Courtesy: PTI
Ashoak Upadhyay
“Language isn’t just a means of communication: it’s a reservoir of memory, tradition and heritage”. Sinan Antoon
“in addition to the lives we lead, we also live lives we don’t lead.” HJ Goodall Jr.
A
little over a month ago the Press Club of Mumbai, issued a petition demanding the government step in to prevent media owners retrenching staff, skimming off their wages or emoluments at a time when not only was the pandemic taking its toll but those brave hearts now facing the axe were at the front lines reporting on the deadly course the virus was weaving through human densities.
The PC has been increasingly turning what it had long been meant to be: an advocacy group for journalists across media; for decades till some years back it served as a metonym for a convenient and cheap watering hole for the frayed nerves of the guardians of freedoms and purveyors of news and opinions that kept the flames of that freedom ablaze. But increasingly it has taken on a role of notifying the state and central government of infringements and violent trespasses by arms of the state itself and by elements in civil society inspired by dog whistles from above, to beat up a couple of reporters or TV camerapersons. One can safely assume that so far it and the victimized reporters had the backing, however silent of media owners who pay them to do their job however unpleasant that might have seemed to those raining down their sticks on conscientious heads. Now the PC trains the spotlight on those owners themselves; the body is “dismayed and shocked at the announcement of several media houses shutting operations, firing staff and announcing mid-stream and unilateral cuts in salaries of journalists and other employees. Almost acting on cue, several of these media groups, citing restricted business operations and falling revenue, have put hundreds of journalists and other employees on the streets in the middle of the curfew period.”
Who is listening? Media owners answer to the call of a more elevated authority than a government directive frowning upon such actions in times of the pandemic. Their actions may be considered, as the PC claims “flagrant violations” of those directions but media owners follow a law that is less corporeal than a written directive but more omnipotent because it underwrites the way we live. The “market” and its laws have long governed media even if journalists have tended to believe in a more exalted and transcendent self-image. When business is falling, revenues drop, costs have to be cut; what better place to carry the axe to than the very input that brings in those revenues? In the sacking, trimming of perks or privileges, the message is not just focused on a sense of that input’s falling exchange value but on the product of their labour itself. News, as the output of this particular labour is discounted; the pandemic is at fault and, the media owners, it could be bruited about, are simply following what has long been passed off as common sense or rational objectives.
The idea that news is a commodity like any other, or that its producers and disseminators are likewise embodiments of exchange value has long been held to be the case. Till about the 1980s, that commodification was disguised by a thick fig leaf of a belief that as the fourth estate, the Press was a guardian of democracy, constitutional values. It was an Institution no less important than the Executive, Legislature, Judiciary; an arm of a secular and civil society with a keen eye out for infringements on freedoms, dangers to democracy. It helped that in the early years of post-Independence India, the Nehruvian goals for a backward nation seemed worth applauding even if the nation-state was not above baring its fangs as it did in rejecting a plebiscite on Kashmir, as it did in dismissing the first communist government in Kerala. The relationship between Editors echoing the lofty ideals of a Nehruvian secularism, non-aligned foreign policy and the development model slowly gathering speed under the five year plans defined the cosy relationship between the state power and the Press; there may have been blips during the license raj with the owners but the fact that they stayed behind their boardroom doors counting all their money helped since the public interactive face of the Press was the editor and the journalist, many of whom the editor perched in the mist of his lofty mission as the lading representative of the fourth estate would not have recognized.
Never mind. At the start of the day, each day, news was the bailiwick of the news editors not the Editor. Reading the news was like eating the hole of a doughnut; wading through the editorial comments was inspired snore-mongering fits and dull headaches. But the romance of the idea of Press freedom continued pivoting on the comfortable profits for the family-owned businesses and an enthusiastic acceptance of state policy-as-mission;—even when the nation-state pampered its territorial ambitions displayed vigorously as patriotism. All the drum-beating was par for the course. India was an emergent power, engaged in keeping the peace through war guided by the legacies of the Nehruvian ideals of secularism and non-alignment with an affinity to the Soviet Union. The mixed economy and the license raj kept the capitalist in check. At the end of the day, the Fourth estate fluttered its wings as the ultimate guardian and conscience keeper of democracy itself. The pen was mightier than the sword.
Wasn’t it?
That illusion kept vaunted Editors on their perch of self-acquired grandiosity in many mainstream print media—till the 1980s when the young scion of the biggest print medium of the time, took over and stripped away he fig leaf and exposed the grandiosity in all its naked vulnerabilities. Times were a-changing! The first baby steps towards a neo-liberal order divested eventually of all the trappings of state-controlled economic activity were being taken; the air carried a whiff of that new age of realism driven by the new technology of computers! A new crop of leaders entering the portals of state power. A heady moment of a new becoming! The age of global capital! The newspaper, according to the heir-apparent was not different from any other product; news was like toothpaste or a mango. You consume the one and await the next. He would have approved The Rolling Stones disgracefully misogynist hit song of the 1960s asking: “Who wants yesterday’s paper/who wants yesterday’s girl…” and the answer, “Nobody in the world”
That was the message beamed into the editorial wing of the largest circulation daily in the country?Today’s news is tomorrow’s vegetable-wrapping paper. And if “news” was a commodity like any other, to use and dispose, a commodity with transient utility encoded in and limited by its mass consumption value, it had to obey the laws of the market. And if it did that then the producers of that product had to be subjected likewise to the dictates and laws of capitalism and generalized commodification.
You could be forgiven for thinking the young scion setting the pace and markers for a brutally trivialised realism that journalists would have to live with, had read Walter Benjamin who had delineated the contours of information as the new form of communication vis a vis storytelling. Perhaps he had read this: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.” (Illuminations: 90). News, the scion would intone, is like soap or words to that effect. And like soap it vanishes from memory and consciousness once it has outlived its moment.
Perhaps this was unpalatable to the torch-bearers of democracy, who had for so long, basked in the groves of a seemingly autonomous ‘Fourth Estate’, with elbow room enough to exercise their ‘rights’ to educate, inform and impart wisdom. Carrying the burden of their profession as arbiters of information with self-regard and little skepticism they labored away serving the citizens’ ‘right to know.’ The skeptics among them would have known; if you could find any. In any case, they were to soon learn: the ‘educator’ was going to learn that information was not knowledge and that information was contingent on the moment and tomorrow’s fading memory and therefore, critical to their enterprise.Information was produced, not as fake news but as a consumable and they were simply its transmitters not arbiters.
The impact of that episteme thrown at the ‘fourth estate’ by the soon-to-be-owner of the largest circulation English daily and emulated eagerly by other owners fretting at their social distance from the affairs of the newsroom was immediately apparent and palpable. The self-image of the Editorsahab and the journalist took a drubbing: the hallowed Chinese Wall between the management and the Editorial spaces was breached. The effect was not long in coming: every aspect of the editorial sections from the Editor down were turned into the components of the news factory.
And if the factory produced news-as-information who was to define the frontiers of news? Not the editor sahab no! The market, the bright=eyed management whiz kids sired in air-conditioned classrooms on what the ‘consumer’ wants, trained in probing the desires seeking consummation, desires that they knew were manufactured but were supposed to pass off as the inevitable expression of ‘Demand’ from an aspirational urbanized middle class. So the commodification of news proceeded merrily tracking what was described solemnly by the marketing wunderkind coming out of management schools as “public taste”. The consumer, it was felt, did not want ‘serious’ tragic stuff all the time, first thing in the morning, or on trains returning home from a grueling day at the office. Entertainment was as important as information about trashy politicians, death and hunger. The village was dirty and let off an odoriferous vapour of failure and non-achievement. Its backwardness puts off readers: Not good for circulation! Stick to the polished, the sophisticates, the theatricals, the spectacle of life, sell happiness and the goods that mitigate despair!
In this brave new world of in-your-face capitalism, journalists became ambidextrous: particularly new appointee-Editors that took their positions burdened even if lightly, by a conscience that their jobs also involved a vocation, a vocation of peering under the surface at life crawling in the muck. So some Editors and the newspapers they lead are guided by the left hand in showcasing stories of suffering while the right hand pushes for the dissemination of information as Spectacle. So a newspaper typically provides what it thinks is a basket of options to cater for varying tastes: stories from hell for the conscience-stricken and others for the despairing in need of narcissistic healing. But they are not mutually exclusive. They connect interstitially: at the subliminal level both are elements of Spectacle. As Spectacle, both news of lynching and the glitter of Bollywood are products of an assembly-line mass production: to be simply ‘consumed’ and forgotten.
This ambidexterity is not the virtue it seems at first glance. It is not an option for a form of praxis to change anything. It is part of the same information-as-communication mode that Benjamin spoke about. It exists in the moment. It will not survive it: yesterday’s apocalypse will be replaced by another one tomorrow. So that even doom becomes spectacle. The Covid-19 pandemic handling in this country has played havoc with the poor migrant worker unsheltered from the exploitation by ruthless mafia dons, contractors acting on behalf of capitalists; you will find stories about them almost every day—and after a while you may not find them because the ambidextrous editors have decided not to bore you further with ‘stale’ products. And you will have the option of flipping the pages to arrive and dwell upon your favourite sport stars or the profound lives of the glitterati in the hope that they light up your own.
The mainstream media play the role of an organic intellectual of capitalism’s constitutive social relations, an interlocking mesh of exploitation and critically, of alienation from the very life that produces them. These interlocking grids are represented as images that together and singly configure what Guy Debord termed, the Society of the Spectacle. You may see one morning as you unfold the daily, screaming headlines about a dalit lynched; African students denied housing because they were thought to be criminals, a huge dowry demanded because the young girl was dark-skinned. And a question in your nerves is lit. Then your eyes wander down to the bottom of the page before you flip it and in that ‘Solus’ position so critical for advertisers is a vacuous whitened face with red lips slightly parted inviting you to a cream that can make you fair and lovely as Savarnas are meant to be. A commentary on the editorial pages by a pontificating radical will denounce caste oppression alongside another condemning state repression and soon you flip pages past government advertisments and Tender notices to gaze upon the legedermains of superstar cricketers or glamorous badminton players in short skirts sporting Nike-logoed caps..
The image is sacred; truth loses meaning in a welter of word-and visual-images that appear as spectacle to be scrolled over and then forgotten; you are wired for the next spectacle.
The Spectacle invisibilises capital’s interstices that produce it. As Debord reminded us it is “capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.” The spectacle distracts; the lynching visual evokes a minor blench then the advertisement below distracts; the media is a carnival of distracting images that lead to a hall of mirrors in which to dwell upon one’s image. The self-image journalists and Editors live with of editorial independence is part of that distraction of the spectacle in the hall of mirrors and that, in India leastways was shattered by the aforementioned scion.
Come to think of it, he should be thanked for having stripped away the curtains and revealed the spectacle for what it is– capitalism.
Not enough though. What remain hidden in plain sight are the profounder and more pervasive epistemologies of hegemony that mainstream media and their arms in the digital or electronic space sell the reader/viewer. These epistemologies help turn even those notes of dissent that occasionally appear on some pages as so much distraction; perhaps they are also valorized as signs of a vibrant democracy. But both as spectacle and as glimpses of some truth waiting to be born they are absorbed into the larger and hidden narrative of national security, national interest and its subsets encapsulated by the magicality of ‘Growth’. So long as such dissent does not question the legitimacy of the Nation-State, so long as the borders of the arena of parliamentary/electoral politics are respected and so long as as the possibilities of an alternative political sphere that encompasses that publicness both Gandhi and Tagore wished for are not endorsed, dissent can sell as a commodity. The radical writers on the Editorial pages can be feted; find assignments in elite universities win international awards. But those that question the legitimacy of the capitalist mode of production and exploitation of natural resources as necessary conditions for a better future, or draw attention to what Ashis Nandy called the ‘illegitimacy of nationalism’ may be ignored, or chased away from the public eye such as the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalists from Kashmir.
Mainstream media become sites for spectacle transmission, and by implication, of exploitative social relations. They defend and perpetuate nationalism that both Gandhi and Tagore condemned, a nationalism based on militarism, sectarian identities, debasement of the vulnerable seeking self-determination.This chest-thumping and flag-waving works to transmit an aggressiveness as self-confidence in “foreign” policy, enflames jingoistic sentiments and passions in a variety of discursive modes> These range, as one has witnessed on some television channels from outright ‘shoot-first-talk-later’hostility to a softer passive-aggressive militarism dressed in the drag of diplomacy. The rationale for both is purportedly forced upon us by raving terrorists, jihadists from across the border, justifying in both cases the need for territorial hostilities military occupations of disaffected states as ‘heroically patriotic’ deeds.
The fourth estate romanticized violence and militarism. Killing is valorized as ‘defense’ of the nation, the army is romanticized as paragons of obedience, discipline, courage and of course ‘nationalism.’
And it is not new or restricted to India or the present. The fourth estate has always been the protector of the Nation-State and its ontologies of aggression even in the name of peace and revolution.And the history of the fourth estate as drum beaters of the nation-state and violence has accumulated all through the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries after a concatenation of events—technology, the emergence of confident nation-states in Europe, rise of incipient colonialist ambitions had ploughed the ground for a press as we understand it—a capitalist enterprise invested with the discourse of nation-state building and hegemonic national identities. The term ‘fourth estate’ popularised by the French Revolution was re-fashioned mid-nineteenth century by various English commentators, including Thomas Macaulay who would point to the gallery in Parliament where journalists sat as the ‘fourth estate of the realm.’By then the news media as ‘residents’ of that estate, were on their way into history as amplifiers of both modernity and the nation-state underwritten by bourgeois-capitalist interests already globalizing with its agendas for self-preservation based on violence and war.
The hegemonic discourses transmitted by the Press run deeper. The media imbibes and perpetuates the Western-centric notion of Time as a linear movement towards a better future prefigured by Science and Rationality as milestones of that march. And History, as a discipline of study guides the less developed, undeveloped, backward world. March towards what? A future that was the West’s past. And since global capitalism had engineered that past in the West so would it do for India. And the Development agenda kicked in; an agenda of Progress defined by a telos of History that would keep us forever behind the Western world as our future tried to catch up with its past.
Mainstream media endorses a developmental agenda that segues into and serves global capitalism.
Its tropes were the dubious legacies handed down to us by the “imperialism of categories” that forced us to absorb the history of western-power pillage and ruthless exploitation of indigenous societies and Nature’s bounties; a universal history of infamy encoded as the essential truths of mankind’s march towards utopia. As History.
In effect then, mainstream media propagate that development “model” that rests on the same discourse of Time’s relentless desecration of natural resources for the service of the ‘market’, for the conversion of indigenous peoples into wage labour for global capitalism and its compradors:Progress as Economic Growth measured by the “Little Big Number.” Mainstream media sells its readers the spectacle of “growth” as truth under the rubric of “There’s No Alternative.” Or to return to Debord with his own emphasis as”instruments of unification.” All opposed to this TINA are either anti-nationalistic or “backward” “primitive” such as the adivasis seeking to reclaim their forests and ownership of natural resources.
Consent is manufactured; consent for a way of life that desacralizes life, pits human against non-human, essentialises the Rational, ridicules the sacred, frog-marching a pluralist society with equal differences and its own cycles of Time into a drab homogeneity singing hallelujahs to a global capitalist order, a strong hegemonic nation-state and even a Hindutva discourse that sits very comfortably at the same perch with its dog whistles. Liberals may bemoan the death of farmers despairing of their precarity; they will also bemoan as backward the life of the farmer. They will denounce violence against poor Muslim dairy farmers but also fret at the skull cap, beard and the hijab as markers of an illiberal backward society. .
These hegemonising epistemologies attenuate the Present to a single narrative of development towards a better future; possibilities of other Presents are condemned as anti-national, airy-fairy, anti-modern. Salvation is not for now. The secularity of the developmental message is only a polish on the religiosity, a Judeo-Christian religiosity at that, of deliverance in the future. And that future will be like the Past of the West. Our present is nothing more than a struggle to catch up with someone else’s past.
And in the meantime, in this attenuated present, narcissism leavens the struggles towards that Future-Past but not without a heavy price of extreme nihilistic despair. The present then is dystopic. We live in a brave new world scripted by Aldous Huxley. If spectacle is truth, then endless pleasure-seeking is the way to happiness. And even here, the media play the role of the market place selling choice wares for satiation: an endless variation on the same products, some to tip-toe by (encounter deaths in Kashmir or Nagaland, migrant workers walking with their rightlessness)others, Bollywood chatter to gulp down with smirks of satisfaction. As in the great novel, story-telling is out as is literature as forms of contemplation and questioning; complexities confuse; enigmas need elaboration or to be “simply explained.” Mystery of language or a visual is replaced with the pure gesture; the artist is venerated for her looks, lifestyles and not condemned for the banal prettiness of her work. In an age of spectacle who wants to think. Imagine,Question?
We may want to believe that the pandemic is redefining capitalism itself; that its heartlessness will take a beating as labour shortages dry up its profiteering. But the question that will need to be asked is this: is there any way a free press can emerge in this attenuated Present that foregrounds thought, imagination questioning and most of all, the need for a moral/spiritual core to unite the human and the nonhuman in a creative unity of differences? Does it already exist?
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Benjamin, Walter: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn.Schocken Books. New York.
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