Departmental Papers (ASC)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
2017
Publication Source
media, culture and Society
Volume
39
Issue
8
Start Page
1194
Last Page
1209
DOI
10.1177/0163443717725575
Abstract
Islamic State’s (IS) image-warfare presents an auspicious opportunity to grasp the growing role of digital images in emerging configurations of global conflict. To understand IS’ image-warfare, this article explores the central role of digital images in the group’s war spectacle and identifies a key modality of this new kind of warfare: global networked affect. To this end, the analysis focuses on three primary sources: two Arabic-language IS books, Management of Savagery (2004) and O’ Media Worker, You Are a Mujahid!, 2nd Edition (2016), and a video, Healing the Believers’ Chests (2015), featuring the spectacular burning of a Jordanian air force pilot captured by IS. It uses the method of ‘iconology’ within a case-study approach. I analyze IS’ doctrine of image-warfare explained in the two books and, in turn, examine how this doctrine is executed in IS video production, conceptualizing digital video as a specific permutation of moving digital images uniquely able to enact, and via repetition, to maintain, visual and narrative tension between movement and stillness, speed and slowness, that diffuses global network affect. Using a theoretical framework combining spectacle, new media phenomenology, and affect theory, the article concludes that global networked affect is projectilic, mimicking fast, lethal, penetrative objects. IS visual warfare, I argue, is best understood through the notion of the ‘projectilic image’.
Copyright/Permission Statement
Kraidy, M., "The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and Global Networked Affect", Media, Culture and Society, 39(8), pp. 1194-1209. Copyright © [2017] (Sage). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications
Keywords
digital image, digital video, global networked affect, ISIL, ISIS, Islamic State, operative image, projectilic image, spectacle
Recommended Citation
Kraidy, M. (2017). The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and Global Networked Affect. media, culture and Society, 39 (8), 1194-1209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717725575
Date Posted:27 March 2020
This document has been peer reviewed.