Mandel, Naomi. “Toward a New Complicity for New Media.”

Naomi Mandel’s scholarship has centered on the representation of violence, including issues around memory, media, and complicity. In “Toward a New Complicity for New Media,” Mandel begins by laying out prior theorizing of complicity and evaluates it within the context of new media. 

According to Mandel, there are “two distinct streams” in contemporary thought on complicity. The first, whose origins she locates with Hannah Arendt, “[i]nvestigates the relationship of agents to harm…within the sphere of human community” and issues of “individual liberty within a collective evil system” (694). The second, originating with Theodor Adorno, looks at “the complicity of cultural production with the regime culture claims to critique or oppose” (694). 

Mandel delineates these streams, and subsequent developments in them, alongside contemporaneous developments in media. In particular, she illustrates the shift in the role of images and other technology from representing the real to being the “hyperreal,” “abstractions whose role is to ‘stand in for’ reality” (697). Mandel points out how the shift in technology and in thinking about technology away from the directly representational has led to changes in war and conflict, and points out the significance, starting with the first Persian Gulf War, of images and other media which shape perception of conflict. She also situates the idea of the Gray zone in this media landscape and points out the role of new media in contemporary conflict, taking as an example Anonymous’s 2013 cyberwar on Israel.

Looking forward, Mandel lays out her recommendations for a “new complicity for new media” (705): it should bring together the two streams of thought on complicity she previously describes; it should be grounded in considerations of the mediation that shapes our interaction with the world, “affirm[ing] the lived reality of digital subjectivity” (705); and it should not see this mediation as “a problem to be resolved or an evil to be opposed,” but rather as “a reality to be reckoned with” (705). Ending with these recommendations, Mandel leaves room for what’s to come: not only does she, in this article, concisely summarize the history of scholarship on complicity, and evaluate the impact of media developments on it, but here she helpfully offers new directions for future research, taking into account those earlier steps.

Author of this entry: Hannah Jakobsen

Mandel, Naomi. “Toward a New Complicity for New Media.” Comparative Literature Studies 56.4 (2019): 693-710.