Description
Visual securitization as a framework indicates whether the images can speak security without necessarily discussing types of images. This article asks how the securitizing discourse can be normal for an audience to accept it: One day, the West is a security threat; the other day, it is a long-term friend in Turkey. This study shows this is possible via the moving images’ power of establishing a hyper-reality that perpetuates a context of securitization. However, while securitization is perpetuated, the narrative is flexible enough to move the same issues to desecuritization. This is because the politician’s image is the “plot” spoiler and “plot setter,” which is accepted as true by the audience. With this, the audience accepts (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, distortion, and replacement of reality from Baudrillard’s perspective. As a case study, the Turkish government visually securitizes the West and creates a hyperreal context to refer to. The amalgamation of visual securitization and the hyperreality concept of J. Baudrillard proposes a new framework comprised of four staged simulacrum analyses. By doing so, the question of how televisual images can precede politics and take a crucial part in securitizing discourse without representing reality can be understood. The proposed framework and the case study shows how the JDP government can make incongruent policy turns vis-à-vis the West without audience backlash.
