Beyond the Identitarian Deadlock: Why Mobile Methods Are Useful for Studying Media in Zones of Conflict

Abstract

We begin with a problem.2 It is something that pressures us to arrive at questions, methods, and concepts. The problem that I have been dealing with for some years now is how filmmakers make sense of audiovisual testimony in zones of conflict, in non-identitarian ways.3 ‘Making sense’ refers to the film form as it engages with a sensorium in which feelings can be created and negotiated. In saying ‘identitarian’, I speak of the ways that conflict parties apply fixed categories of cultural identity to archived, readymade facts (Udupa, 2016), in the sensorial field of what media scholar Ravi Sundaram calls a ‘crisis machine’ (Sundaram, 2020). This crisis machine circulates testimonial images as political stimuli from one media-event to the next. In doing so, it enables affective energies to be appropriated by the Hindu right. The crisis machine refers to synergies between a new phase of Hindu nationalist dominance in the media-sphere and dispersed post-Fordism (to borrow a term from Pothik Ghosh4), the current form of capitalism that fragments time-space and subjectivities while drawing on the cognitive and affective capabilities of human beings. In fact, the term identitarian does not have much to do with the theories and practices that go under the name of identity politics (see the debate in Bohrer [2019], Dean [1996], Haider [2018] and Táíwò [2022]). The identitarian capture works in the service of moral outrage and is most effectively mobilized from the far right in what are called information wars. The fallout is that egalitarian forms of political belonging become increasingly difficult to feel and articulate. My research focuses on practices of witnessing at work in the form of documentary film in zones of intractable conflicts (Bar-Tal, 2013). In these zones, dynamics of identitarian capture become exacerbated by a politics of victimhood (Bar-Tal, 2013; Datta, 2020) and also by the hypervisibility of a set number of tropes through which conflict zones are imagined. Within dispersed Post-Fordism human interactions