It’s about that time in the news cycle when the amphetamine of outrage begins to fade into the opiate of despair.
And I say “news cycle” not to diminish events, but to relay them more accurately; because that is where you and I and virtually everyone who may ever stumble on these words resides: in the cycle of news consumption, a position we sometimes forget in our proverbial cave of projections, believing ourselves to be in the actual thick of things. We are in something, that’s for sure, just not in that.
I’m thinking about Günther Anders, the Jewish philosopher I mentioned in connection to nuclear war. I’m thinking of what he wrote while watching the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel; how he chose moral self-exile from his own community in Vienna because of what he saw on the news. I’m thinking of how, in that very same news cycle, someone else was watching and seething with rage, someone we would later know by the infamous name of Bin Laden.
I’m thinking of Anders’ media theories and his preferred way of writing, that very Hebraic mode of prophetic exaggeration.
Listen to what he had to say in 1979: “in the age of electronic media there is no longer any place where one cannot be informed/dis-informed [informiert bzw. desinformiert], or, more accurately, where one may escape the obligation to be informed/dis-informed, therefore no provinces – there are also no places where one’s ears are not filled with idle chatter concerning the “loss of meaning” by vulgar philosophers, psychoanalysts, and radio preachers, or “automatic consolation tapes,” selected via telephone at one’s individual option.” It reads far from a fair-minded assessment, but who among us cannot recognize the truth beneath his words in everything around us today? As one of his interpreters put it, “we are at work at every moment in the creation of ourselves in the image of mass media, now named social media.”
So, we wonder what to say and how to say it in response to world events, and we worry about what even wondering about our words might communicate. And we turn mute.
x
“The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication – this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange).” [Jean Baudrillard]
A thought popped into my head while watching RICHLAND – a thought that echoes a “nuclear feeling” that James Acord acquired during his time in Richland: that media arts might actually allow for (“transmute”) better communication than we think.
If I were the type of person who would raise his hand during a Q&A, I would have asked @komsomol.films last night how far the mediating power of documentary making itself might allow for deeper presence and gentler listening in places of stark difference. Would spending time in Richland without a camera and mic in hand generate the same affect?
I ask this because we are in reactive times, and I think I’m looking for tools to keep myself grounded. And though I heard a lot of rhetoric among many of RICHLAND’s cast of characters that would normally set me off, a mark of good art is the gravity it brings to the moment.
That’s what it means, I suppose, to be gripped.