The ironic spectator: solidarity in the age of post humanitarianism
The previous work of Lilie Chouliaraki, particularly in The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006) has been described as being at the heart of a recent 'dramatic moral ethical 'turn' in media studies' (Ong, 2009, p. 449) Along with Silverstone (2006) and Boltanski (1999) Chouliaraki's work has been instrumental in providing a robust conceptual (and methodological) framework for the growing literature in media studies concerned with the mediation of distant suffering. Perhaps the major contribution of The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006) to this moral ethical 'turn' was to provide a detailed means of analysing precisely how news texts seemingly position spectators vis a vis distant suffering. It is in this context that Lilie Chouliarki has published her latest book The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post Humanitarianism (2013) Building on her earlier work, it focuses, not on the nature of specific media texts, but much more generally upon how the communication of solidarity with distant suffering has changed over the past forty years in response to the changing demands of politics, the market and technology. The overarching contention of the book is that ethical appeals to solidarity with distant others through humanitarian communication have shifted from being based on pity, to being based on irony. Chouliaraki (2013, p. 2) uses the term 'irony' here to refer to 'a disposition of detached knowingness, a self conscious suspicion vis a vis all claims to truth, which comes from acknowledging that there is always a disjunction between what is said and what exists' She suggests that whereas in the paradigm of pity, the spectacle of the other is used to inspire grand normative moralities, in the paradigm of irony, the spectacle of others like 'us' is used to evoke our capacity for self reflection. In her own words, Chouliaraki (2013, p. 3) contends that this shift from pity to irony,