CUMMUNICATIONS 2010
1-2. 1-2. Hello? Testing. Anyone there?
By Shawn Thompson
In my view, what Samuel Beckett wrote in L’Innommable could be said about journalism today: “Cette voix qui parle, se sachant mensongère, indifférente à ce qu’elle dit, trop vieille peut-être et trop humiliée pour pouvoir jamais dire enfin les mots qui la fassent cesser, se sachant inutile, pour rien, qui ne s’écoute pas, attentive au silence qu’elle rompt, par ou peut-être un jour lui reviendra le long soupir clair d’avent et d’adieu, en est-elle une?[1]”
I don’t want to talk about “the media’s state of crisis” or “how the internet stole newspapers’ advertising” anymore. How many more CBC journalists are going to shove a camera at my face in class to ask me “where do I see journalism in a couple years from now.” Almost every day, mainstream media is having a panel discussion on how journalism changes so fast and how nobody knows where it’s going. You can call all the “experts” and dinosaur-journalists in the world to speculate and whine about it all but you won’t get your “answer”- the solution to your fear of change and refusal to navigate the unknown – because working for three decades in a cubicle hasn’t made anyone a psychic yet. The future never comes.
So where are we NOW?
First of all, I see journalism as something that bases itself on very fundamental human practices i.e. speech, storytelling and the encounter of the Other. It talks about our selves by our selves. In short, journalism is about the human experience. But something got lost, something broke along the way because I don’t see how journalism today can claim to be something humanistic per say; it’s a business like everything else. It became a victim of its very own “progress”; its very own structure is designed to make profits – first. That tells me that its underlying intent, its purpose that aimed at something noble is now just the empty base of what could have been grandiose about it. I don’t watch the news and I don’t read the papers anymore. I am not interested in using my time of life being “informed” by watching CBC’s slow motion replay of whether Stephen Harper ate the ostie in church or not or reading in The New York Times that “Americas Watch[2] is a controversial group that is often accused of being too sympathetic to the left[3],” while the version of the U.S. State Department is quoted, unchallenged…
The question for me is: How to bring back meaningfulness to journalism, to a method that has proven easy to hijack because speech is constantly permeated by money, by egoistical means; it’s a desire-machine producing desires where “le désir est manque[4]” and reveals “le “manque- à -jouir qu’est la vie[5].”
I believe journalism has the same inherent problem as the human experience itself: there are so many things that cannot be expressed in words. Think about the infinite number of feelings and nuances of feelings, intuition and the process of consciousness (if I am aware that I’m thinking, if I can think thinking, what is speaking must be out of thinking per say, it needs to be something outside of the mental thought process: it’s consciousness). And I am not even getting into quantum physics or the mostly untapped mapping and understanding of the human brain. So how to speak the unspeakable? How to articulate with language what has no name, what escapes discourse? How can we talk significantly about the human experience if “le langage n’est pas la vie; Il donne des ordres a la vie, la vie ne parle pas; elle écoute et attend.[6]”
I think what has been mostly lost (denied) in the discourse and attempts of communicating the human experience are the basic elements of what constitute its essence. It is clear for me that the exterior state (of the world, society, of journalism) is a reflection of the interior state (individuals) and if I follow this logic, something is very sick.
“I would say that our society has been afflicted by a disease, a very curious, a very paradoxical disease, for which we haven’t yet found a name; and this mental disease has a very curious symptom, which is that the symptom itself brought the mental disease into being.[7]”
What is this mysterious self-inflicted disease? How are we?
Well, it seems like we all want so badly to connect: with an idea, with a person. We want it so badly that we then believe, we make-believe, we draw lines of connection, to reassure us, to feel whole, to feel not so damn alone anymore. We like to pretend to understand, to explain what can only be described and we hold on to our “truths” so that we can go on with our lives or – in other words – keep our status quo intact. We cannot doubt all the time because society made it as if it was the very way to madness – but “Ce n’est pas le doute, mais la certitude qui rend fou![8]” – by eclipsing “consciousness” of every societal structures (education, politics, workplace, etc.) This is our desperation. The human despair that colours everything: all of our experiences and encounters whether with ideas or people; we desperately need SOMETHING to ground ourselves, we all crave sense. But society provided us with socially constructed empty concepts such as love and happiness which are just names we came with to describe what we can’t get our hold of. And we all seem to move freely but we really have nowhere to go. We are running aimlessly. However, what we do have is the stress, the anxiety, the lack of certainty, the pressure to DO something, to achieve, the fear, the fear of fears, the fear or being critical, to take a stand, to have opinions and to assume ourselves in our decisions. Anxiety at the idea of anxiety. The fear of ourselves, of judgment, the fear of life, the despair of not being happy – yet. The everlasting resistance to change, to life, to everything. The control issues, the overwhelming emotions that we don’t want to feel, the hate of pain, the quest for bliss, all projected on the outside world. The blame is on everything else but our selves. And then the wait, the life of wait, the wait for life. The waiting lives. The waiting for something better, the waiting for that one thing that MUST come our way to make everything okay. The “everything is going to be alright”(that means ITS NOT OKAY NOW and only now matters!) The neurosis, the excess, the desire to forget, the yearn to sleep it away, to drink it away, to numb it all with whatever we can, but only easy does it, we want it easy and we made everything inextricable by choosing so. The lost eyes, the dead glances, the blinking emptiness, to choose everything but probity. Did Foucault echo Kierkegaard with regards to the human sickness?
“Comme il y a, au dire des docteurs, personne peut-être d’entièrement sain, on pourrait dire aussi, en connaissant bien l’homme, qu’il n’en est pas un seul exempt de désespoir, en qui n’habite au fond une inquiétude, un trouble, une dysharmonie, une crainte d’on ne sait quoi d’inconnu ou qu’il n’ose connaitre, une crainte d’une éventualité extérieure ou une crainte de lui-même[9].”
On the micro level, when people ask for the truth, do they really want it? It seems to me that their need for illusion is much greater than the need for truth. Nietzsche’s concept of the human instinctive need for the conservation of the specie might be underrated. It might be much more powerful then what we are able to consciously conceive because so many things converge to assess that we just want to be able to “bear” life. So illusion becomes necessary. People want THEIR truth and have the illusion that they can “choose” it. They want to be able to read it in the papers but just articulated better, clearer and by “official voices.” It reassures them. Although this is possible only because of the very structure of media i.e. the media will do whatever it takes to please the readership (and ownership) and give them those narrow-minded and superficial “views of the world.”
So where is the “objective” truth here? Where is “fairness” in a world that praises the living dead, oblivious robots, running around convinced they are O.K? They have no clue and they don’t want to know. Where is significance when we cheer for clichés and fatuous ideas and call them original and humanistic? We really just want to laugh and have a good time, you know, to take it easy, not looking at people in the eyes too much and planning the next escapism from our very unhealthy living. Nobody wants to know himself or herself, so how can they get to now others? How journalists are different from everything I’ve described above? They too have no clue and they don’t really want to know. It’s like everyone is on pills or something: nothing intense please: they are happy the same way they are sad or angry. It looks like they’ve modeled themselves on a flat line.
“En d’autres termes, S’il est vrai que les masses sont obsédés par le désir d’échapper à la réalité parce que, dans leur déracinement essentiel, elles ne peuvent plus en supporter les aspects accidentels et incompréhensibles, il est également vrai que leur soif de fiction a un certain rapport avec ces qualités de l’esprit humain dont la cohérence structurelle domine le simple hasard.[10]”
I personally need to see journalism as something artistic because the term allows me to get rid of so many barriers called objectivity, truth, fairness (news making comes from a choice and it gives a limit to something that hasn’t, it’s already a treason of “reality”!) as well as the business of it all, the race against time, the madness of productivity, the aimless run, its out-of-breath status…
When talking about representation, journalism is a weltbild (Heidegger), a conceived image of the world but it is represented and perceived in a way that is negating the process of representation or the fictionalizing of reality through the creation and crafting of images and words, of sounds and gestures. The question of reality or fiction is not asked. The assumption is that it is reality. In art, the process of representation is fully recognized: it isn’t hidden or masked. Here, the question is not asked either, although the assumption points out to the opposite direction: it’s fiction. There are two kinds of spectacle: one “true” and the other “false”. But what is most interesting is that it seems like fiction has the propensity to move us to a much greater extent and on a much deeper level. Why is it that a movie, a play, a song or a painting can make us cry and laugh and engrave itself in our memory forever? How many people have you heard saying: “this book (or movie or…) changed my life”? Why is it that art can turn us inside out and make us get up on our feet to take actions on whatever issues the art piece raised? Who cries or laughs while watching the news? Who remembers what they saw or read in yesterday’s news? And we should have all the reasons in the world to be moved by news since it fuels on human dramas: the war, the misery, the pain, the blood, the grief…it talks about the successes and failures of real people that could be your sister or friend, they aren’t actors playing a role nor disembodied novel characters; journalism is about stuff that “matters” happening in our communities, our country, in our world…?
Why is it that an allegory of our lives that is formulated in the chaotic, obscure, unclear, open for interpretation language of poetical figures, that are pure fabrications, seems to reveal better the “truth”, that has more human significance, that makes more sense than the organized “facts,” rational analyses and coherent nominal speeches?
Maybe it’s because any real feeling is in fact unspeakable and cannot be translated in the latter kind of language. Maybe the language of the unspeakable is in fact poetry (in its broader sense). How to express how one feels? Language comes from the mind. The heart has no “mind,” it has no language. Everything we feel inside is expressed AND without words. Then we try to let it out and then we have art.
“Tout art est essentiellement poème (Dichtung)[11]”
So the bottom line is: Which side are you on? Choosing consciousness and living up your feelings is for sure the hardest path (because you are marginalized) but that IS the human experience. On the other hand, if you decide you prefer to avoid FEELING (in general) all your life, know that it will affect all your choices. Take me for example. I’ve spent almost two decades trying to avoid feeling stuff because you get hurt (because when you feel, you care) and everyone learns that pain from very early on. So because repressing feelings is against human nature, you turn to artificial means in order to cope up with your very “sane” denial of life. So I took drugs, I got eating disorders and I made not-so-wise relationships choices. But I’m glad I “woke up” fairly soon and came to realize that the ultimate necessity is to live and take decisions ACCORDINGLY to what my “unspeakable” part is telling me i.e consciousness, intuition and feelings. They’re the only true honest guidance. So cure yourself, it’s time to sober up and be a part of the human experience. Only then, meaningful journalism will be possible on a wide scale.
“As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance to the performance.[12]” –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, p.144, Grove Press, New York, 1961
[1] BECKETT Samuel. L’innommable, p.34, Collection Double, Editions de Minuit, France, 2004.
[2] Americas Watch is an independent organization dedicated to the defense and protection of human rights.
[3] HERMAN S. Edward and CHOMSKY Noam. Manufacturing Consent, p.111-112, Pantheon Books, USA, 1988
[4] DELEUZE Gilles et GUATTARI Félix. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Milles Plateaux, Collection Critique, Editions de Minuit, France, 2004
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] CHOMSKY Noam and FOUCAULT Michel. Human Nature: Justice versus Power (debate), p.1971
[8] NIETZSCHE Friedrich. Ecce Homo, Collection Folio, Gallimard, France, 2005
[9] KIERKEGAARD Soren. Traite du desespoir, Collection Tel, Gallimard, France, 2008
[10] ARENDT Hannah. Le système totalitaire, p.108, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2005
[11] HEIDEGGER Martin. L’origine de l’œuvre d’art, Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, Collection Tel, Gallimard, France, 2004
[12] MILLER Henry. Tropic of Cancer, p.144, Grove Press, New York, 1961
