Remediation, virality and affect: a phenomenological reading into the Alan Kurdi Image

Abstract

ABSTRACT On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent. What in an image endows it the capacity to shame entire humanity, heterogeneous as it is? To further complicate, how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, devoid of any materiality whatsoever – in its singularity generate ‘affect’, universalizable and synchronic across cultures? When we recycle contents from the ‘traditional’ media to the ‘new’ media, we tend to convey something buffer to what the text in its singularity conveys. Using Kurdi’s image as a case study, this paper illustrates how the politics of ‘remediation’ – the buffer – immanent in digitally viral images informs our practices of spectatorship. It engages in sustained, critical questioning of what differences Kurdi’s image makes in terms of the perception and performativity of refugeehood (as a site of knowledge). In other words, how does this image, among others, emerge as the face of refugeehood, or better still, the Syrian crisis? What ‘new’ is being brought in and afforded by the image? How do we interpret the emergence of an image as the face of an ‘event’, and what ontological implications does it entail?