Theorizing Hyperreality and Visual Securitization: The Case of Turkish TV Series Resurrection Ertugrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Popular Culture

Abstract

Visual securitization explores how images can convey security without directly discussing re-presentation and meaning. However, with the rise of moving images and popular culture in politics, visuals may also simulate security as a political strategy. This article asks how shifting securitizing discourse becomes normalized: one day, the West is a threat; the next, an ally. . The paper argues that the Turkish government visually securitizes the West and creates a hyperreal context to refer to. Moving images enable this shift by creating a hyperreal discourse that sustains securitization. Yet, this narrative remains flexible, allowing the same issues to be desecuritized when needed. This is because the politician’s image is the “plot” spoiler and “plot setter,” which the audience accepts as true. With this, the audience becomes ready to accept (de)securitization before the politician (de)securitizes the issue through discourse. This type of imagination and the intertextual relationship between how the state's survival can be actualized in TV series can be best explained via hyperreality. Through the incongruent political turns of President Erdoğan vis-à-vis the West, Resurrection Ertuğrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid series play the securitizing visuals’ role in creating hyperreality. The study contributes to the framework written by L. Hansen (2011) by problematizing the relationship between images’ representation and replacement of reality from Baudrillard’s perspective. The amalgamation of visual securitization and the hyperreality concept of J. Baudrillard proposes a new framework comprised of four staged simulacrum analyses. The proposed framework provides visual security studies with an analysis of popular culture and government-generated simulacra. The case study shows how the JDP government can make incongruent policy turns vis-à-vis the West without audience backlash.

Author

• Onur Tuğrul Karabıçak, Virginia Tech, ASPECT PhD Student