|
Literary Review
MEDIA DISCOURSE
The production of crisis
|
`While not necessarily offering a new or actively enabling perspective, these works do offer a static place for reflection as opposed to pure angst.'
|
THERE was a time — so the simplified story goes — when the old order preserved an oppressive but largely dependable stasis, thanks to a glittering emperor, stately institutions, and our own willing, fearful submission. Then came the republic, trailing distant and variously flawed incarnations of that notion we call democracy, and with it, implanted in its very plurality, a new kind of uniquely terrifying crisis. No longer attributable to the foibles of a monarch, this was a crisis infinitesimally splintered, everywhere and nowhere at once. Marx, who was both the poet and the prophet of this foundational crisis, showed how it could enable new social forms to emerge. However, like other prophets before him, he also suggested a final crisis, followed by a lasting peace. That peace has not arrived, nor is it remotely in sight. Each crisis in the world we now live in only serves to set the stage for the next crisis and the next; and, as the writers, artists and myth makers under review here assure us, crisis is now the norm, calm is that which is passed over in silence. While the Left cowers in a corner and inches towards liberal compromise, the current sponsors of crisis, the new prophets Bush and Bin Laden, seek not to study empirical reality but to engineer it.
Provisional summations
This short essay uses as its points of reverie two recent collections: the fourth volume of the Sarai Reader, edited from media think-tanks in Delhi and Amsterdam, and the 2003 issue of the art magazine Gallerie dedicated to representations of Kashmir. (I should mention without delay that, thanks to unpredictable fate, I now work at Sarai, but that was not the case when I received the book for review.) The Reader brings together a set of varied formats — philosophy, sociology, film studies, photographs, reportage, autobiography, and so on — partly spurred by a workshop on crisis and media at Sarai, an initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, in 2003. The Kashmir issue of Gallerie surveys both contemporary and historical art and writing from Kashmir. Both collections use many different strategies to puncture the cloud of crisis and arrive, not yet at "solutions", but at incomplete and provisional, sometimes unstated, summations of the state of affairs.
A mode of engagement
Even at first skim, what becomes abundantly ambiguous is the question of whether crisis is a state of objective being or a mode of engagement. In other words, the observer, other observers, the situation being observed, and the technology by which the observation takes place, all blur together in a tangled chain of events and transpositions, funnelling into the system in the process of trying to understand it. Information/ representation is not a by-product emanating from crisis but a central part of the crisis itself; not a record, but a pivotal actor. As writers in the Sarai Reader point out, the speed and simultaneity by which information now travels and clumsily translates makes possible a global consciousness that allows us to fret over disturbances in Szechuan Province or Northern Nigeria or Srinagar (which, oddly, sometimes, feels equally far away); but it is that same simultaneity that feeds back and transforms the conflict in those regions into a larger, immeasurably chaotic picture. And, to make things even more morally complex, this media (which includes, in these two collections, oil painting, photography, poetry, internet blogging, wire reportage, live television feeds and party propaganda, all moving at different speeds) can no longer be seen in terms of the simple dichotomy of "mainstream-corporate-bad" and "alternative-smallscale-good".
We are entering a world where citizens receive their "facts" from sources of their own choosing, where information is becoming fundamentally equal, free of the authority of a benevolent state apparatus, free from the illusion of impartiality; this is for better and for worse. In a chilling essay in the Reader, for example, Soenke Zehle explicates the role of activist parastatal radio stations in driving the Rwandan massacre, and shows how their activism was not pushed in a top-down fashion to their listeners, but through a highly interactive, popular and participatory process. The same could be said of Republican radio or of websites that feature beheadings.
Responses to crisis
How then do we, as makers of images, respond to crisis with this renewed responsibility in mind? The work presented in the two collections tries to do it by sidestepping the addictive immediacy and sound-bite self-assurance of most news. In the Sarai Reader, first person accounts from sites of crisis are shot through with moments of tenderness and ironic banality, throwing surprising light on the emptiness and boredom that resides at the heart of crisis. In addition, various articles fan out to mark "the systemic flaws in what is normally considered to be `peace'", to quote from the Arundhati Roy essay in the Reader. In the Gallerie issue, art and text counterpose suffering and militarisation with a nostalgic lamentation for a mythic Kashmir; thus while not necessarily offering a new or actively enabling perspective, these works do offer a static place for reflection as opposed to pure angst.
This is as it should be, a refusal of crisis as a possible way out of crisis. As Ranjit Hoskote's essay in the Sarai Reader points out, the derivative roots of the word "crisis" and "critique" are the same: the Greek krinein, to decide. While "crisis" rings with all the terrible finality of the gods forcing a decision upon the epic hero, "critique" allows the hero to act out of her own volition. Today, the word "crisis" has devolved even further, from marking a decisive turning point to designating an almost "natural" phenomenon about which nothing can be done. Rather than being occasions for a fundamental re-evaluation of our circumstances, crises have become the platform for hasty, steamrolling action — band-aid relief, war or martial law. Moreover, the word "critique" has also suffered a similar devolution in popular usage, from referring to a careful evaluation that is both positive and negative, to one that is only negative, satisfied with targeting the stock villains — "the state", "the police", "the Americans", and so on. There is, in the words of the team that edited the Sarai Reader, "an overproduction of crises". This production often helps those in power to push their agenda. Simplistic activist critique is often counter-productive and hides its own agenda. The crisis will not end in a solution, only in exhaustion, at which point a properly honest critique, in the old sense, must manifest to power the inevitable diplomacy between sworn enemies — terrorists and counter-terrorists — to turn the terms inside out and re-open routes to recovery.
VIVEK NARAYANAN
Gallerie: A Journey of Ideas, Vol. 6, No.2, 2003, p.121, Rs. 250
Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media, February 2004, p.484, Rs. 295. The contents of the Reader are also available for free online browsing and download at www.sarai.net.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
