Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

When the eyes do not blink nor stop: from the operation-image to the rise to the flow 209 the Syrian case? We are faced with the rescue of the wounded, the children, the White Helmets, and consequently of the orga- nization itself, the rescue of life and visibility, by the Syrian boy. But, eventually, the redemption of an earlier image: childhood, the angel, then the synthesis and totemic image. However, we can ask ourselves: what does the term rescue imply? Who to res- cue, and for what? To some extent, we are faced with a semantic operator that is a metaphor of emptiness; there is a rescue of a body, of an organization, but, above all, the practical action of the promoted rescue is that of visibility. It implies it is much more about removing the layers of rubble and symbolic soot than the physical ones, removing the layers of socio-historical erasures to put people, faces, looks in the flow of mediatization, which although not even representing, end up to figurative something that until then did not seem to exist. In other words, the operator ‘ rescue’, which is often seen in headlines produced by both traditional journalism and by the White Helmets, in their new way of doing things (ar- ranging circulation), is not just a strong word, but a word that ‘rescues ’ synthesis-images. When thinking about the conflicts in Syria, which last for decades, and the resulting immigration cri- sis, some images relate and merge in ‘ rescues ’ produced in our memory, understanding it here not like a chest of things seen, but as a process alive and in constant mobilization. In this sense, rescuing synthesis-images implies re- suming the images in dispute. Throughout this text, we iden- tified four types of images in play as operation-images. Such images are operations because they do not exemplify or show something but ‘ do ’ something. Within this perspective, the imag- es of the White Helmets make circuits, produce insertions, and organize visibility movements, be it conflicts or the organization itself. Even their amateur-professional practice allows the “21 st - century massacre” to have a face, a body, and, above all, heroes. The operation- image produced by the teenager Najem, on the other hand, is twofold: it transforms residue-images (without force, appeal, those that are available by the thousands on the web, the result of amateur production) into circuit-images when it assumes mediatized contact logics as the expressions of the western journalism, the technical resource, and the narration