Terror Apparatuses: Power, Prosumership, and Propaganda in Islamic State Media

Abstract

This thesis examines the media produced and circulated by the Islamic State (IS) through Michel Foucault’s notions of power, episteme, and apparatus. I expose the biopolitical function of IS videos End of Sykes-Picot (2014) and And No Respite (2015); the intersection of pastoral power, disciplinary power, and biopower in online magazine Dabiq; and the now defunct ‘PaladinOfJihad’ Tumblr account as a prosumed extension of Foucault’s account of power. To discuss these media, I deploy the term ‘terror apparatus’ to account for the techno- discursive moment in which IS’s contemporarily mediated forms of propaganda emerge. I argue that the re-constitution of these technologies of power are used to demarcate subject positions both inside and outside the Islamic State, to construct the notion of a ‘proper Muslim’, and to foster an Islamic Caliphate. IS media therefore institutes what Foucault calls an apparatus, an assortment of various discursive and non-discursive elements including “institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (1980, p. 194). Such apparatuses are complicit in what Foucault calls governmentality, an operation of power that is linked to processes of subjectification that seek to regulate the conduct of conduct. In other words, Foucault’s apparatus provides a methodology for analysing IS media as well as an understanding of it as a collection of artefacts that emerge from a specific episteme in the current digital moment.