Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 31

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
We aimed to expose how in most media-centred narratives, the participants in humanitarian
songs shrug off the political and ethical questions resulting from their participation.
They create an impression of fraternal action which harms the historical understanding
of conflicts and make difficult the establishment of sustainable political and
economic solutions for the affected populations. The effectiveness of these humanitarian
musical “dispositifs” 7 is dependent on transforming political issues into moral issues, hiding
the historical and geopolitical depth of the problems, and rendering the humanitarian
intentions immune to attack, since they are deemed to be morally good, necessary,
and urgent (Velasco-Pufleau 2014). Overall, we wanted to provide to people watching
and listening to our video installation with elements to develop their critical thinking associating
and dissociating the images, sounds, gestures, discourses, and staged emotions
contained in the videos.
From the Politics of Pity to Collective Emancipation
Humanitarian songs, and TV imagery of famine and death which accompanied
their video clips, victimised and misrepresented African populations. They transform
the donor public’s view of humanitarian action, armed conflicts, health crises,
and environmental disasters from a political one to a moral one. In doing so, humanitarian
songs’ narratives of suffering deploy a fiction depicting the “victims” as powerless
subjects of neoliberal charity, in which solidarity is “a matter of consumerist choice”
(Chouliaraki 2013:188). This humanitarian individualism adopts the logic of capitalist
economy, “the principles of the established ‘Western’ order” (Badiou 2002:5). To end
suffering, all we should and can do is buy songs. As Geldof cynically asserts, “it really
doesn’t matter if you don’t like this song ... what you have to do is buy this thing” (quoted
in Jeffries 2014). In sum, humanitarian songs’ narratives contributed to the development
of a politics of pity cut off from social justice, as Luc Boltanski points out:
The development of a politics of pity thus assumes two classes which are not unequal
by reference to merit, as in the problematic of justice, but solely by reference to luck. ...
For a politics of pity, the urgency of the action needing to be taken to bring an end to the
suffering invoked always prevails over considerations of justice. From such a perspective
it is only in a world from which suffering has been banished that justice could enforce its
rights (Boltanski 1999:5).
Humanitarian songs have enabled the development of a politics of pity in the public
sphere and international relations. After the collapse of the communist regimes in the
East, humanitarianism became a means of action to transform the world “here and now”
7 Michel Foucault defines the “dispositif” [apparatus] as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble
consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative
measure, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions�in short, the
said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of
relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault 1980:194).
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