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Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more pleasurable and durable than their predecessors. Hence, they are deeply compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual and essentially unwinnable war. Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, Figuring Violence reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been militarized. This book tracks their convergences around six types of beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures and so make them easy targets for affective investment. This is a paradoxical and conditional form of recognition that eclipses the actual beings upon whom those figures are patterned, silencing their political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism that begets their victimization.

Perhaps no other function of a free press is as important as the watchdog role. It is easier for politicians to get away with abusing power, wasting public funds, and making poor decisions if the press is not shining its light with what is termed “accountability reporting.” This need has become especially clear as the American press has come under direct attack for carrying out its watchdog duties. This book presents a study of how this most important form of journalism came of age in the digital era at American newspapers. The book examines the front pages of nine newspapers, located across the United States, for clues on how papers addressed the watchdog role as the advent of the Internet transformed journalism. It shows how papers of varying sizes and ownership structures around the country marshaled resources for accountability reporting despite significant financial and technological challenges. Although the American newspaper industry contracted significantly during the 1990s and 2000s due to the digital transformation, the data collected in this book shows that the papers held fast to the watchdog role. The newspapers all endured budget and staff cuts during the 20 years studied as paid circulation and advertising dropped, but the amount of deep watchdog reporting on their front pages generally increased over this time. The book contains interviews with editors of the newspapers studied, who explain why they are staking their papers' futures on the one thing that American newspapers still do better than any other segment of the media—watchdog and investigative reporting.

Taking its departure from a phenomenological encounter with television—indeed a rethinking of the phenomenological method in terms of the way in which the experience of television disarticulates life, opposing my life to the life that is not mine to live and yet mine not to live—this book attempts to illuminate the ontology of late capitalism, focusing on celebrity culture and the rise of the pluripotent gadget. While Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time will serve as the starting point, the theorization of the gadget in particular proceeds by means of bringing Heidegger’s ontology into dialogue with the Marxist theory of the commodity and Althusser’s treatment of ideology. Gadget-commodity-life will come to be understood in terms of a reproduction of the “alethic,” rather than merely ideological, conditions of production. For production to remain possible it will become increasingly necessary to have the commodity itself “stage” the play of concealment-unconcealment as the ontological basis of production. Whereas the first part of this book develops a theoretical frame work through a sustained argument, the second part will attempt to “screen” television, celebrity, and gadget-commodity-life itself through a series of fragmentary theoretical encounters. These will attempt, moreover, to show how the pop-culture objects of late capitalism exist only through the possibility of a theoretical encounter with them—or, in other words, exist as phenomenological.