Radboud Philosophical Facutly Journal

Categorie: Podium Pieces

  • Telling Non-Human Stories

    Writing and reading narratives show us what other possible ways of encountering the world are possible, thereby potentially transfiguring our own ways of engaging with the world around us. Implicated in narrative, therefore, we find a transformative potential.

    Few problems faced by humanity require such a drastic change in engaging with the world as climate change. As a true multitude of authors from all sorts of disciplines now assert, climate change is only resolvable when we venture out of the confines of the purely human, into the breadth of an ecology that both encompasses and transcends us (Chakrabarty 2018, 6; Ghosh 2016, 82; John 2018; Kohn 2013; Morton 2012; Trexler 2015, 13-14; Ustler 2009, 173). Perhaps we can capitalise on the transformative potential of narrative to change the way we deal with climate change as well? Can we use narrative to escape our all-too human way of interacting with the world? To answer this question, we first need to have a clear conception of what narrative can do and how it works as a transformative instrument.

    In his Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) offers precisely such an analysis. To understand the transformative aspect of narrative, he introduces the term ‘mimetic circle’. This philosophical tool describes the way in which the reading of a novel – for simplicity’s sake I use the example of written narrative in this text, but Ricoeur’s theory is applicable to various other ways of experiencing narratives – presents a narrative world to the reader, which then potentially influences the reader’s own world, thereby transforming the way the reader encounters the world around them.

    So, does that mean we can simply take Ricoeur’s mimetic circle and start creating narratives that effectuate more climate friendly behaviour? Sadly, no. For all its philosophical depth, the mimetic circle always centres on human actions and narratives – it is quite literally anthropo-(human)-centric. This is a problem, because these narratives were supposed to help us overcome the anthropocentrism that led to climate change in the first place. We therefore need narratives that capture not only human, but also non-human, material forms of action, communication, and temporality. Only then can we expect of narratives the transformative potential to help us change our behaviour as drastically as is needed now.

    Hence, if we want to use Ricoeur’s mimetic circle to help combat climate change, his philosophy needs to be ‘stretched out’ to also encompass the non-human.  In this paper, I attempt such a broadening by consulting various concepts proposed in Levi Bryant’s Onto-Cartography (2014). More precisely, the primary question this paper poses is whether Bryant’s concept of non-human action can be used to widen the scope of Ricoeur’s narrative theory. I tackle this question in the following way: first, I examine Ricoeur’s theory of narrative by discussing his mimetic circle. Second, I introduce Bryant’s alien phenomenology as a conceptual framework for conceiving non-human action. Third, I incorporate Bryant’s non-human action into Ricoeur’s mimetic circle, thereby establishing a framework for the transformative potential of a non-anthropocentric narrative.

    Narrative Time and Anthropocentrism

    Ricoeur’s theory of narrative and the way it influences human consciousness is, for a large part, carried by his idea of mimesis. To understand what form this influence takes, and how it displays Ricoeur’s anthropocentrism, the mimetic circle itself needs to be elucidated. Afterwards, its anthropocentric elements can be distinguished.

    Mimetic Circling

    The mimetic circle is constituted by a “single continuous process” that is the rotation of mimesis. It is made up of three parts: mimesis1, mimesis2, and mimesis3. A rotation through these three sections describes three respective situations: a person before reading a book, the process of the person actually reading the book, and then the person changed by this reading. To understand the expanse but also the limitations of Ricoeur’s argument, the three steps are discussed separately. 

    Mimesis1 refers to the fact that we are always already capable of understanding actions. We have a so-called ‘preunderstanding’ of action. This preunderstanding becomes more well-defined in its three different elements: structure, symbol, and temporality. Structurally, mimesis1 means that we can differentiate between action and mere physical movement (Ricoeur 1984, 55). We do this using a certain “conceptual network of action” that is given to us through a combination of factors hailing from both the nature and the nurture register (56). Symbolically, mimesis1 refers to the fact that actions have an inherent readability, that is given through action always being “symbolically mediated” (57). This means that action is never done outside a sphere of “signs, rules, and norms” (57) – an action always already means something. Temporally, mimesis1 is largely defined by the Heideggerian idea of within-time-ness (62). Within-time-ness is a kind of preoccupied experience of time; time as the ‘thing’ in which our goals and plans are formulated (63). Mimesis1 is, then, “first to preunderstand what human acting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality” (64).

    Upon this preunderstanding of action, Ricoeur says, a narrative is constructed by means of emplotment. The process of emplotment – to which mimesis2 refers – is the organisation of the as of yet unorganised events distinguished in mimesis1 (64). Emplotment mediates between the preunderstanding of action of mimesis1 and the ‘postunderstanding’ of mimesis3 (65). This mediation occurs in three ways: first, as already discussed, it mediates between the individual “incidents and a story taken as a whole” (65). Second, it mediates between the discordance of a heterogeneous set of elements of “agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, [and] unexpected results” (65), and the concordance of the plot (66). This mediation operates, third, on a temporal plane: a temporally ordered configuration is extracted from a temporally meaningless succession (66).

    This threefold mediation of mimesis2 allows for the creation of a narrative from the preunderstanding of action registered in mimesis1. This creation of plot, however, does not come forth solely from the individual human being’s preunderstanding. It also bases itself on a certain tradition, on the one hand characterised by novelistic paradigms that have sedimented into the tradition (68), on the other hand made up of the innovative potential of each and every unique narrative work (69). Mimesis2, therefore, is the fact of the production of a story by the mediation between incident and story, discordance and concordance, and succession and temporal order, using the input and rules inherited by a tradition.

    The narrative created in mimesis2 does not exist in a vacuum, of course; it is read. The encounter between reader and the work Ricoeur calls mimesis3 (Dowling 2011, 14). This confrontation is a conflict of the actual, practical world of the reader, and the formal, fictive world of the text. The interaction between these worlds is constituted by the fact that both worlds are, by genesis, built on the same preunderstanding of action Ricoeur argues is mimesis1 (15). A preunderstanding of action is needed to construct our own world of experiences but also to construct any narrative in general.

    With mimesis3 the world of the reader collides with that of the narrative, the latter exhibiting its different possible ways of experiencing the world to the former. What then occurs in the reader – if she is influenced by the text, of course – is a change of consciousness (16). This process thus refigures the prefigured consciousness of the reader through the mediation of a configured narrative work.

    Non-Human Action

    Now that Ricoeur’s mimetic circle has been expanded upon, we are ready to understand in what ways the non-human does not fit into the constraints set on narratives by Ricoeur. The problem of anthropocentrism discussed in the introduction resurfaces here: it is hard to conceive of a climate-friendly refiguration – an eco-refiguration, if you will – while only considering the human perspective (Ghosh 2016, 82; Trexler 2015, 13-14; Ustler 2009, 173).

    The threat of anthropocentrism is carried most urgently by the first stage of mimesis. This is because mimesis1 dictates which events in general are (pre)understood as an action. When the non-human is allowed into this category, it can be taken up in the process of emplotment that is mimesis2 and subsequently influence the reader’s world by letting it collide with the world of the narrative.

    The categorisation of non-human ‘happenings’ or “mere physical movement” (Ricoeur 1984, 55), as action is no self-evident manoeuvre for Ricoeur. His way of conceptualising action is implicitly and explicitly anthropocentric: structurally, he distinguishes between human action and its “goals … motives … [and] agents” and ‘mere’ physical movement (55); symbolically, actions are always mediated by an implicitly human plane of expression that includes “signs, rules and norms” (57); and finally, mimesis1 literally refers to a preunderstanding of “what human acting is” (64, my italics). Ricoeur clearly is not interested in non-human action.

    At the same time, I share Utsler’s (2009) optimism for a Ricoeurian eco-philosophy – provided it succeeds in shedding its anthropocentric limitations. To make eco-refiguration possible, the reader needs to be confronted with a configured narrative world that is composed of non-human agents and the accompanying non-human action. To incorporate these elements in mimesis1, I now turn to Bryant’s Onto-Cartography.

    Machines All the Way Down

    In Onto-Cartography, Bryant puts forward a world view in which all entities – whether they be bureaucracies, volcanoes, human beings, symphonies, or forests – are seen as machines. To differentiate between all these machines, Bryant introduces two theoretical tools: the dual face of machines, and alien phenomenology. In the following, I discuss both tools and explain their role in imagining non-human agency and action.

    Dimensions of the Machine

    In contrast to traditional philosophy, machinic philosophy is hardly interested in the qualities an entity has. It is mostly focused on what the machine does. Fundamentally, “[a] machine is a system of operations that perform transformations on inputs thereby producing outputs” (Bryant 2014, 38). Every entity that exists, therefore, has a certain set of transformations it operates on (flows of input), and a set of outputs constituted by these operations.

    This structure sets up a dichotomy between a machine’s operations and its outputs (40). The capacity a machine has for its specific array of operations is called a ‘power’ (a leaf’s power to photosynthesise, for instance). The outputs created by the machine’s actual operations are called ‘manifestations’ (42). These manifestations do all sorts of things for the machine: they can be the machine’s qualitative appearance (the leaf’s greenness, for example); they can transform the behaviour of the machine itself (its shrinking when there’s little water); and they can be a material output flow (the oxygen produced by photosynthesis) (44-45). The powers a machine has dictate which operations it undertakes, which subsequently generates the entity’s observable facts.

    Machines are not open to all inputs, neither do they possess an endless array of powers. To illustrate this, Bryant talks of how machines are respectively ‘structurally open,’ and ‘operationally closed’ (55). The leaf acts as an example again: in terms of the inputs it is receptive to, it is structurally open to the specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum leaves use for photosynthesis (Heliospectra 2012). A machine’s operational closure refers to the finite selection of powers a machine has (Bryant 2014, 56). It also comprises the fact that an input flow is never encountered by a machine ‘as it is’, it is always encountered “in terms of how its operations transform it” (57). According to Bryant, the input flow ‘as it is’, that enters the leaf is a photon with a certain vibration length. By contrast, the leaf encounters it as fuel for internal energy production.

    By combining the abovementioned facts – machines have a ‘power-face’ and a ‘manifestation-face,’ and are open to a selection of flows and work on these flows in specific ways – Bryant argues it is possible to infer how a machine encounters and experiences its world (62). His method for this procedure is discussed below.

    Alien Phenomenology and Action

    The inference of such an encountered world first entails questioning to which flows a machine is structurally open and how the machine structures these flows; second, how the machine operates on these flows and what functions the transformed flow has in the machine; and finally, how the machine encounters the world around it (62).

    Bryant’s aspirations must remind readers familiar with phenomenology or philosophy of mind of Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ (1974). In this paper, Nagel argues that we cannot reduce the “subjective character of experience” to simple physical terms – something Bryant definitely seems to be doing when he wants to describe the phenomenology of all machines (Nagel 1974, 436-37). To speak with Nagel: ‘we cannot possible know what it is like to be a leaf!’ Bryant readily accepts this critique; indeed, his kind of “second-order phenomenology” does not enjoy the same level of epistemic reliability that traditional ‘first-order’ phenomenology does – the fact that we cannot ‘move’ into the point of view of other machines makes all statements about the content of these other points of view merely inferential. But, Bryant argues, “[o]ur alien phenomenologies will always be imperfect, but as we will see, as imperfect as they are, they are nonetheless preferable to the epistemic closure of humanism that approaches all of being in terms of what it is for us” (64). Put more simply: it is better to have an imperfect understanding of the world of plants, couches, and bureaucracies, than to have none at all.

    The Nagelian critique can perhaps be further suspended with a short example of the alien phenomenology of one unassuming protagonist: a patch of grass. When a gardener mows down half of this patch, the mown down grass produces a plant stress hormone called GLV (Green Leaf Volatiles) (Dombrowksi et al. 2019). These GLV-molecules enter the rest of the grass patch machine. The GLV-flow is canalised into the receptor kinase of the grass leaf cells (Dombrowski et al. 2020). There, the transformed GLV-flow primes certain “wound stress pathways” in the cell – putting the plant in a sort of ‘defence mode’ (Dombrowski et al. 2020, 780). Put in Bryantian terms: the grass patch is selectively open to GLV-flows, through the receptors in the grass’ cell membranes the flow is structured into the right cellular mechanisms. The grass cells have a multitude of powers for operating on this flow – together constituting the operational closure – that are far too complex to be discussed here, the eventual result of which is that the grass ‘readies itself’ for being wounded – the GLV-flow has become a warning signal to the grass. Finally, we may now carefully conclude that the patch of grass encounters a world populated by all sorts of plant hormones, one of which is GLV, to which it can react defensively.

    How does this conclusion imply non-human, plant-action? The answer is quite simple with Bryant: the grass patch machine, like every other machine, operates in accordance with a combination of environmental input flows it takes in, and the specific powers it has – thereby producing a multitude of manifestations. The production of a manifestation by the exercise of powers on flows of input – that is action in both a human and non-human sense.

    Non-Human Mimesis

    The problem this text has come to is the following: is the description Ricoeur gives of action in mimesis1 compatible with – stretchable to – Bryant’s machine-action? If it is, non-human actions can be emplotted into narratives, these narratives eventually eco-refiguring the minds of their readers. This final section discusses this problem.

    As became clear in the section on Ricoeur, mimesis1 grasps those events as actions that have structural “goals … motives … [and] agents” (Ricoeur, 1984, 55) and that are symbolically mediated by a plane of meaningful communication of “signs, rules and norms” (57). The problematic bifurcates, consequently, into a problem of non-human ‘goals’ and ‘motives,’ and a separate problem of ‘meaningful communication.’[1]

    To start off with the second problem, the idea that only humans are capable of meaningful communication is wholly alien to Bryant. He claims that “it is likely that planes of expression [fields of meaningful communication] are to be found throughout the animal kingdom” (133). Bryant can say this because a machine never encounters an input flow ‘as it is,’ but always “in terms of how its operations transform it” (57). Especially in highly complex machines like organisms and groups of organisms, input flows can – by repeated reinterpretation by the machine – become meaningful signs. A signal that is utterly meaningless to other machines can thereby become full of meaning for other machines configured to operate on it – for grass plants, the GLVs are a sign of danger, for humans, they just smell good (Ford 2022). Examples of non-human, meaningful communication are virtually endless, moreover: “Acacias alert other acacias to prowling giraffes. Willows, poplars, alders: all are caught warning each other of insect invasion across the open air” (Powers 2018, 176-77).

    Bryant’ plant-action thus fulfils the symbolic exigency of action in mimesis1. This redirects us to the first problem: the structural requirement for goals and motives behind an action. Alien phenomenology shows that any given machine can be seen as a whole that encounters the world in a certain way. This tremendous broadening of ‘subjecthood’ is accompanied by Bryant’s insistence that organic machines do have goals: ranging from the goal to “preserve their organization” to the complexity of being “intentionally goal-directed” (Bryant 2014, 30).

    These new, strange subjects have their own goals and motives: according to Bryant we may intelligibly speak of the goal of the patch of grass to mitigate the damage done by the grass mower; we may intelligibly think that the plants in our home have the goal to capture as much light as is internally useful to the plant. Hence, it is very possible to imagine complex motives behind non-human action. The only problem that remains, and seems insurmountable, is the fact that we may never know about these motives with the same certainty as we know about our own and other humans’ motives – that is the upshot of Nagel’s barrier. Whether we are convinced of Bryant’s insistence that accepting this limitation and prolonging our efforts to imagine these non-human worlds is better than closing ourselves off to them, in the end, seems a question of intuition, more than one of philosophical argumentation.

    Conclusion

    Lastly, to return to the problem that spawned this text, is it possible to perform a non-anthropocentric Ricoeurian mimetic circle – to create non-anthropocentric narrative worlds that influence people into changing their stance towards climate change? I started this investigation by discussing Ricoeur’s mimetic circle. The ontological understory of mimesis consisted of first localising the anthropocentrism in the prefigurative part of mimesis. This mimesis1 excluded non-human action on both structural and symbolic grounds. Bryant’s concept of non-human action was a structurally open and operationally closed production of manifestations by the exercise of powers on flows of input. With this, the symbolic grounds for dismissing non-human action could be rejected. The structural grounds proved harder to counter for Bryant – plant-machines can indeed be thought to have motives and goals, but due to the epistemic uncertainty of alien phenomenology we may never know these for sure.

    Overcoming this problem can perhaps only be done by making it practical – something we as philosophers have a tendency to refrain from. What are the practical implications of refusing to believe that non-human machines may have goals and motivations – or put more technically: to go along with Bryant’s epistemic uncertainty regarding non-human phenomenology? Most importantly for this paper, they are that non-human ‘actions’ cannot be categorised as real actions because of Ricoeur’s structural requirements. This would, furthermore, mean non-humans cannot be taken up in the mimetic circle, meaning non-anthropocentric narratives that influence human ways of engaging with their world cannot be conceptualised in any serious way. Finally, our own anthropocentrism is therefore made inescapable, we cannot flee from it through telling stories and creating narratives – climate change becomes insurmountable.

    So perhaps, indeed, we must remain epistemologically pure and reject non-human actions; with such dire practical consequences, however, this epistemological purity comes at a very serious ethical cost: the evaporation of our ability to create real change in real people. It may come as no surprise that I myself look forward to new, inventive non-human narratives.

    Bibliography

    Bryant, Levi R. 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

    Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory 57, 1: 5-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12044.

    Dauenhauer, Bernard P. 2013. “Ricoeur and agent causation.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39, 6: 523-537. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453713485720.

    Dombrowski, J.E., Kronmiller, B.A., Hollenbeck, V.G. et al. 2019. “Transcriptome analysis of the model grass Lolium temulentum exposed to green leaf volatiles.” BMC Plant Biology 19, 222. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-019-1799-6.

    Dombrowski, James E., Brent A. Kronmiller, Vicky Hollenbeck, and Ruth C. Martin. 2020. “Transcriptome Analysis of Wounding in the Model Grass Lolium temulentum” Plants 9, 6: 780. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants9060780.

    Dowling, William C. 2011. Ricoeur on time and narrative: an introduction to Temps et récit. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

    Ford, Jez. 2022. “The Smell of Fresh-Cut Grass is an Attack Warning.” Science Illustrated. Retrieved on the 10th of June 2023. https://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/ask-us/the-smell-of-fresh-cut-grass-is-an-attack-warning/.

    Ghosh, Amitav. 2016 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Heliospectra. 2012. Which regions of the electromagnetic spectrum do plants use to drive photosynthesis? Retrieved from heliospectra.com on 5th of June 2023. http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/conteudo_thumb/Which-regions-of-the-electromagnetic-spectrum-do-plants-use-to-drive-photosynthesis.pdf.

    Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. California: University of California Press.

    Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

    Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What is it like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, 4: 435-50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914.

    Potter, Henry D. & Kevin J. Mitchell. 2022. “Naturalising Agent Causation.” Entropy 24, 472: 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24040472.

    Powers, Richard. The Overstory. Dublin: Vintage Classics.

    Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative: Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen MclLaughlin & David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

    Utsler, David. 2009. “Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics as a Model for Environmental Philosophy.” Philosophy Today 53, no. 2: 173-78.

    [1] The question of agency is a separate and incredibly complex problem that can and should be discussed in a more spacious text than this one. The problem is, however, not at all insurmountable: as we can read in Dauenhauer (2013, 523), Ricoeur in principle uses ‘agent causation’ instead of the ‘distributive agency’ of Bryant (2014, 180). Although these two positions, when taken to their extreme forms, do most definitely contradict one another – extreme agent causation places the source of action fully inside the entity, while extreme distributive agency places next to no source of action inside the entity – I believe they can be synthesized quite elegantly. This should be done in two steps: first Bryant’s insistence on the unity of a machine (while at the same time being a part of a world of other machines, and being made up of endless machines itself) and his subsequent alien phenomenology proofs the distribution of agency implied by his theory is not boundless – the source of a machine’s actions is always also internal. Second, Ricoeur’s agent causation is not boundless either: the source of a person’s actions is never fully internal (as is clear from the effect sedimented tradition has on the types of novels people can and do write). Moreover, as is clear from Potter & Mitchell (2022, 3) for agent causation to be naturalised, it needs, among other things, to take account of both endogenous, and exogenous activity of the organism. A synthesis, hence, is possible, but we naturally need more space to develop this point in its entirety. For now, a discussion of non-human action will have to suffice.

  • Dying for God?

    On how Dutch media influences the imagery of ‘IS women.’

    ‘We have an insatiable desire for classification, for through it we create the world. Power, true power, is held not by those with the largest bank accounts or the strongest military, but by those who give us the words with which to view the world.’ (Whitley 2016)

    With this statement scholar Thomas J. Whitley aims to highlight the importance of narrative around terrorist acts, claiming that leading narratives have a strong influence on how we perceive the events these narratives are about. In the West, it is especially the narrative of the media by which we attain ‘knowledge’ about certain terrorist events. In line with Whitley, it would hence mean that the media has a strong influence on how we perceive these events (Whitley 2016).

    Thus, it is important to at least research this possible influence of the media. This is especially relevant when considering cases like that of the Dutch women who have joined ISIS and are now trying to return to their homeland. Within the Netherlands, the question of whether the Dutch government should allow these women back has indeed become a topic of popular debate. These women were part of an organization that is categorized by the Netherlands as terrorists, but does this make these women terrorists or a danger to Dutch society? As stated above, the media could have a big influence on how we think about this dilemma and therefore also have a big influence on both the lives of these women and their kids, whose faith is usually bound with that of their mothers.

    Therefore, my aim for this paper is to answer the following research question: How does Dutch media influence the public image of Dutch women who are or were part of IS? I answer this question by using the first section to give an outline of the situation of the so-called ‘IS-women’ and the response of the Dutch government to the IS-women who want to return to the Netherlands. This section takes a sociological perspective and aims to give background information that is relevant to the remainder of my paper. However, academic research lacks a specific discussion on how media influences the imagery of women who are part of ISIS. Therefore, I use the second section of this paper to analyze existing research about the broader relationship between ISIS and the media in general. This section is mostly from the perspective of the communication sciences. Lastly, I use the third section to analyze Dutch media which have written about ‘IS-women’ and apply the background information of the first section and the broader research of the second section to this analysis. By doing this I conclusively give an answer to the question of how Dutch media influences the imagery of women who are part of the IS movement.

    Ultimately, I argue that the narrative of the media creates a notion that many people take to correspond to reality. What I mean by this is that we all have a certain image of what it means to be a woman who is part of ISIS and tend to believe that this general image corresponds with all the women who are, or were, part of ISIS. As the quote with which I opened states, our words determine how we perceive reality. This general image, and the fact that we think this image corresponds to reality, is in a big way influenced by the way the media writes about these women.

    1. ‘The Dutch dilemma’

    Who are the Dutch IS-women?

    In June 2014 the ISIS caliphate was proclaimed. In response, a small group of individuals residing in the West chose to migrate to this new caliphate due to their alignment with the interpretation of Islamic teachings by members of the Islamic state. Mostly, this interpretation refers to a version of Jihadism, which can be defined as a particular version of Islam which argues that violence has to be used to spread the teachings of the Islam.[1] Among them there were also women who can be defined as follows:

    A female jihadist is considered a girl or woman who has either considered (and is registered as such by the police) or attempted to travel to ISIS territory; who facilitates or recruits others for travel or marriage to jihadists; has returned from ISIS territory; or has committed acts of violent extremism. (Gielen 2018, 456)

    These women can also be ascribed a certain agency because they knowingly and willingly traveled or considered traveling to ISIS territory. This is also shown by the fact that they actively contributed to the recruitment of others. A rapport of the AIVD[2] shows that most of these women are between 15 and 30 years old and are known to be converts with various ethnic backgrounds. However, minors who were taken by their parents are not covered by this definition because of their lack of agency (Gielen 2018, 456-458).

    Subsequently, to understand these women it is relevant to understand the process by which they are recruited. This process can be proactive, which means that (vulnerable) women are actively manipulated to join ISIS, and reactive, which means that recruiters wait until the women show interest. One must also consider other influences outside this recruitment process, like love, online group chats, and peer pressure within social media. It is also common that these women already had peers involved within the jihadist network. These relationships were further enhanced by social media whereby recruiters anticipated certain push and pull factors (Gielen 2018, 459). An important pull factor is that one can be motivated because of personal or idealistic reasons (Jacques and Taylor 2009, 506-507). Also, it is important to acknowledge the feeling of sisterhood and romanticized narratives as important pull factors (Saltman and Smith 2015, 13-17). Romanticized, in the sense that these narratives are often constructed to paint a perfect picture to overshadow the more negative aspects of joining the Islamic state. As will become clear, this disillusionment regarding the romanticized narrative becomes an important factor in why people want to leave.

    Push factors would be revenge or certain key events that motivate these women to join ISIS (Jacques and Taylor 2009, 507). Examples of this are: isolation, the search for identity, having a sense of belonging, a feeling that the Muslim community is being oppressed and persecuted, and aggrievement at the (perceived) lack of international action (Gielen 2018, 458). However, one of the most apparent push factors is the troubled life histories of these women. Studies have shown that 60% of the foreign fighters within ISIS have had psycho-sociological problems and 20% had psychiatric problems (Gielen 2018, 458).

    Additionally, research exists about the push and pull factors for women leaving ISIS. Pull factors are often positive alternatives such as the desire for a normal life or having family obligations. One of the most important push factors is dissatisfaction with other group members, leaders, or the ideology of IS. These push factors can be further divided into three categories. First, there is the ideological category that concerns disillusionment with the ideology. Second, there are the social factors to be understood as dissatisfaction with extremist peers. Third, you have practical factors that ‘revolve around the personal life situation, such as feeling isolated, stigmatized or externally pressured to participate in extremist groups’ (Gielen 2018, 459). 

    The Dutch reaction

    What these women also have in common is that authorities know about their affiliation with ISIS and therefore certain measurements are undertaken. These women were first portrayed as victims and this resulted in the fact that many European countries did not prosecute them nor offer ‘exit programs’. These exit programs normally aim at deradicalization and reintegration, but due to the assumption that women were the victims this program was not deemed necessary for their situation (Gielen 2018 454-456).

    However, according to Gielen, recent studies have shown different imagery of these IS-women. Research of the AIVD[3] stated that IS-women often are heavily armed and are trained to use these weapons. Next to that, IS-women seem to have an active role in recruiting other girls and women online. IS-women thus seem to have a much more active role within ISIS than previously thought. It follows that it is critical to have an effective policy to deal with these IS-women. This is especially critical because a growing number of IS-women are aiming to return to their home country due to the decline of the IS-caliphate. The need of such an effective policy is especially important for the Netherlands because they have relatively many women who migrated to the Middle East to join ISIS. 100 Dutch women have migrated to this area and at least 80 of these 100 women have actually joined ISIS (Gielen 2018, 455).

    II. Media and ISIS

    Now that there is an outline to work with, we are one step further in analyzing the influence of Dutch media on Dutch women who have joined ISIS. However, as remarked in the introduction, it is relevant to first analyze the broader relationship with ISIS and the media in general. This is important as there exists no scholarly literature that specifically focuses on Dutch media. Accordingly, this lack of a theoretical framework needs to be complemented by first giving a more general overview in order to apply this theory to the case of Dutch media. I shall give this overview by firstly analyzing two relevant publications, the first being from Moran Yarchi and the second from Archi Mehdi Semati and Piotr M. Szpunar. Secondly, I shall formulate my own reaction to the insights given by these publications.

    Using media as a weapon

    According to Moran Yarchi the media plays an important role in the war against ISIS. She states that, alongside the actual military confrontation, an ‘image war’ exists to support one of the main goals of terrorists: to attract attention and to spread fear. Publicity in the media is one of the key ways to achieve these goals. Therefore, many terrorist organizations actually make use of this by considering how the media would portray their actions. Based on this, Yarchi supports the claim of B.M. Jenkins[4] who stated that terrorism is a theatre: the people watching are far more important in a terrorist attack compared to the actual victims (Yarchi 2019, 53-54).

    Additionally, Yarchi claims that this ‘image war’ within the media has its roots in the fact that, in general, conflicts have changed recently since the War on Terror. This is because the rise of this conflict is connected to a couple of major changes. The first major change is that contemporary conflicts are mostly fought between state and non-state actors. The second change is that conflicts gain much more attention through media compared to other means. The media coverage has come to play an important role in conflicts because media influences political actors and these in turn influence other fronts, like public opinion. Hence, the media becomes the weapon of modern warfare because terrorists can influence public opinion (Yarchi 2019, 53-54).

    Next, Yarchi states that terrorist organizations and especially ISIS have numerous methods of how they aim to influence the public. To understand their methods, we have to keep in mind that these organizations are usually less powerful compared to the states they wage war against. Consequently, by ‘promoting’ their violent acts and spreading fear within the media these terrorist organizations aim to reverse this public image of an asymmetric power relation. In other words, they aim to appear as evenly powerful as their enemy (Yarchi 2019, 55). Next to that, organizations like ISIS try to gain more support from other Muslims by glorifying the war. Both aspects are especially relevant now that ISIS is losing power; they still want to come across as a powerful foe and at the same time hope to make up for their loss by trying to influence Muslims to joining them (Yarchi 2019, 63-65).

    Beyond the spectacle

    Likewise, Mehdi Semati and Piotr M. Szpunar agree with the importance of media within the conflict between ISIS and ‘the West’. They, however, disagree with the statement that it is purely ISIS that tries to weaponize the media. For this, they refer to an earlier publication by Barbie Zelizer who states that the U.S. media and ISIS propaganda share a journalistic style: both frame ‘the conflict in a simplistic us/other binary’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). Thus, despite being very different, both try to construct an insurmountable divide between the U.S. and ISIS (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).

    Zelizer also states that some aspects of ISIS are ‘hyper-visible’. According to Semati and Szpunar she argues that: ‘much of the conflict remains unseen, with any information gaps filled in through phantasmagorical, speculative and imaginative registers’(Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). In other words, only a part of the conflict is shown in the media, but it is portrayed as the main part of the conflict and thus given more visibility compared to other aspects. Due to this, many people come to understand these aspects as being the whole conflict, with the aid of their ‘speculative imagination.’ She claims that both sides are using this tactic so that they can portray the conflict as they see fit (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).

    Semati and Szpunar illustrate this point by referring to the work of Rebecca Adelamn who states that Western media uses the weapon of imagery to ‘locate and contain the phantom enemy of the war of terror’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). What she means by this is that the media is being used to construct the idea of ‘the other’ as the enemy. The reason for the U.S. to do this is that by framing an image of the enemy they hope to control how we perceive these terrorists. However, ISIS uses this technique against them by aiming to portray the West as evil in (local) media. Thus, while both try to create a distinct ‘other,’ they do so by applying the same tactic and thus being more alike than they make it seem (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).

    However, according to Semati and Szpunar, ISIS does not create a ‘spectacle’ by only reinforcing its violent image. Here they draw on the arguments of Maran Kraidy, who claims that ISIS also tries to promote the ‘good life’ within the caliphate. Semati and Szpunar contrast this with the radical position of Francois Debrix and Ryan Atrip who make a distinction between reality and non-reality. According to them both ISIS and the U.S. use media not to present truths, but rather a simulation, a non-truth (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 4). This is in line with the research of Friedrich Kittler, who states that ‘states create their own terrorists.’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 5). What is meant by this is that people from ISIS paint a more positive picture on what we would call terrorism, instead claiming that these actions make you a pious Muslim. As such, this non-truth is also used to create a romanticized narrative in order to gain more followers.

    Nonetheless, Western media focuses much on the violent aspects of the IS-caliphate and therefore much of the public attention goes to this aspect of ISIS. This shows that how we perceive ISIS is very much influenced by how they appear within the media. Such appearances can however be nuanced according to Semati and Szpunar. Some claim, for instance, that ISIS is ‘a ‘transnational multiethnic state’ that moves beyond racism in a way that America never could (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 7). This shows the ambiguity surrounding narratives around ISIS and therefore Semati and Szpunar invite readers to keep problematizing Western narratives by keeping into account different narratives concerning these conflicts (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 6-7).

    Discussion

    To conclude this section, both articles have important insights that I will use for the next section and ultimately answer my research question. Yarchi argues that the aim of terrorist organizations like ISIS is to spread fear through the media because they aim to influence the public image into thinking they are as powerful as their enemies. Semati and Szpunar add that the West also uses a similar tactic because they aim to control the perception of the conflict and to create a further divide between ISIS and the West. The media does this by focusing on one part of the conflict and ignoring other parts. Hence, they create hyper-visibility, which is thickened by the speculative imagination of the public.

    However, I do want to criticize these articles by claiming that it is unjust to the situation to only focus on the responsibility of ISIS and the U.S. What this overshadows is that the media is its own entity. Of course, the media is influenced by the courses that ISIS and the U.S. take. Despite this intertwinement, we should not underestimate the individuality of the media. Hence, we should not only look at how the West and ISIS influence the media but also the other way around.  Therefore, I am now to approach the relationship between Dutch media and IS-women by considering this individuality and how the media influences the West and ISIS.

    III. Dutch Media and the women of ISIS

    The perspective of the Dutch media

    After having undertaken this more general analysis concerning the relationship between ISIS and the media, it is now time to apply these theories to the way ‘IS-women´ are being portrayed in Dutch media. As a start I want to give an enumeration of headlines:[5]

    • To get IS-children (and their mothers) back or not?[6]
    • ‘IS women are very happy.’[7]
    • Yezidi community afraid of the return of IS-women.[8]
    • IS-women from Syria want to return to the Netherlands.[9]
    • These are the two IS-women who have returned: ‘Prove atrocities are hard to find.’[10]
    • They want to return to the Netherlands, but how dangerous are the women of IS?[11]
    • IS-women helped fighters rape our women.[12]
    • Two returned IS-women in the Netherlands: May be difficult to prosecute them[13]
    • How dangerous are the Dutch IS-women?[14]
    • Should we pick up ISIS women and children or not?[15]

    This selection is made by simply googling ‘Nederlandse IS-vrouwen’ (‘Dutch IS-women’). What this selection makes clear is that almost every headline seems to imply that they do not write or talk about specific cases but about ‘IS-women’ in general, with the exception of a WNL video (WNL 2019) and an RTL article (De Goede 2019),

    This also seems to be the case when taking a closer look at these articles. Let’s take, for instance, the 2019 video of Nu.nl. Within this video, people talk about the dilemma surrounding IS-women and how some people in the parliament think it’s too dangerous to let these women return. Others in the video think it is safer for these women to be judged in the Netherlands. Within the rest of this video, two activists, who both claim to have talked to IS-women, make their say. These activists claim that ‘they’ (the ´IS-women´) have chosen to be a part of the dangerous IS-organization. Hence, these women should not be allowed to return (Nu.nl 2019).

    The most prominent argument for this statement concerns the crimes that IS-women committed against the Yezidi women, whose homes were conquered by ISIS (Nu.nl 2019). These crimes especially became apparent during an NOS interview with a Yezidi woman and her family. This woman claims that she has a hard time seeing ‘them’ (women who joined ISIS) because they reminded her of the gruesome things these women have done to her and her people. Hence, she and her family claim that these women should not be allowed back in the Netherlands under any circumstances. According to this Yezidi family, the women were worse than the IS-men (NOS 2019a). This is also claimed by another 2019 NOS articleand by some people within the 2019 Dutch EO-documentary translated as:  Should we pick up ISIS women and children or not? According to both, ‘IS-women’ helped the ‘IS-men’ in beating and raping Yezidi women.

    Some of the media articles and videos do however conduct interviews with individual Dutch women who were part of ISIS. Despite this, general claims are still being made. For instance, in a 2016 interview by the Telegraaf,an ‘IS-woman’ claims that all ‘IS-women’ are still happy within the caliphate. In the previously mentioned EO documentary, a mother states that she cannot accept that her daughter might be allowed to return. According to her, all ‘IS-women’ are terrorists. In the same documentary, a journalist states that all women from ISIS are innocent and that their only task was cooking. A Dutch CDA[16] politician reacts to this, claiming that it does not matter and that ‘they’ (IS-woman) all tell lies. According to him, all IS-women are guilty of collaborating with ISIS (EO 2019). According to a 2019 article in Het Parool, the Dutch state indeed claims that they do not intend to bring back women from ISIS. These women have chosen their own fates and the state does not see them as any less dangerous than their husbands.       

    Some media articles and videos do, however, try to take a more positive stance against this dilemma. A 2019 article by RTL Nieuws claims that the migration of IS-women can perhaps be explained due to a bad childhood and as an attempt to give new meaning to their lives (RTL 2019). A NOS article of the same year claims one can make a divide between women who had active and passive roles within ISIS (NOS 2019a). However, the first article ultimately claims that women did know what they got themselves into. According to this article, these women must have known beforehand about the beheadings and other crimes committed by ISIS. They chose to maintain this system (De Goede 2019). The second article also warned that we should not underestimate these women (RTL 2019).

    Thus, what all these media articles and videos have in common is that all of these make general claims about ‘IS-women,’ regardless of which normative stance they take. They constantly refer to ‘them’ and make statements such as ‘they are all dangerous´ and ‘they should not be allowed to come back to the Netherlands.´

    The simulation of the Dutch spectacle

    In line with the article of Semati and Szpunar, I claim that this trend is problematic from an epistemological point of view. What I mean by this is that all these articles make claims based on induction. Based on an enumeration of singular events, they make general claims by stating that all women of ISIS are applicable to these events. Even when articles claim that not all of these women are the same, they all still make general claims in the end. In other words, conflicts are made up of singular events and certain actors who acted in these events. It is therefore problematic from an epistemological point of view to claim that all of these women were active in the conflict, that all of them are terrorists and, therefore, ought not to be allowed to return to the Netherlands. By doing this, the abstract notion of ‘the IS-women’ that is being fed by the media becomes the leading influence in how people think about IS-women in general. Instead of considering each case individually, the media let many of us think that all the women of ISIS have the properties that are written or talked about in the media.[17] 

    Moreover, in line with Semati and Szpunar I claim that this kind of journalism causes a ‘simulation’ which is made up by the generalization of the media and the reactive speculative imagination of the Dutch people. What I mean by this is that the media lays a big focus on certain aspects or properties surrounding the situation of IS-women and makes it seem as if these are all applicable to every woman of ISIS. For instance, however horrible the crimes committed against Yezidi women are, the claim that all ISIS women are guilty of this cannot be known. Due to this statement, it is, however, very easy for the speculative imagination of the reader to create a false narrative that indeed all of the women are guilty. This is also strengthened by the fact that these news items use the general label of ‘IS-women’ instead of talking about (particular) Dutch women who joined ISIS.

    However, one can argue that the women who did not have an active role in these crimes, have still had an indirect role in them by maintaining the caliphate and, therefore, making these crimes possible. But when we analyzed the media, we have seen that some of these articles or videos claim that ‘IS-women were worse than the men’ and ‘IS-women’ helped rape the Yezidi women.’ This makes it at least seem as if all of these women had an active part in these crimes. And despite that, the first and second sections of this paper both showed that assuming these women had full agency is problematic.[18]

    As a final remark I want to highlight that this paper is not a critique of the policy of the Dutch government. By no means am I trying to argue here that we should or should not allow  Dutch citizens who joined ISIS to return to the Netherlands. Instead, the point of my paper is that the general statements by the media can very easily influence people into agreeing with this generalization and, therefore, ignore much of the reality of the conflict. As Semati and Szpunar have shown us, the conflict has much more ‘reality’ than what the media portrays. Next to that, the first section has shown that not all Dutch women who joined ISIS are doing so because they want to be terrorists. Instead, research by the AVID has shown that numerous complex sociological (push and pull) factors exist and thus the motivation for Dutch women to join ISIS can vary per person.

    However, the media is the main way by which we gain ‘knowledge’[19] of these events, as stated in the introduction of this paper. This could prove to be problematic because we live in a democracy and people can choose our government and the government decides how to deal with the women who joined ISIS. It is very likely that these votes are being influenced by fallacies fed by the media. Hence, like Semati and Szpunar claim, we should keep problematizing this narrative. This is because not only the lives of these women depend on it, but also the lives of their children whose current faith is intertwined with that of their mothers.

    Of course, one can aim to counter this generalizing narrative by looking at more in-depth media coverage concerning IS-women. However, I argue that this would miss the more important insight that language itself has a generalizing tendency. In the 20th century, philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida already argued that our discourse about the world has certain epistemological limitations that cannot be overcome by language itself.[20] Consequently, they argued that we should acknowledge that there is a part of existence that transcends our understanding of the word. Put differently, existence is too complex to fully be encompassed by our linguistic framing of the world: there will always be something that escapes our words. What their point makes clear is that it is perhaps a better solution to acknowledge that we can never fully understand the situation of IS women, instead of reproducing our generalizing understanding at a more in-depth level.

    Some might think that this kind of ‘thinking’ would amount to a standstill, which in philosophy, we would call an aporia. However, as early as Plato, such a standstill is not seen as wholly unproductive. In Meno, this take on the aporia becomes clear when Plato writes about a discussion between Socrates and Meno concerning the idea of knowledge. At a certain point, Socrates argues for the benefits of an aporia:

    ‘Socrates: So he is now in a better position with regard to the matter he does not know?

    Meno: I agree with that too.

    Socrates: Have we done him any harm by making him perplexed and numb as the torpedo fish does?

    Meno: I do not think so.

    Socrates: Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to find out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before the thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences about the square of double size and said it must have a base twice as long.

    Meno: so it seems.

    Socrates: Do you think that before he would have tried to find out that which he thought he know though he did not before he fell into perplexity and realized he did now know and longed to know?

    Meno: I do not think so, Socrates.

    Socrates: Has he ten benefited from being numbed?

    Meno: I think so.’ (84 b-c)

    Here, of course, being numbed referred to how Socrates’ questioning caused someone to arrive at a state of not-knowing [aporia]. What this dialogue tries to teach is that it is sometimes better to question everything one thinks to ‘know’ in order to arrive at truth as separated from knowledge. As such, the unknowable transcendence within our world can be seen as an aporetic truth that cannot be aligned with our knowledge of the world. Perhaps further research could instead indicate that it is precisely by not speaking that we can have a more open stance toward the transcendent existence of IS-women. As Levinas and Derrida would claim, it is only then that ethics could begin.[21]

    Conclusion

    Summarizing, in the first section I have given background information surrounding Dutch women who joined ISIS. Here we saw that a complexity of push and pull factors exist that explain the motivation of these women. In the third section, the article of Yarchi showed that ISIS in general uses the media to spread fear and to reverse public opinion around the asymmetric power-relations between ISIS and its enemies. The article of Semati and Szpunar has shown that both ISIS and the West use media to control the public image of their conflict. They do this by letting the media focus on certain aspects of the conflicts and making these hyper-visible. However, I argued that we also should account for the individuality of the media and thus should not only look at how the West and ISIS influence the media, but also the other way around.

    That is what I analyzed in the third section. I started my section by analyzing some media videos and articles which took IS-women as their topic. Based on this analysis I argued that all of these articles made general statements about these women and thus did not consider their singularity. I argued that this is problematic from an epistemological point of view because you cannot make general claims without considering the singularity of each event and the person who participated in these events. I closed this section by stating that this paper does not function as a critique of the policy of the Dutch government, but simply is a critique of how the media uses false statements to influence public opinion on Dutch women who joined ISIS. Therefore, we should always keep problematizing these statements. Thus, let me respectively restate and answer my research question: How does Dutch media influence the (Dutch) public image of Dutch women who are or were part of ISIS? My answer is that the media uses general statements about ISIS women and therefore influences us into thinking that every Dutch woman who has joined ISIS is the same, while in reality, ‘they’ are not.

    Bibliography

    AIVD (2016) Life with ISIS: the Myth Unravelled. The Hague: AIVD.

    AIVD (2016): Annual Report 2015: A Range of Threats to the Netherlands. The Hague: AIVD.

    AIVD (2017): Jihadistische vrouwen, een niet te onderschatten dreiging. 17 November. The Hague: AIVD.

    De Telegraaf. 2016. “’IS-vrouwn zijn heel gelukkig.’” Youtube video, 1:03. July 5, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXTBnvh1b1Y.

    Gielen, Amy-Jane. 2018. “Exit programmes for female jihadists: A proposal for conducting realistic evaluation of the Dutch approach.” International Sociology 33, no. 4: 454-472.

    De Goede, Agnes. 2019. “Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden.’” RTL Nieuws, November, 21, 2019. Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden’ | RTL Nieuws

    Jacques, Karen and Paul J. Taylor. 2009 “Female terrorism: A review. Terrorism and Political Violence.” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 3: 499–515.

    NOS. 2019. “Jezidi-gemeenschap bang terugkeer IS-vrouwen.” Facebook video, 3:02. “NOS.” November 1, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=573379010138198.

    Nu.nl. “IS-kinderen (en hun moeders) terughalen of niet?” Youtube video, 9:19. November 16, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0bFpqdG65w.

    Plato. ‘Meno.’ 1997. In Plato: complete works, edited by John M. Cooper, and translation by G.M.A. Grube, 870-897. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company.

    Rosman, Cyril. 2019. “IS-Vrouwen uit Syrië willen terug naar Nederland.” Het Parool, November 1, 2019. https://www.parool.nl/nieuws/is-vrouwen-uit-syrie-willen-terug-naar-nederland~bbb57801/

    RTL Nieuws. 2019“Ze willen terug naar Nederland, maar hoe gevaarlijk zijn de vrouwen van IS?” March 1, 2019. https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/buitenland/artikel/4906066/vrouwen-kalifaat-syrie-terugkeren.

    Saltman, Erin Marie and Melanie Smith. “Till Martyrdom Do Us Part: Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon.” London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

    Semati, Mehdi. 2018. “ISIS beyond the spectacle: communication media, networked publics, terrorism.” Critical studies in Media Communication 35, no. 1 (January): 1-7. 

    Swolfs, Lennard. 2019. “‘IS-vrouwen hielpen strijders bij het verkrachten van onze vrouwen.’” NOS Nieuws, January 11, 2019. https://nos.nl/artikel/2308525-is-vrouwen-hielpen-strijders-bij-het-verkrachten-van-onze-vrouwen.html.

    Van den Berg, Ellen en Hanne Küpers, “Hoe gevaarlijk zijn de Nederlandse IS-vrouwen?” Argos. Vrijzinnige Protestantse Radio Omroep. Hilversum: VRPO, October 26, 2019. https://www.vpro.nl/argos/media/afleveringen/2019/Hoe-gevaarlijk-zijn-de-Nederlandse-IS-vrouwen-.html.

    Van den Brink, Thijs. 2019. “Moeten we IS-vrouwen en kinderen ophalen of niet?” Nieuwlicht. Evangelische omroep. Hilversum: EO, June 3, 2019.

    Whitley, Thomas J.. 2016. “An act of terror and an act of hate.” MRBLOG. Accessed on 25 June. 2021. https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/mrblog-act-terror-act-hate/.

    WNL “Twee teruggestuurde IS-vrouwen in Nederland: ‘Mogelijk lastig om ze te vervolgen.’” Youtube video, 2:20. November 20, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4838oUUAUM.

    Yarchi, Moran. 2019. “ISIS’s media strategy as image warfare: Strategic messaging over time and across platforms.” Communication and the public 4, no. 1: 53-67.

    [1] Jihadism refers here to the Islamic term of Jihad which bears the meaning of ‘making an effort’ to achieve a goal. Accordingly, the Jihad is split into two versions: the inner Jihad, mostly referring to the personal struggle to keep up the teachings of the Islam and the greater Jihad, referring to the goal to convert people to the Islam. When people talk about Jihadists, one often refers to this greater Jihad. However, the connection to violence is not a necessary definitional aspect of this term.

    [2] The ‘Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst’ (AIVD) translates as ‘General intelligence and security service’ and is a secret organization that aims to protect national security.

    [3] For the research see: 1. AIVD (2016) Life with ISIS: the Myth Unravelled. The Hague: AIVD. 2. AIVD (2016): Annual Report 2015: A Range of Threats to the Netherlands. The Hague: AIVD. 3. AIVD (2017): Jihadistische vrouwen, een niet te onderschatten dreiging. 17 November. The Hague: AIVD.

    [4] Jenkins, B. M. (2006). The new age of terrorism. In Kamien, D. G. (Eds.), The Mcgraw hill homeland security handbook (pp. 119). New York: McGraw Hill Professional.

    [5] I will immediately give the English translation. However, for each translation I will give the original Dutch in the corresponding footnote.

    [6]  IS-kinderen (en hun moeders) terughalen of niet? See: (Nu.nl 2019).

    [7]  ’IS-vrouwn zijn heel gelukkig.’ See: (Telegraaf 2016).

    [8] Jezidi-gemeenschap bang terugkeer IS-vrouwen. See: (NOS 2019a).

    [9] Rosman, Cyril. “IS-Vrouwen uit Syrië willen terug naar Nederland. See: (Het Parool 2019).

    [10] Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden.’ See: (De Goede 2019).

    [11] Ze willen terug naar Nederland, maar hoe gevaarlijk zijn de vrouwen van IS? See: (RTL Nieuws 2019).

    [12] ‘IS-vrouwen hielpen strijders bij het verkrachten van onze vrouwen.’ See: (NOS  2019b).

    [13] Twee teruggestuurde IS-vrouwen in Nederland: ‘Mogelijk lastig om ze te vervolgen.’ See: (WNL 2019).

    [14] Hoe gevaarlijk zijn de Nederlandse IS-vrouwen? See: (Argos 2019).

    [15] Moeten we IS-vrouwen en kinderen ophalen of niet? See: (EO 2019).

    [16] Christian Democrats.

    [17] Next to that, this generalization is problematic from a juristic perspective. Legally, we cannot judge them all in the same manner. Instead, the judge has to consider the complexity of each individual case. Thus, it is too easy to just say that none of these women should be allowed to return.

    [18] In line with this, we can also ask ourselves to what extent citizens, in general, are responsible for the crimes of their government. Should the person who voted for Bush, Obama, or Trump be held accountable for the war crimes committed by presidents? But more importantly, do we think differently about these questions if they question the crimes committed by our own government?

    [19] As I have argued, no real knowledge but rather a simulation.

    [20] See, for instance, Derrida’s Violence and Metaphysics and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.

    [21] Further elaboration on this alternative is beyond the scope of this paper as this paper mainly concerns itself with the problem of media.

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    Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of dominations. “Epistemology” is about knowing the difference. [2. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1985/2004), 20.] 

    Introduction

    The relationship between postmodernism and feminism is one of debate. Often, postmodernism is taken as the “assumed reference point in a debate that has largely taken place within feminism and has authorized feminism’s reflection on itself through either disavowal or disapproval”.[3. Sara Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3.] Against this background, Ahmed wonders how we, as feminists, might be able to read postmodernism differently — “as feminist and for feminism”.[4. Ahmed, Differences that Matter, 2.] Put differently, can we reconsider the relationship between feminism and postmodernism — generating some sort of metamorphosis? Is it possible that this relationship is not marked by authority, hierarchy, and exclusion, but, instead, might be understood as being one of mutual and reciprocal productivity?

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  • The Becoming of Art: A Cocreative Process

    Introduction

    One of the most unexpected but gravest pains I have perhaps experienced in this lifetime thus far is when a piece of music got, according to me, violently interrupted by applause. The musical performance consisted of a group of people playing large drums. The deep drumming sounds drilled through my bones, and when the last drum had sounded, I was caught off guard by the audience around me that broke out into a loud applause. I remember literally screaming ‘nooo, what did you do’, but no one else seemed to be as bothered as I was. For me, there was a silence needed after the drumming. The frequencies of the drums were still vibrating in my bones. The silence afterwards was part of the piece of music, it was a critical part necessary to process the intensity that I had just experienced. Until this day I grieve that experience that got ripped out of my body, yet at the same time never had a chance to leave it or calmly die out. It may sound a bit dramatic, but I am sure that there are people that recognize the violation of a piece of music because it got interrupted by applause or screaming before the last notes had sounded, or before a necessary silence sounded. To what extent does silence, as in the absence of played notes, form a part of a music piece? Silences during a music piece are an integral part, there is little ambiguity about that, but how about after a music piece ends?

    The question of when and how an artwork is completed is one that various thinkers have written about and forms part of the wider question of what art is. What remains understudied, however, is the role the various senses might have in answering the question of where an artwork begins and where it ends. Based on the five senses, it might seem clear where an artwork begins or ends – a music piece starts with the first sound and ends with the last sound, a painting begins when something becomes visible and ends when the visible object no longer changes, or the painting begins where you can physically touch the canvas and ends where that canvas physically stops for example. If you would regard culinary practices as an artwork, you could say the same for taste and smell. However, these senses do not account for the anecdote mentioned above, or for the fact that an artwork can be interpreted or experienced in various ways by different people. In that sense, an artwork can take different shapes for different people depending on the emotional experience or interpretation that the artwork evokes.

    Considering only the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, these emotional experiences cannot be accounted for as part of an artwork. However, whereas in the West we recognize five senses, this is far from universal. On top of that, the specific ordering in which senses are considered and used differs. Some strands of Hinduism, for example, recognize ten senses or Indiryas. That is, in addition to the five sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) they also recognize the five so-called motor organs (hands, feet, mouth, anus, and genitals) that help humans interact with the world. In many Western African cultures, the heart is recognized as an additional sense based on the belief that the heart has the ability to sense and perceive emotions and spiritual energies in a distinctive way from the other senses. The heart is considered the center of emotion and intuition. The idea of a ‘sixth sense’ is also recognized in traditional Chinese culture where this sense is associated with ‘qi’, the vital energy that flows through all living things. Even in Western cultures the term ‘sixth sense’ is sometimes used to refer to intuition of a psychic ability. With regards to the ordering of the senses, in the West sight and sound are generally seen as the ‘higher senses’ that are most important since they are most closely related to the mind (Howes 2009, 22-23; Howes 2013, 8-9). However, this is not universal. Songhay shamans in Niger, for example, prioritize taste, smell and hearing over sight and can “taste kinship, smell witches, and hear the ancestors” (Elliott and Culhane 2017, 48).

    In this essay, I will look at the beginning and completion of an artwork by focusing on the bodily sensual experience of it as a body of art. In the first section I will look at the ambiguity of the beginning of an artwork by looking at two examples, that of a painting and a piece of music. In the second section I will explore the ambiguity of the completion of an artwork, here I will also discuss the concept of Death of the Author (cf. Barthes 1967). In the third and final section, then, I will discuss who should be considered the artist or creator given the ambiguity of an artwork’s beginning and completion. In the conclusion I will shortly summarize the arguments in this essay.

    The beginning of the artwork

    To understand where an artwork begins, we must ask the question of when the process of creating art begins. To illustrate the ambiguity of the answer to this question and to move beyond an inevitable abstractness when writing about art, I will briefly examine two examples of what are commonly considered artworks: a painting and a piece of music.

    The conventional painting is mostly a visible experience; hence one might assume that a painting starts with the paintbrush touching the canvas. This moment signifies the first visible sign of the shapes or colors that will eventually comprise the artwork. But as many people who have made a painting will recognize even this is not a self-evident moment of beginning. Sometimes you first make a sketch before using paint or colors on your canvas. This means that in questioning when the creation of art begins, the sketching would have to be included. Now suppose that the sketch is not done on the eventual canvas, but on a separate piece of paper. The sketching on this paper is included in the process of creating the eventual painting, but does it also form part of the painting?

    Whether we decide to include the paper sketch in the eventual artwork or not, even the sketches or paint might not actually be the first visible aspect of the artwork. Without a canvas there would be nothing to hold the paint together, which means that the canvas forms an integral part of the eventual artwork. The creating of the canvas, then, would have to be included in the creation of the painting – stretching a canvas, cutting the wooden frame. But we can go one step further. Suppose that we are talking about a landscape painting. The visible experience of the painting is based on a visible landscape, or some aspects of it. This could mean that the process of creating a painting, as a primarily visible experience of art, might even start with the painter looking at landscapes. Or, even more radically, one might argue that the painting as a visual representation of a landscape (or aspects of it) is already somehow present in the landscape itselfin the same way Michelangelo famously said that every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. This reflects Michelangelo’s belief that the job of a sculptor was to reveal something that already existed rather than create something from scratch. But, in the case of the landscape painting, can we then say that the physical landscape forms part of the artwork?

    We might come up with different answers to these questions and undoubtedly various people will have different opinions and feelings about them. The point, however, is not to answer all these questions but rather to illustrate in how many ways they can be answered. This means that the beginning of a painting is far from self-evident. I will give another brief example to show this.

    Whereas a painting is mostly a visible experience, a music piece is mostly an audible experience. Hence, similar to the painting, we might first assume that the music starts when the first note sounds. But suppose the music piece is played by an orchestra. Would not the first movement of the conductor then form the beginning of the music piece? After all, without the conductor lifting their hands, no sounds would follow. Now suppose that a group of people, perhaps the orchestra, is practicing a piece of music. You might say that musical practice as an expression of music is art, but when people practice a music piece,is the practice then also part of the artwork? And if the music piece is constantly played differently, whether that is with slightly different improvisations, or the same notes but with a whole different emotionality to it, does that mean that there is a dynamic range of what the artwork is? And when, with what level of adaptations, does it become a new artwork altogether?

    When philosophizing where the painting and the music piece start, I focused primarily on one sense at a time. However, as you may have already thought while reading these examples, neither a painting nor a music piece are solely visible or audible experiences. Some paintings are less of a direct representation of a visible experience in the world (such as a landscape), but rather an expression of a non-visible experience such as an emotion, or they combine visible impressions and invisible emotionality. Similarly, a music piece is not solely an audible experience but also an expression of emotions or a state of being or even thinking (whether that is in lyrics or rhythm). So, taking this into account we might wonder whether these artworks start with the emotionality they are based on or inspired by. And if that is the case, if the same emotional experience creates several artworks, are they truly separate?

    What I have attempted to illustrate in this section is that artworks, and thereby the creation of an artwork, cannot be said to have an unambiguous beginning to them. However, this might not be a problem as long as we can say when an artwork is finished: perhaps with the last brushstroke on the canvas, or the last note that has sounded. In the next section I will discuss to what extent an artwork can be considered finished when we consider interpretation of an artwork as integral to the artwork itself.

    The completion of the artwork

    Whereas on the issue of the beginning of art there is little literature, on the issue of the completion of art there is much more. In this section, I will discuss several authors and point out what I argue is their biggest flaw, namely that they seem to consider an artwork as a merely material, physical object. Instead, I will argue that a crucial aspect of what constitutes an artwork is that it evokes a certain response. This response goes beyond the five senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting) – it evokes emotions, bodily sensations or a thinking process. In other words, the experience of the artwork creates or comprises the artwork. Since the evocation of such responses keeps happening as long as people experience the artwork, I will then conclude that an artwork is never completed.

    In his text ‘When is a work of art finished?’ Hudson Hick (2008) discusses contemporary philosophers Monroe Beardsley and Paisley Livingston’s works in aesthetics literature. Hick’s discussion focuses on how Beardsley and Livingston consider the issue of art completion by attempting to formulate necessary conditions for a work being finished. Hudson Hick concludes that such necessary conditions are impossible to define, but we should instead look for sufficient conditions. Regardless of the sufficient or necessary conditions, both Beardsley, Livingston and Hudson Hick (2008) contend that a state of being finished can be attributed variously to the artist with respect to a particular work, and to the work itself. This means that “an artist might not be done until they have decided that the work is done, but if nothing further has been done to the work it seems that the work was finished when the last change was made” (Hudson Hick 2008, 70). I am interested in the latter, namely when an artwork itself is finished. However, I would argue we have to ask to what extent an artwork itself can be finished.

    Beardsley, Livingston and Hudson Hick all implicitly assume an artwork to be a merely material object. Hudson Hick (2008) mentions examples of when the last word is written, or when the last brushstroke has been made. An artwork seems to be considered as a physical material body. However, the experience of an artwork goes beyond its physical materiality: at the very least, the physical materiality evokes an experience in the person experiencing the artwork (by hearing it, seeing it etc.). I think we can all agree that one of the most important attributes of art is that it does something in our bodies. A work of art can move people, evokes emotions, or other sensations in the body – the frequencies of music even influence our own bodies brainwaves/frequencies (a phenomenon that is known as ‘entrainment’).

    This experience is one that goes beyond the five senses commonly recognized in the West as explained in the introduction (Elliott and Culhane 2017, Chapter 3; Howes 2009; Howes 2013). We do not merely hear a song; the song evokes a certain emotion and/or internal bodily response. I argue that this experience of the artwork is essential to what constitutes art. Hence, if we look at the sensual experiences of art (beyond the five senses), we understand that what constitutes an artwork goes beyond its material physicality and includes the responses it can evoke. This means that an artwork is changed and created also after its assumed material physicality (last brushstroke painted, last word put on the page) seems ‘finished’. The extent to which an artwork will keep being experienced and hence createdmeans that it may never be completed. But then, if an artwork is constantly being created, who is the artist?

    Who is the artist?

    Intuitively, an artwork is created by an author or someone I will call the ‘original artist’. As we have seen in the last section, however, part of what constitutes the artwork is the internal responses it evokes in human beings experiencing the artwork in whatever way. In that sense, we can say that the person experiencing the artwork is also at least partly creating it. This concept is often referred to as ‘death of the author’. In this section, I will explore the concept of ‘death of the author’ by looking at its use by various thinkers. Specifically, I will contend with several thinkers that an artwork is determined neither solely by the ‘original artist’, nor solely by the art-experiencer. Then, I will go a step further and discuss the extent to which the artwork itself participates in the process of creation through the practice of agency.

    The concept ‘death of the author’ refers to a literary theory that was introduced by French philosopher Roland Barthes in 1967. According to Barthes, the idea of the author as the sole source of meaning in a literary work is problematic. Instead, he argues that the meaning of a text is not determined by or limited to the author’s intentions, but rather by the reader’s interpretation. Therefore, Barthes suggested that the focus of a literary work should be solely on the text itself and how it is interpreted by the reader. The theory is referred to as ‘death of the author’ because it suggests that once a literary work, or a work of art, is created, the author no longer has control over its meaning or interpretation (Barthes 2016).

    In his book, The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot (originally written in 1955) even argues that the author’s disappearance is a necessary condition for the creation of literature. The act of writing involves a kind of self-erasure in which the author must release control over the text and allow it to live a life of its own (Blanchot 2015). Gilles Deleuze made a similar argument when stating that the painter must ‘destroy’ themselves and allow the painting to take on a life of its own in order to create a powerful and impactful artwork (Deleuze & Bacon 1981). Although I indeed find it evident that an artist has to release control over their artwork in order for it to be created, or at least shown, I disagree with Barthes, Blanchot and Deleuze that the original artist (or author in his context) has to completely erase or destroy themselves.

    There are thinkers who offer more nuanced perspectives. In his 1969 essay ‘What is an author?’, Michel Foucault critiques the author as a singular, fixed identity and argues that the idea of an author as the sole originator of a text is a relatively recent development in Western culture. He challenges the idea that the author is the source of meaning of a text and instead argues that this meaningis shaped by a complex network of discourses and practices extending beyond the individual author (Foucault 2013). Hence it seems that Foucault does not necessarily erase the author, but rather includes it in a network of creating factors. Jacques Derrida’s work on the notion of ‘deconstruction’ challenges traditional notions of language and meaning. He, for example, states that the meaning of a text is not fixed, but is instead in constant flux based on its context and the various interpretations that arise from it (Bass 2020). Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco (1979) suggests that the meaning or interpretation of an artwork is not determined solely by the artist or the reader, but rather by the interaction between the two. He states that the reader of a text, for example, brings their own knowledge and experiences to the interpretation of the text, but that the interpretation is always also mediated by the text itself. I agree with this latter approach that is more nuanced: both the author or ‘original artist’, as well as the person who experiences art, are the ones creating an artwork.

    As argued in the previous section, the experience of art is a subjective one, which means that the artwork stretches out into many people. Since an artwork can be experienced years, decades or even centuries after the last brushstroke has been put on a painting, or the last note has been recorded,  the artwork is never completed. But does, then, the artwork in itself also have a sort of agency?

    I am not the first to suggest that art has some sort of agency. In anthropological literature, there have been discussions on this for decades. In his book Agency and Art, anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998) argues that an anthropological study of art means studying the social contexts in which artwork is produced, circulated, and received. According to him, an artwork mediates social agency. Gell defines agency as being attributable to ‘those persons (and things) seen as initiating causal sequences … caused by acts of mind or will or intention’ (Gell 1998, 16). According to this definition, art objects cannot be agents in themselves, but act merely as extensions of their maker’s or user’s agency (2004, 541). Gell further denies the intrinsic agency of art objects by suggesting that what a person sees or experiences is a function of their previous experience, their mindset, their culture etc. (Gell 1998, 33). In anthropology agency often refers not to people’s intentions but their ability to act and make a choice of action. In this sense, agency cannot be attributed to an artwork as it cannot be said to have intentions.

    Contrary to these definitions of agency, I would say that an artwork in itself, without being necessarily intended in that way by the artist, has agency in the sense that it has the power to evoke emotions or reactions for both the artist and the audience of an artwork.  This agency cannot be separated from the agency of the other artists (the ‘original artist’ and the people experiencing the artwork). What I mean by this is that the agency of an artwork is still tied to the context in which it is produced.For example, a painting of a red square will evoke different emotions for people that live in a communist regime and hence have certain associations with the color red than those who do not. At the same time, the agency of an artwork is also still dependent on a person’s history of experiences, emotions when experiencing the artwork, cultural background, etcetera (Gell 1998) – someone who has experienced a breakup will feel different emotions from hearing a love song than someone who just got engaged. To an extent, then, the agency of an artwork is cocreated by the context and the person experiencing the artwork, and this only becomes clear when we take into account the sensuality of an artwork beyond the five senses.

    Conclusion

    To summarize, to understand where an artwork begins, I first asked when the process of creating art begins. The answer was that the creation of an artwork cannot be said to have an unambiguous beginning, especially when looking beyond the five senses commonly recognized in the West. This would not be a problem as long as we could say that an artwork can be finished. However, that question too is ambiguous. When we consider an artwork as more than a merely material, physical object and contend that a crucial aspect of what constitutes it is that it evokes a certain response,) we see that the experience of the artwork cocreates or comprises it. This means that an artwork is changed and created also after its assumed material physicality seems ‘finished’. I then asked the question ofwho the artist is. On the one hand there is the ‘original artist’, but on the other hand we can also say that the person experiencing the artwork is at least partly creating the artwork – a concept that is sometimes called ‘death of the author’. I contended that there does not have to be a complete death of the original author, but rather that an artwork is a constant cocreative process. In this cocreative process, the artwork itself participates in the process of creation through the practice of agency. The artwork in itself has agency in the sense that it has the power to evoke emotions or reactions for both its ‘original artist’ and its audience . However, this agency cannot be separated from the agency of the other artists (the ‘original artist’ and the people experiencing the artwork). Instead, the agency of an artwork is still tied to the context in which it is produced. Based on this argumentation we can then conclude that the making of an artwork is a cocreative process. In this cocreative process there is not one artist, but rather that the artist is an interwoven network of the ‘original artist’, the audience, and the artwork itself. The role of each of these cocreators can only be understood when considering the bodily sensation of an artwork beyond the five (Western) senses. In that sense an artwork might be best seen not as a noun that has a beginning and an end, but rather as a verb: work that is constantly in creation.

    Bibliography

    Barthes, Roland.  2016. “The death of the author.” Readings in the Theory of Religion, 141-145. London: Routledge.

    Bass, Alan. 2020. “‘Signature Event Context’: Margins of Philosophy (Derrida 1982 [First Published 1972])”. In Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, 105-134. Routledge.

    Blanchot, Maurice. 2015. The Space of Literature: A Translation of” l’Espace Littéraire”. University of Nebraska Press.

    Culhane, Dara. 2017. “Sensing” In A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and creative Methodologies, edited  by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane. North York: University of Toronto Press: 45-67.

    Deleuze, Gilles, and Francis Bacon. 2003. Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. University of Minnesota Press.

    Eco, Umberto. 1979. The role of the reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts (318). Indiana University Press.

    Foucault, Michel. 2017. “What is an Author?” Aesthetics (4), 284-288. Routledge.

    Hick, Darren Hudson. 2008. “When is a work of art finished?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66(1), 67-76. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2008.00288.x.  

    Howes, David, ed. 2009. The Sixth Sense Reader. Oxford: Berg.

    Howes, David. 2013. “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies.” Sensory Studies. http://www.sensorystudies.org/sensational-investigations/the-expanding-field-of-sensory-studies/.

  • Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublëv: A Dostoevskian Hero

    Introduction

    Few literary writers have left their mark on the realm of thought and art as fiercely as Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novels and stories have brought forth – with an incredible pathos and novelty – questions that are seared into the condition humaine. Dostoevsky’s feat to give flesh and blood to various philosophical, psychological and theological debates has enticed poets, philosophers, theologians, artists and film directors. The ideas presented in books such as The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov have been of an enduring value, as they continue to echo in the works of many thinkers.

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  • What happens when someone’s unhappiness threatens another’s joy?

    Although I will only talk about unhappiness and happiness, my intention is not to imbue you with my unhappy ideas!

    Everybody assumes that happiness is one of the most desirable feelings. Happiness! Of course, we all want to be happy! In other words, everybody avoids the state of unhappiness. 

    What if we discuss the status of its desirability? Some spaces and positions in our daily life are designed to normalize the desirability of happiness. To avoid unhappiness and to constantly desire happiness – is not ‘just’ an innocent thing. To clarify, I will tell you a story of mine that is not about the persuasion of happiness, but rather about how one’s unhappiness can threaten another person’s joy. In doing so, I dare to release the feelings that are suffocating me in everyday life.

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  • Is it Justified to Evaluate Female Genital Mutilation Categorically Different from Male Circumcision?

    An Examination of Inconsistency Based on Cultural Bias and Making Distinctions Between Religious and Cultural Practices

    Introduction 

    Within the Western discourse, there is a categorical rejection of female genital mutilation (FGM). It is considered a violation of an individual’s rights and a form of unnecessary violence. At the same time, the topic of male circumcision (MC) is perceived – especially in the US – as much less problematic or even benign. While it may at first sight appear unfeasible to compare FGM with MC, I will demonstrate in this essay that there are certain similarities that are often ignored, and which point to an inconsistency in our categorically different evaluations of FGM and MC. This inconsistency becomes especially evident in philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s account of both practices and potentially points to a cultural bias. A double standard of comparable practices cannot be accepted if we want to develop accounts that are as objective, or minimally biased, as possible. Additionally, if it turns out that we are inconsistently evaluating two comparable practices, we might want to adjust policy and legislation, respectively. 

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