In a metaphorical sense, the newspaper is like a second skin. It absorbs the morning reader’s reactions. It absorbs his consternation, his indifference, his need for gossip, his sense of silence and his helplessness. In many ways, a newspaper also creates a field of interactions and responses. Probably the most interesting of these is the reader’s response. I wish to talk of some of them.
I found that many readers who have been reacting to my research recently seem to think it’s dated. They seem to think I belong to a different era and speak a different kind of radicalism, which is both old-fashioned and outdated. The example I would like to cite is the debate on Gaza, or when one discusses truth commissions or violence.
The Gaza Strip is almost forgotten today. It is now a piece of real estate. Donald Trump has taken over. But Gaza, at one time, should have promoted and instigated imagination into a festival of resistance.
Trump has, in a way, created a new America. When one talks to younger individuals, they respond that Trump emphasises the distance from the old America. They point out that my understanding of Vietnam—as an example of radicalism—is outdated. To me, it was an articulation of music, philosophy, politics. There were a range of responses, from paediatrician Benjamin Spock’s to philosopher Noam Chomsky’s. Vietnam also managed to combine folklore and music, from the works of Joan Baez to that of Bob Dylan.
The students who read this, interacted and reacted with laughter. They said Vietnam is embalmed. Trump’s new politics is much more pragmatic and much more calculating. They said Vietnam is a feat of memory; it’s a piece of taxidermy.
Not many of them knew what was happening in Gaza. But many seemed to know the morphological features of Israel’s F-21 aircraft. They knew quite a bit about the big plane’s technical details. What was missing is any sense of what happened to the people. The death of tens of thousands of children was missing.
When I pointed out that this was the time for a different kind of interaction, they seemed indifferent. And it’s this indifference—the silence, the sense of erasure—that one must capture.
This problem came out in an acute—and at the same time, intellectually abstruse—form. For me the Truth Commission of Desmond Tutu was a demanding idea, but a brilliant one. It was a series of experiments on everything from a confession to the very idea of violence. The commission’s work was transmitted in over six local languages. It turned every spectator into a witness—someone who had to judge what to evaluate, who had to morally take a stand on the nature of apartheid, against violence.
Tutu made it a brilliant form between translation and the vernacular. The Truth Commission led to a new kind of politics in South Africa, with a new kind of involvement. And it’s this involvement—where spectatorship turns into a moral act of a witness—that one seems to be missing in Gaza. It seems to be missing even in the aftermath of the apartheid.
It’s in this context that I realised a problem with memory. Memory distances, encloses and includes in a club-like way. Today, memory has become a major excluder because, to a certain extent, the new generation does not remember the old wars. It cannot understand concentration camps. Nor can it in any way be involved in responses like those to the Vietnam War.
The sense of violence has changed. Violence is triage, violence is genocide. Whenever we speak of it, we conduct an act of storytelling, which highlights persons, biographies and sociographies around the event. But violence today is not the old kind of brutality. It is abstract and to a certain extent, it’s captured and relayed in numbers. And in a way, these numbers tend to turn violence into an impersonal affair.
I want to emphasise that violence affects language—the language of body counts. Here, one has to contend with what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. Because that banality has now extended to forms in which violence merely becomes a change in methodology. That’s why the sense of angst, the sense of consternation, or the sense of horror regarding Gaza is missing.
One has to understand that in a deep and fundamental way, both violence and the nature of perception has changed. The newspaper has to capture it in terms of a new imagination. And this is where I think the difficulty of communication lies.
When one talks of the Vietnam War, when talks of the Bangladesh genocide, when one talks of Rwanda, there’s a history, there’s an act of storytelling, there’s an act of conscience, there’s resistance, there’s response, and ther’s a different act of creating history. One questions power, one defends powerlessness. Subjective erasure, subject to dismissal, subject to indifference.
And this, I think, is the problem we are facing today. Whether it is talking about the Truth Commission or the Vietnam War, we are encountering a different language. It almost seems those events occurred in a different world. At one level, we have to recover the act of storytelling, and at another, we have to recover the language. At a third level, we have to bring a new literacy to numbers—they have to speak.
Numbers cannot be abstract. They have to have a semiotic bar. They have to tell something about the people who died and the way they died. Otherwise, the silence of numbers can be quite frightening. It communicates nothing by itself beyond the act of counting. It is a partiality. Memory has to capture the totality—and be textual, informational as well as oral. Today, memory is more an act of information, and as such, it becomes disembodied. It tends to lose its human quality.
Once we have memory, once we have storytelling, once we have a different kind of information—as knowledge, wisdom, judgement—we might be able to control the way in which we think and interact.
The right to information has to have a right to the forms of knowledge within which the information is embedded. Fables have to carry a moral, a certain kind of message. It is this we have to remember and communicate.
And the newspaper is still a blessed place in which we have to communicate an understanding of the genocidal brutality of the 21st century.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)