and . . . the emotivist self lacks any such criteria.” MacIntyre goes on to say of the emotivist self, “Everything may be criticized from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self’s choice of

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standpoint to adopt” (1985, 31). Naturalized emotions once again become influential, for through their significations of veracity (the tears, for instance) they intimate a standpoint unassailable because it cannot be subject to rational criteria. Indeed, rationality is no longer an issue at all. To paraphrase MacIntyre, it might be said that everything can be criticized, except for the standpoint naturalized through emotional displays by the self. Inasmuch as naturalized emotions appear in the media environment, they symbolize a truth of connection that can be felt by those who see for themselves and that can only be missed by those who act through institutions. This is the terrain Geldof and Madonna similarly occupy, albeit with spiritual differences (spiritual questions are of little import in Geldof’s statements). It means the emotional-emotive self cannot be criticized as such, even though that self can criticize anything else, including the failure of Yohane Banda to own a car. Emotivism is the basis of the role contemporary music plays in common-sense humanitarianism. The importance of music is clear at a purely impressionistic level inasmuch as most of the leading figures of common-sense humanitarianism are musicians or involved in the music industry. This has been the case since the foundational moment of Live Aid in 1984, when musicians released collaborative records like “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in the United Kingdom and “We Are the World” in America. An obvious explanation for this curiosity could be the simplest. Perhaps this otherwise diverse group of performers is for some reason especially committed to “Africa.” Maybe this is just a quirk of history and biography. Such an explanation would be perfectly adequate taken on its own terms if it were not for the way in which music itself (and not just musicians) has been made central to common-sense humanitarianism’s narratives and modes of communication. It would also be adequate were it not for the cultural fact that common-sense humanitarianism continues to attract the attention of musicians (and other cultural figures too) long after many of the original Live Aid figures have disappeared. In other words, the link of common-sense humanitarianism with music is formal and not biographical. Some commentators have made great claims about the connection of humanitarianism with music. For instance, the British commentator

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Dave Marsh saw the initial Live Aid concerts of the 1980s as a sign of the rock audience becoming alert to its full potential, more aware of issues such as poverty and hunger, and, furthermore, embracing its ability to do something about it (Ullestad 1987). Meanwhile, Robin Denselow identified the likes of Geldof and Bono as performers who have learned to use their music and concerts as vehicles for the statement of political positions, and examined how the big show or record sales apply the greatest pressure on the institutions and power brokers who try to keep things exactly as they are (1990). Denselow would almost certainly bolster his argument by quoting Madonna, who said, “I have a reputation of being provocative. . . . But I think it’s kind of a waste of time to provoke just for the sake of provocation. I think you have to have a lesson or something that you want to share. You have to have a reason for it” (Madonna 2006b). Here Madonna is announcing she wants to use her celebrity profile, and her music, as a vehicle for definite ends, but the sense of the contributions by the commentators is that humanitarianism is little more than a means for music to recover the allegedly radical credentials it previously had but lost. They seem to be more concerned to find traces of some recommitment to a myth about rock and pop music. However, a subtler appreciation can be found in Neal Ullestad’s discussion of charity rock events (1987). He points out that rock music has an ambiguous situation in modern culture because, on the one hand, for many of its performers and audiences it facilitates a (however manufactured) spirit of rebellion or at least self-expression, while on the other hand, it is also a component part of the culture industries geared toward profit generation by selling reliable products to consumers. Consequently, as a site of cultural practice, rock is in a state of permanent tension between critique and cooptation. Ullestad argues that the tension can be seen in Live Aid. It reflected the cooptation of music within the hegemony of the capitalist culture industries to such an extent that the aid and the music were of secondary significance to the event itself (the form culturally was more important than the content; for a discussion of this point, see Tester 1994), and it was so attractive to the prevailing order of things that mainstream politicians tried to harness themselves to it. Live Aid, Ullestad says, “is firmly situated within the limits of the

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dominant social structures, including hegemonic relations at the level of social consciousness. It is, in fact, a part of the ‘common sense’ reality—the mirage— of the ‘natural’ and inevitable order of things as they are” (1987, 71). Yet for Ullestad this is not the whole story, since it was also the case that “Live Aid served to disrupt the smooth flow of ideas and beliefs because it was also a window onto another part of the world, a window through the haze of the mirage, a view behind the screen of consumer ‘reality’” (Ullestad 1987, 71). Live Aid involved a disruption of hegemonic relationships even as it was fully implicated within them. Good support for this argument is provided by one of the most poignant and well-known moments in the 1985 Live Aid broadcast. Introduced by David Bowie after he sang “Heroes,” which he dedicated to “the children of the world,” it was the video CBC had put together (presumably from the footage Brian Stewart’s team captured, containing the soon-to-be-iconic shot of Birhan Woldu) to the soundtrack of the song “Drive” by the Cars. The video focused on very small children in the feeding centers, and the sound of the song was only interrupted by the noises of their suffering. When the lyric is “scream,” there is an immediate cut to a child screaming, and it is also possible to hear coughs and crying. These natural and essential human sounds intrude upon the overly smooth song with its glossy (and presumably expensive) production values. Yet the intrusion always happens in time to the beat, and so it does not actually jar. The video has such an iconic status in commonsense humanitarianism that it was used at the very beginning of the Live 8 concert in 2005 (where Bowie once again sang “Heroes,” although this time it seemed he was singing to and about the audience itself ). Bob Geldof introduced it as proof of why the campaign to put pressure on the G8 leaders continued to be necessary. After it was shown, Birhan Woldu walked onto the stage and waved at the audience in order to show the campaign might also have a tangible success. The reuse of the video was, of course, convenient. First, it meant a film deeply embedded in modern cultural memory could be introduced in context to new generations hitherto deprived of an opportunity to act in terms of it rather than just consume it. Second, it put the present campaign in a line of direct continuity with the past and thus created a

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measure of cultural legitimacy. Third, it showed that campaigns against “African” poverty could work because here was Birhan. In all of these ways, the video fits well with the contention that events like Live Aid and Live 8 stand in an ambivalent relation to hegemonic common sense. From one perspective, the reuse of the video in the context of Live 8 was supportive of the existing dominant structures. After all, the very fact that it could be shown again and still possess some kind of charge was itself sufficient indication that the condition of “Africa” had not been transformed by Live Aid twenty years earlier or indeed in the intervening period, and so there was little or no reason to imagine much would happen this time around either. This was despite the fact that Live 8 was aimed at putting pressure for debt relief onto the leaders of the G8 nations and therefore had immediacy and focus. Ironically, the reuse of the video made the challenge of Live 8 very safe, as political leaders possibly grasped when they went out of their way to appear with Bob Geldof and Bono. Equally, by using a film to one degree or another alwaysalready known, the meaning of the event was naturalized and domesticated. These are aspects of cooptation. From the opposite point of view, however—from a perspective seeking to stress oppositional possibilities—it can be contended that the video made it clear to the audience that this concert was something considerably different from an afternoon in the park watching big-name bands. It also showed that despite everything now well known about “Africa” and despite all of the previous efforts of the “constituency of compassion,” still the leaders and institutions of the world as it is had failed to act. The video opened a window on “Africa” at once justifying the concert and yet revealing the bitter truths everyday life in the affluent West otherwise disguises. By this argument, the G8 leaders were keen to appear in the media environment alongside Geldof and Bono in order to defuse the pressure the event had put on them and to show they had responded to it, even if the subsequent Gleneagles Agreement proved their response to be somewhat less than it might have been. Consequently, although the video was at first intended to open a window on what life is like outside of the West, when it was reused its status had drastically changed. In 2005 it had become persuasive. The persuasion

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operated at a number of levels: it was an attempt to persuade the G8 leaders, an attempt to persuade the audience the job remained to be done, an attempt to persuade younger generations that what happened twenty years before was and remained compelling. The publicity for Live 8 made its continuity with and difference from Live Aid quite clear: one slogan broadcast during the event proclaimed, “Last time we wanted your money, this time we want your name.” In other words, the action this time was to persuade political leaders to act. However, building on themes raised by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, it can be contended that the video was effective in being persuasive because even as it was used as a means to encourage action on the part of individuals, it also implied the creation of a community. It intimated belonging and thus linked personal feelings with public events; indeed, the public event was collapsed into ostensibly authentic personal feelings held in common. The community was constituted by the individual social subjects who demonstrated the simultaneity of their audience membership by “giving their name” to the campaign at the same time and in the context of the Live 8 concert. Individuals were persuaded to register their individuality, but in so doing, they were pulled together into a community of people who were all doing the same thing because evidently they all felt the same. This was the basis of the “constituency of compassion” on whose behalf Bob Geldof claimed to be speaking in the 1980s, and the music was significant because even as it pulled individuals together on the basis of its persuasive force (and therefore even as it implied a voluntarism of the acceptance of persuasion), it was also disciplinary. The “greatness” of the music registered in modern culture in terms of its audience appeal or its celebrity performers shows “every individual that he has to obey its authority, by symbolically being accepted, ‘integrated’ into the society through the music.” As such, “what appears to the isolated observation of its effect as the power of music to form society is to a great degree only the more or less ritualized repetition of the mechanisms of integration employed by an already established social order” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973, 109). The reuse of the Live Aid video at the beginning of Live 8 was, then, a ritual of social order.

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The Live 8 audience itself was not enjoined to participate in any action other than to make a declaration of selfhood. Yet that declaration was powerful for social subjects because it was integrative. The emotivist self was made continuous with the cultural past and lent a measure of integrity by the statement of concern that follows from “giving” one’s name. Moreover, this act was thoroughly entwined in relationships of persuasion. Through the concert format the self was persuaded to give her or his name to the campaign, and when that donation—that gift—was publicized, it was a principle of the persuasion of others on the grounds that if all of those people shared that attitude toward “Africa” then so ought the self who has not yet given her or his name. Inasmuch as the self accepted the means of persuasion and was persuaded, it was also given a measure of veracity derived from doing the same thing as everyone else. The dominant concern was not to give information to the audience; it was instead to exert influence on others. Therefore, Live 8 was thoroughly emotivist, and its most emotive tool of all was the video that was recovered from Live Aid in 1985. The music was used as a means of persuasion, but it is also pertinent to think about how the music could have value of such a sort. After all, the video producers took it as given that the images of starving “African” children could not be left to speak for themselves, but could only have a definite meaning if they were harnessed to a piece of pop. But in so doing, any counter-hegemonic possibilities the footage might have contained were closed down. The linkage of the word “scream” in the song lyric with the scream of a child is a fine signification of the extent to which possible meanings were blocked and the principle of narration and of the integration of the world once again became Western action. “The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect . . . because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979, 124). The connection of the starving children to a pop song actually meant the integration of the outside into the dominant narratives and entailed a transformation of their status from the possibly moral to the

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entertaining. The suffering children were made entertaining because using an already-known song as a soundtrack meant it was possible to know from the outset how long the images would last, and so in this way there was a temporal closure that guaranteed the relief of escape even as the pictures might have been harrowing. Furthermore, the entertainment value was increased unintentionally (and terribly) because despite the integration of the song and the images, the song itself could not really bear the weight of the images— or the images became banalized by the song. Unfortunately, the connection had about it an aspect of bleak comedy, as Ricky Gervais possibly glimpsed: “Music has become comic in the present phase primarily because something so completely useless is carried out with all the visible signs of the strain of serious work” (Adorno 1991, 51). This point could actually be leveled against all uses of pop music in humanitarian appeals. It means the ostensible demand is a diversion. In the case of the pop video with starving children, there was no duration and therefore little or no sense of a need for engagement with the particular. Indeed, the particulars became completely interchangeable so long as they were generally similar. As a result, generic representation becomes at once necessary for the producers and sufficient for the audience. There can be little or no nuance and thus nothing by way of the creation of an opening that moves outside of hegemonic structures, if only because there is simply not the time. Yet there is not the time because pop music is used as a means of communication, and the demands of the capitalistic culture industries establish that a pop song ought not to last more than a few minutes. Adorno rightly contends that the culture industry has standardized songs to such an extent that the number of beats to a bar and their duration is set in advance, and so these aspects are known in advance too (1991, 43). This is stopwatch morality. The music most explicitly used in common-sense appeals tends all to be in the minor key (unless there is an uplifting key change at the end, usually accompanied with pictures of now-smiling children). This formal structure makes it emotionally manipulative (DeNora 2003), and the songs all tend to be about love. Consequently, moral connection is reduced to the tropes of love, and the personal and personalized feelings

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of love in turn become the registers of concern for others. Morality is incorporated into love, love is the stuff of pop lyrics, and so what might otherwise be problematic and pressing (famine) becomes normalized and integrated. Furthermore, once again the emphasis is on personal feelings and the music is used with the intention of influencing the attitudes of the audience. It is used instrumentally, and therefore it has to be amenable to such use by being predictable as a commodity of both production and consumption. What Adorno said of jazz applies to the music used in common-sense humanitarianism: “Everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme,  .  .  .  its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance. . . . This propensity accelerates the standardization, commercialization, and rigidification of the medium” (1989, 200). A sign of the process Adorno identified is the continuity from Live Aid to Live 8 and, furthermore, the reliance of common-sense humanitarianism on predictable and virtually formatted narratives and devices. In another essay on music, Adorno proposed the idea of regressive listening. He said this was a result of the commodification of music by the culture industry, its reduction to the predictable and the associated repudiation of anything unexpected. The culture industry has enforced regression on audiences because it refuses the possibility of any alternatives to the profitable models, and yet audiences accept this because it means they can live in peace and be entertained, without the challenge that might be offered by the possibility of different musical styles. Adorno said, “The regression is really from this existent possibility, or more concretely, from the possibility of a different and oppositional music” (1991, 41). If this idea is extended, it becomes pertinent to speculate that with its emphasis on musical forms and performers themselves commodified (as proven by the stress on celebrities, Madonna as a brand, and Bob Geldof’s repeated argument that it was necessary to get the acts that sell the most records), common-sense humanitarianism feeds upon and exacerbates regressive listening on the part of the audience. And there quickly follows the more pinching question: can commonsense humanitarianism be identified as what amounts to a regressive morality? To the extent that it is a closed and totalizing system and

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narrative, and to the extent it naturalizes social and cultural relationships, the conclusion is clear. Common-sense humanitarianism is regressive.

family values Regression, then, consists in the blocking and the repudiation of any possibility of things being different than they are. As such, myth is intrinsically regressive, but in the context of common-sense humanitarianism, the situation is exacerbated by its dependence on the appearance of celebrities as inspirations, incitements, or exemplary figures in the media environment. Quite simply, dependence on celebrities is incompatible with any encouragement of a sense of the possible instead of the existent. Celebrities are the products of a rational industry in which “marketing and public relations plainly dominate in the pursuit and management of public attention for profit.” The connection of celebrity to relationships of production means the celebrities are “at once both real and artificial, spontaneous and programmed, performing themselves and being themselves” (Meyer and Gamson 1995, 184). These points apply in the case of Madonna and her dealings with “Africa.” First of all, the story of her adoption of David Banda was told in no small part with the assistance of the panoply of public relations managers that have long surrounded her. The extent to which the Madonna brand is managed was illustrated a few days before the story was released when her publicist refused to comment on it. According to reports, Madonna’s “publicist, Liz Rosenberg .  .  . denied any knowledge that the pop star was to adopt a baby” (Tenthani 2006). Presumably the denial was made because the time was not yet thought to be appropriate for the media announcement, and therefore the presentation could not be managed in the desired way (or the denial was a managed “planting” of the seeds of the story). Moreover, if it is right to identify the story as a moment in the rebranding of Madonna and the connection of the brand to values other than mere money-making, then it also has to be concluded it was indeed an exercise in the creation of “public attention for profit.” Even bad publicity can be turned to good use if it can be managed. After Madonna’s

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appearance with Oprah Winfrey, it was remarked that “public relations specialists praised her spin-control efforts and lots of favourable press followed, including one story detailing Malawian president Ben Mutharka’s support for Madonna” (Padgett 2006). In the world of marketing, the identification of a brand with non-monetary values is carried out in the pursuit of profit. Second, if celebrity identity is ambiguous, then the celebrity her- or himself is required always to exert, or to try to exert, a measure of control over how she or he is employed by any campaign with which she or he has become connected. Celebrities need campaigns in order to maintain brand profile, and campaigns need celebrities in order to secure appearance in the media environment, but “even as activists try to mobilize celebrity participation as a resource for their movements, celebrities themselves attempt to exercise control over how they will be used.” The upshot of this is that “cognizant both of their need to maintain a working relationship with their audiences, and of the kinds of claims and movements in which they have some kind of credibility, celebrities may in fact gravitate to less challenging movements, and to more consensual claims within larger social movements” (Meyer and Gamson 1995, 188). It is improbable that high-profile celebrities like Madonna would uphold unpopular causes, because then they could not exert control over appearance; the controversy surrounding the cause would swamp the celebrity. For example, Mel Gibson has been somewhat sidelined in Hollywood culture because of his espousal of a very traditional if not indeed reactionary version of Catholicism. Any too binding relationship dilutes the celebrity’s ability to achieve a rebranding when fashions change, while a controversial cause might tarnish the brand. Consequently, “selected causes must be unthreatening and in tune with the consumer’s existing predilections” and “causes are chosen that offer a quick response to immediate guilt” (Smith and Higgins 2000, 315). “African” babies fit the agenda perfectly. In short, in celebrity-led campaigns—and common-sense humanitarianism has always been celebrity led—the requirements of the culture industry and specifically the exigencies of the management of celebrity appearance in the media environment cause a gravitation toward

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common-sense values always-already widely accepted and scarcely controversial. The existent is confirmed, and the possible is blocked. This is the nub of regression. Celebrity involvement tends to be in campaigns “dominated by moderate, middle-class politics and concerns, emphasizing collective and indivisible benefits, or, alternatively, charity” (Meyer and Gamson 1995, 202). Even though Madonna’s celebrity is based on intimations of controversy, her comments about why she went to the orphanage and took David are entirely compatible with Western common sense. Of course, the story fits Western myths of “Africa,” but the compatibility rebounds back on itself and also confirms Western myths about the West. In particular, the value rebounding back on the West is about mythical and mythicized “family values” presumed to be valid for everyone and which everyone supposedly desires. The claims-maker (in this case the celebrity) has to be able to intimate how despite fame and wealth she or he is the same as everyone else (although the category of “everyone else” is, of course, a regressive common-sense myth in its own right). If certain values are valid for everyone, then the celebrity as an exemplary figure has to be identifiable with them. Madonna went to considerable lengths to show that despite her celebrity she is just like everyone else. She knows that “being married and having kids is not exactly simple no matter who you are” (Madonna 2006b). The only difference is that Madonna has a particularly demanding job, meaning sometimes she pays her children less attention than she ought. But even as she discusses this, the tension between performing Madonna and being Madonna comes to the fore. When Meredith Vieira rather gently asked Madonna if she sometimes makes mistakes in her life with Rocco and Lourdes, she agreed she does and explained, “My days off, they’re not really days off. I have to be mom and wife and, you know, there are times when I should have, you know, hung out with my kids and I just said, ‘I need a massage. I’m going to do that instead’” (Madonna 2006b). Everything is a role to be performed, and continuity between roles is apprehended largely in terms of competing demands rather than consistency. Yet David has nevertheless been welcomed into a loving home, and he is integrative even as he is integrated. Madonna and

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her husband discussed the idea of adoption at length, and the children have accepted the baby: “They just embraced him, and that’s the amazing thing about children. . . . They don’t ask questions. They’ve never once said, ‘What is he doing here,’ or mentioned the difference in his skin color, or questioned his presence in our life” (Madonna 2006c). Furthermore, it was stressed that Madonna had not been treated any differently from other parents of adoptees and had been frequently visited by child welfare and protection agencies (BBC News online, September 7, 2007). In the interview with Meredith Vieira, Madonna’s “connection with David” and fascination with family was linked to her own past. Vieira put the matter directly in a voiceover: “Madonna says that she feels a special kinship with the baby, because, like David, she never got to know her mother” (Madonna 2006b). This comment was immediately followed by a picture of Madonna with David, and then one of the child Madonna on her own. In this way the woman who had been abandoned by her mother was embracing the child whose mother had died. Madonna thus became a sign of hope for all abandoned children and an agent who brings hope to others inasmuch as she prefers to welcome them into her loving family. All social and cultural attributes are stripped away in the name of a myth of family. Madonna herself then said, “I hope to be the mother that I didn’t have to David, as I have hoped to be the mother to my other children” (2006b). For one British commentator, this was all too much. Melissa Kite pointed out that in terms of bare facts, Madonna’s childhood was not so very different from David’s. Madonna was one of five siblings with no mother and a father who could not cope and sent the children away. Kite admitted that it is unlikely Madonna did not notice the similarity, then rhetorically speculated what would have happened in the media had an African family come to America and taken away the little Madonna without her father’s express support. To put the issue in such a way to a Western audience is to already give the answer (Kite 2006). Kite was concerned by the relationship between the West and “Africa,” but Michela Wrong asked a more cuttingly direct question. For Wrong, the rub of the story of Madonna and David was not about the West and “African” babies; rather, it was about the West and its own myth of the nuclear family (Wrong 2006).

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From the perspective of Western “fantasies and philanthropies,” David Banda was one more living instance of the abandoned child “Africa” evidently produces to excess. However, if attention is paid to the statements of his own father and relatives, it is clear that he was still identified as part of a familial unit. Admittedly, this is not the nuclear family of Western myth, but it is nevertheless a support network. Three quotations demonstrate this. First, BBC News quoted the “chief” of the village of Lipunga, where David had been born. The unnamed “chief” said he approved of David’s adoption because “if we didn’t send David away to the orphanage we would have buried him” (BBC News online, October 13, 2006; emphasis added). Second, the Independent newspaper quoted Yohane as saying, “What we agreed with Madonna was that she looks after my child until he finishes school, becomes independent and comes back home to us.” Third, the same newspaper quoted a cousin of Yohane: “Our understanding as a family is that David is still part and parcel of our clan” (Bloomfield 2006; emphasis added). All of these quotations include David in a community. David belongs to a group fractured by poverty and illness but which nevertheless supports and nurtures in its own way. Extended family, clan, and village communities define the group. Admittedly, these comments might only have been made because everyone saw personal opportunities in David being taken by Madonna, but even if this measure of cynicism is attributed to the “chief,” Yohane, and his cousin, it still presupposes they are in some way linked to him and identify David as their kin. Quite simply, they could only imagine personal benefits from what happened to David if they identified him as one of their world. The conclusion is clear: David was not abandoned. Wrong’s argument is that Madonna failed to notice this kind of support network or different— extended—family structure; she saw David as in need of a family of his own, because she was illicitly applying her own Western values to “Africa,” naturalizing the nuclear family as the family. For Wrong, this is just another example of how “time and again we project on to Africa’s inhabitants the priorities and options that rule our own lives” (2006). Consequently, we (the inhabitants of the West who narrate “Africa” in terms of Western “fantasies and philanthropies”) take our particular myth of the family and condemn “Africa” for diverging

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from it. Wrong says, “You know the one I mean: the neat family unit that supposedly eats, sleeps and tours shopping malls together. . . . Anything that strays from this cloying model, we regard as an aberration” (2006). The structures of belonging in which David was situated did not fit with the “cloying model,” and so they were either ignored or denied any validity. Their very possibility was repudiated. Yet this raises another question. If “Africa” is condemned for abandoning children and not upholding the virtues of the nuclear family, why is the myth of the nuclear family taken to be so common sense, so natural and inevitable as the only suitable child-raising unit, in the West? The condemnation of “Africa” highlights the extent to which its familial forms diverge from the mythical nuclear family. But why then is the nuclear family taken by hegemonic narration to be the natural and “normal” family form? Why is the nuclear family so obvious in the West? Within the answers to those questions there are signs of the Western desperation. According to Christopher Lasch, “As business, politics, and diplomacy grow more savage and warlike, men seek a haven in private life, in personal relations, above all in the family—the last refuge of love and decency” (1977, ix). Lasch’s contention is that as the modern world becomes increasingly perceived as threatening and risky, social subjects retreat into the private “haven” of the family. It is in the family, and especially in the nuclear family presumed to be completely divorced from the external world as soon as the door is shut, that social subjects seek safety, security, and a firm sense of selfhood. There is a turn to the private. Yet “in reality, the modern world intrudes at every point and obliterates its privacy. The sanctity of the home is a sham in a world dominated by giant corporations and by the apparatus of mass promotion” (Lasch 1977, xxiii). The media environment can be identified as a cause of the obliteration of the safe haven of the family. Television consumption is one of the culturally dominant activities in the “haven in the heartless world” of the nuclear family. Television is used as an entertaining diversion and yet also, paradoxically, as a source of information about public external threats and risks that validate the retreat into the family. Hence news broadcasts become valuable, because without them the family sphere would not possess its quality of being an escape. In order to escape, it

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is first of all necessary to know what is being escaped and what it is necessary to escape from. Television teaches lessons about the war out there. But the threat is internalized, and the hoped-for divide between the ostensibly safe nuclear family and the dangerous outside is obliterated. The family is put under pressure because it cannot cope with the dangers validating it. The front door has to be opened. Madonna somewhat disingenuously spoke of this conflict when she told Oprah Winfrey she had no idea about the public controversy her family arrangements were causing: “I don’t read newspapers or watch television, but all of my friends have let me know what everybody’s talking about and what’s going on in the news. . . . It’s pretty shocking” (Madonna 2006c). Pierre Bourdieu says journalists are always in a hurry and can never get beneath the surface of a story. They lack sufficient time: “Journalists—the day laborers of everyday life— can show us the world only as a series of unrelated flash photos” (1998, 7). Nothing can be allowed to matter too much because within minutes it is likely to be old news, uninteresting, and indeed an impediment to be cast off, since audiences can be best secured through “scoops” and innovation. This is, of course, what Madonna’s brand managers know extremely well. There is more than a hint that her naivety about the press coverage of the adoption was all part of her rebranding as an innocent and family-centered mother. However, the new brand seems to have been discarded, because around the time of her fiftieth birthday, the “Madonna as Mother” was replaced with the “Madonna as Exceptionally Fit and Alluring Woman” brand. Bourdieu continues to say of journalists, “Given the lack of time, and especially the lack of interest and information (research and documentation are usually confined to reading press articles), they cannot do what would be necessary to make events really understandable” (1998, 7). This contention about the lack of research is confirmed by press coverage of the Madonna and David story, most of which is parasitic upon a couple of interviews. Journalists—and by extension this means the media environment in and of itself— cannot take events and make them intelligible by putting them “in a network of relevant relationships.” Consequently, the world becomes absurd, dehistoricized, and dehistoricizing (Bourdieu 1998, 7).

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Absurdity is exactly what Bob Geldof appreciated when he saw the television news reports of the Ethiopian famine. Yet in as far as the world becomes absurd and unintelligible, it also becomes existentially threatening to and for social subjects, and so unless they have the cultural capital to exploit appearances in the media environment, they retreat further and further into the “haven in a heartless world” of the domestic sphere, only for the escape route to be undermined every time there is engagement with the media environment, as there necessarily will be in the quest for entertainment. If the audience is going to continue to engage with the media environment (and thus enable the capitalist institutions of the environment to secure the audience share sold to advertisers or regulators), the environment must be able to negate the threats it otherwise creates. First of all, there is a subordination of news to entertainment genre, and second, the absurdity of the world is turned into a mere surface confusion through the construction of narratives that resolve conflict and make everything orderly (or at least intelligible) once again. This is what the myth of the nuclear family helps to achieve, despite— or perhaps it is actually because of—the weight of all the hopes and expectations placed upon it. The mythical family unit offers a principle of general order (even as any particular family might collapse under the pressures exerted upon it) because it is a means of making sense of the confusion of relationships elsewhere. To retreat to the mythical haven is to find a sphere not at all absurd. As such, even if David is indeed part of a network of extended family, clan, and village, its validity is denied because it connects what the West constructs as the private and domestic with the public, and therefore it is identified as threatening. David’s extended networks connect him with what is constructed in the West as the warlike world out there, and he needs to be rescued from them. One expression of this is the suspicion about Yohane Banda’s motives, competence, and integrity. Furthermore, the relationships with which David is associated by his father and uncle are very far from “cosmopolitan,” so they are out of kilter with the hegemonic metropolitan imaginary symbolized by celebrities like Madonna. Indeed, slightly underneath the surface of a lot of the coverage of Yohane is an unstated assumption that his life has been lived in the context of the extremely parochial (remember,

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he does not have a car), and therefore his own horizons have been turned inwards and stunted by what the metropolitan imaginary would doubtless identify as the “oppressive community” of his clan and village. The naturalization of the myth of the nuclear family restores the West as the locus and agency of understanding the confusions of the world even though the media environment demonstrates that Western ways are not universally upheld. Madonna thus restores order to an otherwise absurd, threatening, and risky world, because through her actions she repudiates the possibility of any other arrangements or valid imaginations. She acts in terms of an unquestioned presumption of the universal validity of particular Western familial forms, and as a celebrity, she connects the news of her action with the genre of entertainment. In this way, the myth of the family as a haven is reiterated even though the media environment obliterates any chance of its separateness. Furthermore, this naturalization of the nuclear family as the only appropriate home for children gives emotivist culture a definite social basis. Now everything can be criticized from the basis of its divergence from the very nuclear family that in the West ostensibly enables its children to develop according to their own preferences (such as David’s future choices about religion). The imposition upon “Africa” of Western values of the nuclear family consequently makes the particular form seem to be inevitable, common sense, and without alternative, even as the media show it is not universal at all. But the other forms are known only in terms of their aberration and failure. The nuclear family is naturalized because it becomes the principle of comparison and the point of order. But the argument goes further. “Africans” who are without the nuclear family are consigned by this narrative to lives without choice, whereas the West is linked to freedom of choice. “African” family structures are identified as failing or oppressive (and at best as dubious) because they stand over and above any given individual (David was born into a clan existing regardless of him), whereas the mythical Western nuclear family is created through the action of its participants. As such, and once again, there is a reinforcement of the imagination of the West as the locus of action in the world. For example, David’s family

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members are either dead or defined by extended relationships tied to a particular place, itself narrated as peripheral and “primitive” (its inhabitants cannot drive, and Yohane Banda was reported as being illiterate). Meanwhile, Madonna’s family is an achievement. It comprises herself, her husband, and their children, and the usual frictions and pleasures of family life typify it. For example, even though Madonna felt drawn to David once she had seen him, the decision to adopt was freely reached after consensual negotiation (although it is curious to see Madonna making a statement appearing to imply patriarchal power relationships; then again, perhaps this image was deliberate inasmuch as it fitted in with her rebranding as every-mother): “We’ve been talking about it for two years, and it wasn’t until about, I’d say a year ago, where my husband said, ‘OK, let’s do it’ . . . you know, I want to, you know, give a child a life who wouldn’t be given a life” (Madonna 2006b). From this it is possible to extrapolate narrative conceits of what internal family relationships ought naturally and by common sense to be like. Since they are based on the clan and village, “African” structures must be patriarchal, traditional, and oppressive, but because Western family relationships are based on the free choice of the members to participate in its life, the nuclear family must be pulled together by love and consensus. And so, even as it is threatened all the time, the nuclear family can still be a haven in the heartless world. The private becomes the tolerant cosmopolis, and cosmopolitanism becomes domestic tolerance. The nuclear family becomes the “copy and sample” of the world as it is seen from the metropolitan centers. “Africans,” then, are narrated as lacking in the security and ability to act that Western family relationships are mythically constructed as offering. “Africans” are the children and the progenitors of significant aspects of the heartless world Western families can witness through its appearance in the media environment, and thus the emotivist selves of the West can come to appreciate their own relative good fortune even despite their own anxieties. This is what Madonna realized: “I have an incredible life. I’m blessed with so many things. . . . I want a child that nobody else wants” (2006b). But what then is the child? Madonna took what she wanted, and for some commentators this is tantamount to a new variation on the enslavement of “Africa.” “Madonna

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has opened the old wounds of slavery and colonialism,” wrote Mary Mitchell in a sentence rather begging the question of whose wounds (2006). David, then, is nothing more than a kind of slave, or at the very best a screen upon which can be projected the fulfillment of Western fantasy. Melissa Kite saw something similar: “In years to come, when we in the West have evolved a little, we will come to see cross-border adoption as we now view the slave trade” (2006). Once again, then, David is narrated in terms of Western categories, albeit this time with Western self-admonition, and any chance he might be narrated differently is blocked. After all, his own extended family cannot legitimately narrate him because they are merely figures from the periphery stuck in traditional communities needing to be overcome in the name of cosmopolitanism. Mitchell and Kite make pertinent points, but they have a perhaps understandable tendency toward overstatement. After all, they were writing news opinion pieces and therefore were required by generic convention to come up with the incisive phrase. The question of what David is consequently remains, and perhaps it is most appropriate to opt for the most obvious answer. What is David from the perspective of modern Western narrations? He is, as Michela Wrong observes, “a very lucky boy” (2006). But if David is fundamentally just lucky and the beneficiary of the good fortune of being compelling to Madonna on aesthetic grounds, then he is actually denied any moral validity of his own. To say David is lucky is, once again, to narrate him and to make the West the actor. This is perhaps the hegemonic rejoinder to Mitchell’s and Wrong’s intuitions that there is a whiff of slavery and colonialism about the whole story of the adoption. No longer does the West import “Africans” for purposes of profit; now the “Africans” are narrated as being fortunate to live in a world in which “we” are so metropolitan and affluent that “we” are free enough to rescue “them” from the world “their” parents have made. “They” are lucky that “we” have the wherewithal to give “them” a bed for the night. Put another way, “our” affluence is “their” good fortune. These are all of the benefits for the West of the regression involved in common-sense humanitarianism. The world is made safe for Western fantasy and philanthropy, while all the time no thought is given to the

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threatening chance that a more honest treatment of “Africa” and “Africans,” one that accepts Africa and Africans, might be possible.

conclusion The stakes of the story of Madonna’s relationship with David Banda are considerable. They go to the very heart of the meaning and action of care for others in the modern West, and they are thrown into sharpest relief if Madonna is compared with Bob Geldof. Although Geldof is frequently criticized and popularly viewed with considerable suspicion, he has never experienced the vilification visited upon Madonna, which caused Bono to rush to her defense. Bono said, “Madonna should be applauded for helping to take a child out of the worst poverty imaginable and giving him a better chance in life.” He went on, “Baby David is lucky to have been adopted by someone who can give him a chance of survival in this world and I don’t think it’s fair that people are criticising her” (NME News 2006). The question is: why was Madonna so criticized—at a level obviously shocking to her (had it not been, she would not have embarked upon a media campaign to put her point of view for herself ) and which was personal in a way few, if any, attacks on Bob Geldof (or Bono, for that matter) have been? Whatever else she might have done and for whatever reasons, when Madonna took David, she did something Western culture has not yet come to terms with. She took responsibility for a child who is from the peripheries and brought him into the metropolitan center without giving a firm date for his return. She gave him a bed “here.” To this extent, her actions appear to imply that leaving “them there” is not enough. Of course, she is not the only celebrity to have done this. Angelina Jolie has also adopted babies, albeit with less overt publicity than Madonna, and she has also been attacked. Whereas Madonna is narrated as the “material girl” who is herself a commodity and turns all she touches into a thing to be bought and sold, Angelina Jolie is positioned as questionably emotional. In her purported emotionality is ambivalence. Jolie at once seems to express emotivism because she operates according to her own preferences, and

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yet she also validates the nuclear family as a place of certainty and security. As such, “she has become both an exemplar and an antidote for the need to create a meaningful life, and Americans by and large don’t read about her because they want to learn more about the refugee crisis in Africa. They read about her because they don’t” (Junod 2007). Angelina Jolie and Madonna, however manufactured their appearances in the media environment might be, are at one level at least trying to do something fairly straightforward. They are trying to care for children whom they identify as being in desperate need of help. They do not talk much about justice or in abstract terms about development and trade. They talk about loss, abandonment, and helping. This is how Geldof started off, but his narrative eventually became more abstract as he got closer and closer to the hegemonic institutions and sites of postimperial power in the world. Madonna and Jolie are identified as having questionable motives because, as celebrities, they are constructed as capable of acting only for themselves and never selflessly for others. As such, Angelina Jolie becomes “crazy” (Junod 2007) and Madonna becomes the object of an exceptional level of media cynicism (see, for example, Beck 2006). Madonna and Jolie are condemned because they tried to do what the West finds difficult. Despite all of their failings and contradictions, perhaps Madonna and Jolie did indeed try genuinely to do something selfless. Yet that is what celebrities cannot possibly do, according to the dominant culture at least. As such, the more Madonna publicized her action the more cynicism it caused. She was evidently acting without regard to financial values (although the rebranding undoubtedly generated profit), and thus she revealed the secret of the imaginary and action of common-sense humanitarianism. For a short while, Madonna seemed to be saying that “Africa” wants for more than money. All the time she appeared to be making such a claim she was condemned. The substance of the condemnation was a mixture of incomprehension and fear at the chance that she was pulling away the curtain on common-sense humanitarianism and creating the space for quite different possibilities in the dealings between the metropolitan center and the peripheries. The attacks only died down when the focus of the media environment turned

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elsewhere, when the story became “boring” and the common-sense and mythicizing structures of regression repaired the rips in the fabric Madonna had momentarily created. They were rips that might even have destroyed the Madonna brand itself, and it is unsurprising to see signs of regression here too. All through 2007 and 2008, Britney Spears had been very publicly breaking down psychologically. The press mercilessly hounded her, and Madonna was moved to tell Vanity Fair, “When you think about the way people treat each other in Africa, people inflicting cruelty and pain on each other, then come back here and, you know, people taking pictures of people when they’re in their homes, being taken to hospitals, or suffering, and selling them, getting energy from them, that’s a terrible infliction of cruelty. So who’s worse off ?” (Cohen 2008). Who indeed? Common-sense humanitarianism is so rewarding to the West because it reaffirms our moral seriousness without forcing us to ask serious moral questions.

conclusion

This essay opened with the question of why and how humanitar­ ianism packs a punch in modern culture. It’s because of the rise of ­common-sense humanitarianism. Chapter 1 looked at what commonsense humanitarianism is. Chapter 2 explored how it is possible and what it does to those it seeks to help. And chapter 3 questioned exactly who is being saved by it. Whatever else it might be, Joseph Conrad’s corrosive and magnificent novella Heart of Darkness is an unflinching examination of the West’s fantasies and philanthropies about “Africa.” It continues to resonate because it deals with questions about the West and “Africa” lurking at the heart of humanitarianism. The novella has been accused of being racist, and it is racist inasmuch as “Africa” and “Africans” are given no ability to act of their own volition, but it is also a dagger to the heart of Western pretension because it is written from the inside. Conrad shows that the West goes to “Africa” to exploit it, but he also raises the distinct possibility that much of the violence and determination of the exploitation follows from the absurdity of Western life itself. There is the French warship firing shells into the jungle because an encampment of “enemies” is “hidden out of sight somewhere” (Conrad 1990, 11). But there is also the absurdity at home,

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in the metropolis at the center of flows and exchanges, which the projection of fantasy and philanthropy seeks to hide. The Australian sociologist John Carroll says at least part of Conrad’s message is clear: “Life in the modern city is absurd: people full of stupid importance; some property; meaningless petty routines; the butcher on one corner, the policeman on the other; a healthy appetite and filching a little money; order kept by hollow terror of scandal, the gallows and the lunatic asylum” (2004, 180). Through watching the television news from Ethiopia, Bob Geldof suddenly realized his metropolitan existence was in pursuit of, and surrounded by, “fripperies.” Geldof saw what Conrad’s Marlow saw: modern metropolitan existence is absurd. Geldof went to an “Africa” known in advance from media representations as “other.” He saw in it “African” primitivism and purity struggling to survive defilement by catastrophes visited either by nature or the very metropolis that enabled Geldof to imagine “Africa” for his own ends. The primitivism he saw exposed the frippery of modern metropolitan life. The “Africa” he found was only possible through the power relationships of the media environment, and this meant that Geldof—like everyone who accepts common-sense humanitarianism— could not question what seemed to be so obvious. All he could imagine was salvation from catastrophe. But whose salvation, and which catastrophe? The search for salvation from “out of Africa” resonates so deeply with modern culture because it hides the cynical darkness at the heart of the metropolitan world cities with their emphasis on money. And thanks to the media emphasis on personalities rather than processes, salvation appeared in the person of Birhan Woldu and other “African” children. She is the savior who was saved. Saving Birhan and the subsequent luck of her aesthetic appeal became the West’s “excuse for being there” in “Africa” even as no other excuse could possibly be found, even as the search for an escape from the absurdity of a life surrounded by “frippery” could never be admitted. Common-sense humanitarianism thus says much more about the humanitarians than about those who are the ostensible causes of concern. The search for a savior worked while all the time blocking any alternative narrations of “Africa,” and certainly the narrations of Africans themselves. The institutional and geographical centralization of

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the flows and exchanges of the media environment in the postimperial world cities made sure that Western narrative hegemony could remain unchallenged and that “Africans” might never become Africans (except when they might also become “enemies” or “insurgents”). Commonsense humanitarianism does not imagine that the media environment itself produces the savior. This is because the media environment is so self-evidently natural and inevitable that it is scarcely noticed except as a tool to be used. After all, the media environment merely stumbled across Birhan as an act of fate and not because of the choices made by a camera crew. That’s the story media professionals tell, anyway. But as the case of Madonna illustrates, the media environment is not just the preserve of journalists. It isn’t just about “news.” It is also a sphere for the generation of profit and celebrity. Now the savior does not need to be sought among mythicized “Africans” who are denied any ability to narrate themselves. Rather, the savior can come from the heart of modern culture. This is the root of the hubristic appearance in the media environment of celebrities who adopt babies so they can be given “a better chance of living.” The hubris consists in the excessive and unquestioned assumption that there is a right to do this if need be, regardless of the wishes of those who are to be helped. Irrespective of the personal sincerity of the celebrities in question (and there is no reason to question their sincerity), they manage appearance in the media environment in terms of attempts to deny the suspicion that all of their actions are marketing ploys for brand identity. Yet celebrity culture itself means these suspicions can never be entirely overcome. Consequently, their every appearance in the media environment inspires cynicism because it connects with the whiff of profit generation, and the possibility of the revelation of the absurd frippery of metropolitan life is transformed into a critique of the frivolity of the celebrities. This was the trap into which Madonna fell when she adopted baby David through very managed and manipulated (manipulative) appearance in the media environment. Madonna was disdained and criticized because she took celebrity culture at face value and assumed that as a special kind of cultural icon she might herself be a savior. But in so doing, she made the escape from absurdity absurd, and so she had to be rejected. Angelina

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Jolie is less criticized, for the simple reason she is more cautious about expressing her personal desires and acts in the media environment. Jolie’s adoptions tend to be known about afterwards—when they are “straightforward facts”—as opposed to while they are happening. Madonna temporarily cracked the edifice of common-sense humanitarianism. By trying to manipulate the reporting of a process while it was happening, she challenged the media’s conceit of its own innocence in perpetuating celebrity culture. She forced the media environment to look into the mirror, and it did not like what it saw. As a result, Madonna was vilified. According to Edward Said, two visions of the postcolonial world flow from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The first vision “allows the old imperial enterprise full scope to play itself out conventionally, to render the world as official European or Western imperialism saw it.” In this vision, “Westerners may have physically left their old colonies in Africa and Asia, but they retained them not only as markets but as locales on the ideological map over which they continued to rule morally and intellectually” (1993, 27). This is the postimperial vision in which common-sense humanitarianism is situated and which it helps to sustain. It provides an excuse for continued Western dominance over “Africa” and “Africans,” and it can be identified as “a justificatory regime of self-aggrandizing, self-originating authority, imposed between the victim of imperialism and its perpetrator” (Said 1993, 82). The difference between commonsense humanitarianism and old-style imperialism is, however, that “selfaggrandizement” is carried out in a spirit of huff and bluff to disguise the nagging possibility that metropolitan life—with its fripperies and plays on appearance in the media environment—is largely absurd. Said makes it possible to see that the second vision to flow from Heart of Darkness puts the common-sense arguments in context and makes them “local to a time and place, neither unconditionally true nor unqualifiedly certain” (1993, 28). It is difficult, if not impossible, from within the metropolitan center of the world to imagine a viable alternative to common-sense humanitarianism. After all, common-sense humanitarianism really and truly does save lives, and it does so in a way able to reproduce concern for “Africa” over a relatively long term. The achievement

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is dependent upon a mythical and regressive narration of “Africa” that denies the possibility of engagements with Africa and Africans. However, as this essay has sought to show, it is possible to narrate the conditions of existence of common-sense humanitarianism, and therefore it is possible to show that it is not inevitable or natural at all. Through an exercise in critical cultural sociology, it is possible to show that common-sense humanitarianism works but on fallacious grounds, naturalizes but is not at all natural. So it becomes possible to imagine that, like all social and cultural forms, it “would have its moment, then it would have to pass” (Said 1993, 28).

References

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 93, 94, 95, 96 aestheticization of Africans, in common-­ sense humanitarianism, 22, 23, 76–77 “Africa” vs. Africa, defined, ix–x as ancient home of universal humanity Geldof (Bob) on, 21–22, 30–31 and inability of Africans to act, 38–39 exoticizing of, 20–23, 26–27 as focus of common-­sense humanitarianism, ix Geldof (Bob) on as ancient home of universal humanity, 21–22, 30–31 causes of poverty in, 20–21 destructive influence of West in, 29 ignoring of history and culture of, 21–22 as monolithic place, 20, 21, 29–30 mythicization, 20–23, 25–31 primitivism of, 23 purity of, 23, 30–31 relationship to modernity, 27–29

generic media representations of, 66–68 justifications for intervention in, 67, 68–69, 112 mythicization of common-­sense humanitarianism’s dependence on, 31 in Geldof, 20–23, 25–31 narration of, by Raising Malawi ­c harity, 74–76 primitivism of and magical naturalism, 69 negative pole of (barbarism), 70 purity of, 23, 30–31 African Children’s Educational Society Trust, 37 “Africans.” See also Banda, David; Woldu, Birhan aestheticization of, in common-­sense humanitarianism, 22, 23, 76–77 vs. Africans, defined, ix aid recipients, denial of moral validity to, 84, 107 and common-­sense humanitarianism lack of resistance to, 60–61

122  index “Africans.” (continued) media characterizations of resistance to, 61, 70 connection with territory, 68–69 as creation of Western narration, 61–64, 68 devaluing of experience of, 60, 61–64, 70 family values of, Western denial of validity, 101–2, 104–6 inability to act, 38–39, 61, 67, 105–6 mythicization of, as voiceless victims, 61–71 orphans, naturalization of, 79–80 reduction to signifier of abandoned child, 75 refugees massification of, 64–66 mythicization of, as voiceless victims, 63–71 resistance to common-­sense humanitarianism, media characterizations of, 70 silencing of, 62–63 suffering, naturalization of, 67 as victims, Geldof on, 21 aid recipients, as lucky, rather than worthy, 84, 107 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Al Jazeera, 48 Arendt, Hannah, 43–44 “Asia,” and common-­sense humanitarianism, x Banda, David as lucky rather than worthy, 107 Madonna adoption of, ix, 72 as assault on common-­sense humanitarianism, 84, 108–10, 113–14 and brand management, 97–98, 103 as colonialism, 106–7 as denial of African extended family units, 101–2

emotional connection as motivating force in, 83–85 and narration of “Africans,” 77– 79 selection process, 76–80, 99 superficiality of media coverage of, 103 as part of extended family, 101 Banda, Yohane on adoption of son by Madonna, 80, 101 media characterizations of, 72–73, 74, 104–5, 106 placement of son in orphanage, 72 Band Aid action urged by, 16 as common sense response, 14 dependence on emotion, 14 and emergence of Geldof, 10 establishment of, 12 stressing of personal responsibility in, 12 and Woldu (Birhan), 36, 37–38 Barthes, Roland, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 63 Berg, Michael, 73 Berlin, as world city, 48 Berlin Trade Exhibition, 48, 49–50, 50–51 Bono activism of, 90 and audience cynicism, 59 and Comic Relief Day, 56–57 and common-­sense humanitarianism, 10 defense of Madonna, 108 and Live 8, 92 Bourdieu, Pierre, 103 Bowie, David, 91 Buerk, Michael, 10–11, 22, 66–67 Burman, Tony, 35 Bush, George W., 34 “Candle in the Wind,” 12 Carroll, John, 112

index  123 The Cars. See “Drive” video (The Cars) celebrities adopting of African children by, ix, x (See also Madonna, adoption of David Banda) as assault on common-­sense humanitarianism, 84, 109–10, 113–14 Jolie (Angelina) and, ix, 108–9, 113–14 components of celebrity, 81–83 construction of, as incapable of selfless acts, 109 Geldof (Bob) as first celebrity of common-­sense humanitarianism, 10–11 lack of veracity, 58–59 preference for support of widely-­ accepted causes, 98–99 as spokespersons for humanitarian causes, ix transcendence over cynicism of money economy, 81 celebrity culture forces underlying, 58 as regressive, 97 charity events cycle of demand-­sacrifice-­reward in, 52–54 as entertainment, 52–53, 95–96 colonialism, Madonna’s adoption of David Banda as, 106–7 Comic Relief Day (2007), 56–58 commodification, and celebrity culture, 58 common sense definition of, 8 institutionalization of metropolitan perspective as, 43–47 media as common-­sense constituent of contemporary culture, 51 mythicization as function of, 24 stressing of sensate in, 8, 9 common-­sense humanitarianism abandonment of emotion for practical action, 31–34

action required by, 9 aestheticization of Africans in, 22, 23, 76–77 “Africa” as focus of, ix African resistance to media characterizations of, 61, 70 reasons for lack of, 60–61 “Asia” and, x attractiveness of to West, 110 and charity events, as entertainment, 52–53, 95–96 and common-­sense racism, similar narrative structures of, 39, 69 and cynicism, 56–58 definition of, 9, 34 dehumanizing effects of, 55–56 emotional connection as motivating force in, 9, 83–85 entertainment industry and, viii–ix foundational statement of, 10–11 Geldof (Bob) as exemplary figure of, 10–20 gravitation toward widely-­accepted causes, 98–99 hegemonic nature of, ix, 48–49, 76, 112–13 and history, ignoring of, 24–25 as imperialism, ix, 4, 38, 39, 47, 114 implicit division between masses and exemplary figures, 32 justifications for intervention in Africa, 67, 68–69, 112 Madonna’s adoption of David Banda as assault on, 84, 108–10, 113–14 as mask of absurdity of modern metropolitan existence, 112, 114 media as enabling medium for, 71, 112 and music, role of, 89–97 critical views on, 89–91 emotivism and, 89, 94 integration of periphery into dominant narratives, 93–96 mythicization, dependence on, 31 and myth of universal human nature, 24, 84–86, 88

124  index common-­sense humanitarianism (continued) as narration of vestigial Western hegemony, ix, 4, 38, 39, 47, 114 naturalization of emotions in, 14, 17–18 as naturalized component of Western culture, 7–8 as naturalizing but not natural, 114–15 necessity of dislodging, x preconditions of, 40–50 as regressive, 96–99, 107–8 standardized, commercialized narratives of, 96 “us”-­“them” divide created in, 39, 67 and voices of resistance, inability to contain, 61 common-­sense racism, and common-­ sense humanitarianism, similar narrative structures of, 39, 69 community, Cars’ “Drive” video and, 93–94 Conrad, Joseph, 23, 25–26, 111, 114 consumer culture, and magic of celebrity status, 82–83 consumption, as goal of Geldof humanitarian efforts, 12, 17 cosmopolitanism. See also metropolis as common sense, 43–47 and domestic tolerance, 106 Silverstone on, 44 cult of the journalist, 51–52 culture media shaping of, viii as medium facilitating humanitarianism, vii–viii surface-­level expressions of, as indication of fundamental substance, x–xi cynicism celebrities’ transcendence over, 81 against common-­sense humanitarianism, Madonna’s adoption of David Banda and, 84, 109–10, 113 money and, 56–58

demand-­sacrifice-­reward cycle, in charity events, 52–54 democratization, and celebrity culture, 58 Denselow, Robin, 90 Diana (princess of Wales), 12 Dombey and Sons (Dickens), 40, 42 domestic tolerance, cosmopolitanism and, 106 “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” 12, 36, 89 “Drive” video (The Cars) creation of community via, 93–94 as emotivist, 94 and integration of periphery into dominant narratives, 93–96 and tension between critique and cooptation in music, 91–93 elevation of celebrities, 81–82 emotions Geldof’s (Bob) emotional response to African famine, 10–12, 12–13, 104, 109 abandonment of, for practical action, 31–34 criteria for rightness of, 15, 17–18 and emotion as motivating force, 85 emphasis on, 13–15 moral distinction between individuals and institutions in, 15–16 as motivating force in common-­sense humanitarianism, 9, 83–85 as motivating force in Madonna, 83–85, 87 naturalization of in common-­sense humanitarianism, 14, 17–18 and emotivism, 89 and myth of universal human nature, 85 veracity of, in emotivism, 89 emotivism defined, 87–88 and family values, 105 reduction of morality to, 87, 88–89 and role of music in common-­sense humanitarianism, 89, 94

index  125 The English Roses (Madonna), 83 entertainment industry, and common-­ sense humanitarianism, viii–ix exoticizing of “Africa,” 20–23, 26–27 family, as refuge from modern world, 102 media as threat to, 102–4 media naturalization of nuclear family myth and, 104–5 family values, Western as act of love and consensus, 105–6 adoption of as common sense, reasons for, 102–5 critique of African family values implicit in, 101–2, 104–6 Madonna’s adoption of, 99–102 media naturalization of, 104–5 Geldof, Bob and absurdity of modern metropolitan existence, 112 aestheticization of Africans, 22, 23, 76 on “Africa” as ancient home of universal humanity, 21–22, 30–31 causes of poverty in, 20–21 destructive influence of West in, 29 ignoring of history and culture, 21–22 as monolithic place, 20, 21, 29–30 mythicization, 20–23, 25–31 primitivism of, 23 purity of, 23, 30–31 relationship to modernity, 27–29 and charity event cycle of demand-­ sacrifice-­reward, 54 and common-­sense humanitarianism, 112 criticisms of, 108 current focus on world trade systems, 20 and cynicism, 56–57, 57–58 Denselow on, 90 division of world into historical and ahistorical components, 22 emotional response to African famine, 10–12, 12–13, 104, 109

abandonment of, for practical action, 31–34 criteria for rightness of, 15, 17–18 and emotion as motivating force, 85 emphasis on, 13–15 moral distinction between ­individuals and institutions in, 15–16 in Ethiopia, 18–20 as exemplary figure of common-­sense humanitarianism, 10–20 exoticizing of “Africa” in, 20–23, 26–27 humanitarian efforts for African famine relief, 12 consumption as goal of, 12, 17 and neighborliness, 13, 40 and imperialist legacy of world integration, 42–43 and institutions embracing of, 32–33 moral distinction between individuals and, 15–16 rejection of, 14, 16–17, 31, 85, 89 and Live 8 concert, 91, 92 and magical naturalism, 68 and media as environment of encounter with others, 43 perception of world unity, 13, 40 as resident of metropolitan center, 40–43 transformation into professional humanitarian, 34 Woldu (Birhan) and, 36, 37, 38, 41 Geldof in Africa, 25–31, 66 Gervais, Ricky, 56–58, 59, 95 Gibson, Mel, 98 Gleneagles Agreement, 92 Gramsci, Antonio, 7–9, 38–39 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 23, 25–26, 111, 114 history, common-­sense humanitarianism’s ignoring of, 24–25 HIV/AIDS African suspicions of Western origin of, 29 in Malawi, 75

126  index HIV/AIDS (continued) and narration of “Africans,” 77–79 positioning in Western consciousness, 78–79 Hobsbawm, Eric, 35 Horkheimer, Max, 93, 94 humanitarianism. See also common-­ sense humanitarianism and aid to morally unworthy, 5–6 as cultural phenomenon, vii defined, vii fundamental premise of, 1–2, 4–5 and human rights activism, benefits and problems of linkage between, 3–4 impartiality standard of, 2, 4–5 narration of, selection of legitimate narrators, 38 specialists’ vs. common sense view of, 6–7 and state power, benefits and problems of linkage between, 3–4 value of, despite imperfections, 6 humanity Africa as ancient home of, Geldof (Bob) on, 21–22, 30–31 myth of universal human nature, 24, 84–86, 88 human rights activism and humanitarianism, benefits and problems of linkage between, 3–4 vs. humanitarianism, 2 Ignatieff, Michael, 4 immortality of celebrities, 83 imperialism common-­sense humanitarianism as manifestation of, ix, 4, 38, 39, 47, 114 definition of, 39 human rights activism as, 3–4 integration of world into totalizing whole, 42 legacy of as justification for remedial intervention, 67, 68–69, 112

in metropolis relationship with periphery, 47 and power to narrate, 38 institutions control of media, 45–46 embracing of, by contemporary common-­sense humanitarianism, 32–33 emotivism and, 89 Geldof (Bob) and embracing of, 32–33 moral distinction between individuals and, 15–16 rejection of, 14, 16–17, 31, 85, 89 immorality of, in common-­sense humanitarianism, 15–16 Madonna’s rejection of, 85, 89 insurgents, as media characterization of resistance to colonialism, 61 John, Elton, 12 Jolie, Angelina, ix, 108–9, 113–14 journalists cult of the journalist, 51–52 time constraints on, and perception of world as absurd and dehistoricized, 103 Kabbalah Centre, 73 Kabbalah movement, 82, 85 Keelan, Victoria, 73 Kite, Melissa, 100, 107 Kracauer, Siegfried, x–xi Lasch, Christopher, 102 Live Aid action urged by, 16 and audience interactivity, 52 and charity events as entertainment, viii, 54 consumption as goal of, 17 and cynicism, 56 dependence on emotion, 14 and emergence of Geldof, 10 establishment of, 12 Madonna and, 81

index  127 and role of music in common-­sense humanitarianism, 89 as standardized, commercialized music, 96 stressing of personal responsibility in, 12 and tension between critique and cooptation in music of, 90–93 tenth anniversary of, 18 Woldu (Birhan) and, 35 Live 8 concert and audience interactivity, 52 consumption as goal of, 17 and cynicism, 56 as emotivist, 94 Geldof’s motives for involvement in, 18 and role of music in common-­sense humanitarianism, 90 as standardized, commercialized music, 96 tension between critique and cooptation in music of, 90–93 Woldu (Birhan) and, 37 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 87, 88–89 Madonna adoption of David Banda, ix, 72 as assault on common-­sense humanitarianism, 84, 108–10, 113–14 and brand management, 97–98, 103 as colonialism, 106–7 as denial of African extended family units, 101–2 emotional connection as motivating force in, 83–85 and narration of “Africans,” 77–79 selection process, 76–80, 99 superficiality of media coverage of, 103 aestheticization of Africans, 76 as brand, 83, 97–98, 103 celebrity status, components of, 81–83 charity involvement, 73–74

common-­sense humanitarianism and, viii on conditions in Malawi, 74, 75, 76 criticisms of, 108–10, 113–14 on cruelty of media, 110 emotions as motivating force in, 83–85, 87 emotivism of, 87–88 and family values adoption of, 99–102, 103 naturalization of, 105 on goals of provocative behavior, 90 and institutions, rejection of, 85, 89 and Live 8 concert, 37, 54 and media, as medium for emotional veracity, 86–87 as moral exemplar, 86–87 and myth of universal human nature, 24, 84–86, 88 on reasons for helping Malawian children, 74 as resident of metropolis, 80–81 on Yohane Banda, 74, 75–76 magic, as component of celebrity, 82–83 magical naturalism, 68–70, 76 Malawi Madonna on conditions in, 74, 75, 76 narration of, by Raising Malawi charity, 74–76 Malkki, Liisa, 63, 64, 65, 67–68, 69, 70 Mansbridge, Peter, 35 Marsh, Dave, 89–90 Marx, Karl, 9 media audience passivity, 51–52 characterizations of resistance to humanitarianism, 61, 70 characterizations of Yohane Banda, 72–73, 74, 104–5, 106 charity events and audience interactivity, 52–53 cyle of demand-­sacrifice-­reward in, 52–54 as common-­sense constituent of contemporary culture, 51

128  index media (continued) competition within, 50 cruelty of, 110 cult of the journalist, 51–52 as enabling medium for common-­ sense humanitarianism, 71, 112 as environment in which encounters with others take place, 43–44 and family media threat to family as refuge, 102–4 naturalization of nuclear family myth, 104–5 generic representations of “Africa,” 66–68 hegemony of narrative power, 48–49 imagination of Western responsibility through, viii, 33 and imperialist legacy of world integration, 42–43 institutional control of, 45–46 and metropolis as gravitational center of modern world, 47–50 as naturalized part of everyday life, 11, 113 shaping of culture by, viii superficiality of, and perception of world as absurd and dehistoricized, 103 ubiquity of, 51 mediapolis, Silverstone on, 45 metropolis. See also cosmopolitanism competition between metropolitan centers, 47–48 definition of, 47 Geldof as resident of, 40–43 as gravitational center of modern world, 47–50 hegemony of narrative power, ix, 48–49, 76, 112–13 relationship with periphery, imperialist legacy in, 47 metropolitan existence absurdity of, 111–12, 114 common-­sense humanitarianism as mask of absurdity of, 112, 114

institutionalization of as common sense, 43–47 Mitchell, Mary, 107 modernity, destructive influence in Africa, 27–29 money and cynicism, 56–58 dehumanizing effects of, 55–56 morality, regressive, common-­sense humanitarianism as, 96–99, 107–8 moral sense, as practical morality, 9 music, rock and pop role in common-­sense humanitarianism, 89–97 critical views on, 89–91 emotivism and, 89, 94 integration of outside into dominant narratives, 93–96 standardization and commercialization of, 95–96 tension between critique and cooptation in, 90–93 Mutharka, Ben, 98 myth, as intrinsically regressive, 97 mythicization of “Africa” common-­sense humanitarianism’s dependence on, 31 in Geldof, 20–23, 25–31 of “Africans,” as voiceless victims, 61–71 dependence of common-­sense humanitarianism on, 31 and exoticizing, 26–27 as function of common sense, 24 myth of universal human nature, 24, 84–86, 88 narration. See also mythicization of “Africans” aid recipients as lucky, 84, 107 and empathy of common-­sense humanitarianism, 77–79 Birhan Woldu as creation of, 41, 43, 46, 59–60, 61–64, 66, 70–71 humanitarianism and, 38

index  129 imperialism and, 38 of Malawi, by Raising Malawi charity, 74–76 metropolitan hegemony of, ix, 48–49, 76, 112–13 music’s integration of periphery into dominant narratives, 93–96 periphery’s inability to resist, 49 naturalization of African orphans, 79–80 of African suffering, 67 common-­sense humanitarianism and naturalization of emotions in, 14, 17–18 as naturalized component of Western culture, 7–8 as naturalizing but not natural, 114–15 of emotions in common-­sense humanitarianism, 14, 17–18 and emotivism, 89 and myth of universal human nature, 85 of media, 11, 113 of Western family values, 104–5 neighborliness, in Geldof’s response to famine, 13, 40 Norsk Hydro, 73 Oliver, Jamie, 57 Oprah Winfrey Show, 37, 54, 79, 98, 103 Oxfam, 13, 64 periphery inability to resist postimperial narration, 49 integration into dominant narratives, in common-­sense humanitarianism, 93–96 relationship with metropolis, imperialist legacy in, 47 Woldu (Birhan) as resident of, 41–42, 46, 59 philosophy, specialists’ vs. common-­ sense view of, 8

primitivism of “Africa” and magical naturalism, 69 negative pole of (barbarism), 70 purity of in common-­sense humanitarianism, 23 in Geldof’s conception of Africa, 23, 30–31 in Woldu (Birhan), 23 prostitution, dehumanizing effects of, 55 Raising Malawi charity, 73, 74–75, 85 Rajaram, Prem Kumar, 62, 66 refugees massification of, 64–66 mythicization of, as voiceless victims, 63–71 resistance to common-­sense humanitarianism, media characterizations of, 70 Rieff, David, 1–4, 6 Rojek, Chris, 58, 81–83 Rosenberg, Liz, 97 Rwanda crisis and aid to morally unworthy, 5–6 refugees’ resistance to return, 69–70 Said, Edward on assumed primacy of West, 70 on British mercantile ethos, 40 and imperialism, definition of, 39 on imperialism, vestiges of, 42, 46–47 on power to narrate, 38 on resistance to colonialism, 39, 60 on visions of postcolonial world, 114 on Western blindness to other ­c ultures, 44 secularization, and celebrity culture, 58 self, modern, emotivism and, 88–89 Silverstone, Roger, 43–46, 49, 51, 65, 69 Simmel, George, 48, 49, 50–51, 53, 55, 56 Spears, Britney, 110 Spirituality for Kids, 73–74 state power, and humanitarianism, benefits and problems of linkage between, 3–4

130  index Stendhal Syndrome, 50 Stewart, Brian, 35, 37, 41–42, 62, 91 surface-­level expressions of culture, as indication of fundamental substance, x–xi Taylor, Charles, viii Taylor, John, 66–67 telethons, as entertainment, 52 television, as threat to family as refuge, 102–4 Terry, Fiona, 5–6 Too Good to Be True (Madonna), 83 Ullestad, Neal, 90–91 universal human nature, common-­ sense humanitarianism and, 24, 84–86, 88 Vanity Fair, 73, 110 veracity celebrities’ lack of, 58–59 of emotions, in emotivism, 89 media as medium for, 86–87 Vieira, Meredith, 76, 77, 88, 99, 100 Warnock, G. J., 87–88 Waters, Tony, 7 “We Are the World,” 12, 89 West defined, viii as sole source of action, 38, 67, 85, 105–6 Western culture common-­sense humanitarianism as naturalized component of, 7–8 naturalization of values of, 84

Western responsibility toward others, media shaping of, viii Winfrey, Oprah, 37, 54, 76–80, 79, 98, 103 Woldu, Ato, 37 Woldu, Birhan and charity event as entertainment, 54 as creation of Western narration, 41, 43, 46, 59–60, 61–64, 66, 70–71 devaluing of experience of, 60, 61–64, 70 as iconic image of Ethiopian famine, 35–36, 67, 91, 113 inability to comprehend West, 42, 62 innocence of primitivism in, 23 lack of agency, 62 and magical naturalism, 69 media leverage on, 72–73 mythicization of, 64 reappearance as icon of charity success, 36–38, 59–60, 91–92, 112 reproduction of Western hegemony in, 62 as resident of periphery, 41–42, 46, 59 silencing of, 62 as uncosmopolitan, 49 veracity of, 58–60 women refugees, representational constitution of, 66 world cities, 48–49. See also metropolis World Trade Organization, as cause of African poverty, 21 world trade system, as cause of African poverty, 20–21 Wrong, Michela, 100–102, 107 Yara International, 73 Yohane Banda, 75–76