"The Rewriting Of The Disaster: Thoughts on independent media, new media and the work of mourning" was a talk delivered by New York artist and Independent Media Center Activist Paul Chan on November 15, 2001 at the New Social Geographies and The Politics of Space Conference at Scripps College, CA.
errorThe Rewriting Of The Disaster
Thoughts on independent media, new media and the work of mourning
By Paul Chan
Let me begin with a confession: I feel weak. This is not surprising, knowing what I experienced, and what others experienced with us New Yorkers some time ago: a time that feels both terribly intimate and infinitely distant. It is hard to describe. It is also a unique quality of the disaster, which I will return to later.
Do others feel weak? I do not know. Writer Maurice Blanchot (who shadows this text from title to the final period) wrote, "Weakness is grief weeping without tears." And there is still much grieve. Numbers and analysis are of no use to me, either to dispute or confirm facts. The interconnections between the horror, the politics, and the propaganda are complicated. Almost overwhelming. I feel reluctant to act in this orchestrated descent, with each action and each turn contributing to another fall from an illusionary democratic grace. As if the Seattle police or the National Guard in DC weren’t brutal enough, this civil discourse of force descends into a boisterous rule of the mob.
Do others in the Independent Media Center feel weak? I do not know. But I would never speak for or represent them, either in times of strength or weakness. This is neither modesty nor strategy, but rather the diffused and diverse qualities of the Independent Media Center that makes representation difficult. For those of you who have been living under the dead weight of corporate media, some background about the IMC might be in order. The Independent Media Center began as a coalition of media activist groups covering the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests. From the first Seattle IMC, activists adopted the IMC model, which is itself founded upon the history and experience of other independent media groups, and bought it into their own communities. Today, IMC is a global grassroots network of media artists, producers, and activists committed to using media production and distribution as a tool for promoting social, cultural, and economic justice. There are now over 50 IMCs worldwide, with chapters in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Australia. Every chapter maintains a website and a few even have office space. Each website supports a system of self-publishing that lets anyone send text, photos, audio, and video onto the site and within seconds have it appear on the front page for anyone to see, reply, and add onto. Indymedia has been called a new ecosystem of democratized media. I prefer to call it something less grand but just as remarkable: Indymedia is the Associated Press of the people and its network of websites constitute the world's largest chain of anti-corporate community newspapers.
I am an artist. And artists are, in one way or another, obsessed with form. It is the question of how we give shape to meaning that we obsessively ask. When something as intangible as an idea is put into the service of our desires to create a poster, or a photograph, or a digital video documentary, a transformation takes place. Good form not only pushes that idea into a higher order of meaning. It also gives the material that shaped that idea a new reason to exist. And this is the closest thing we have to magic. For the IMC in particular, and independent media in general, technology has been the key to this magic; specifically, the evolution of the personal computer, the global advance of the internet, and the continuing development of open source programming, make Indymedia not only possible, but vital. The NYC-IMC website is powered by an idiosyncratic variant of an open source programming language originally written by an Australian anarchist collective. A motley crew of anarchists, Marxists, Libertarians, Greens, hacktivists, liberal apologists, and one progressive mason volunteer to keep the countless donated computers and devices like scanners, laser printers, zip drives, and routers in running order. We work off three different operating systems and everything is connected to a dedicated T-1 connection donated by 2600, quite possibly the world's oldest hacker collective. All these vectors of technology combine to give activists a multitude of forms to express, educate and agitate with: from online radio to streaming video; from interactive archives of protest reports to downloadable digital newspapers. This is what is called new media, where the cross pollination of media and content generates a multiplicity of forms, all of which can be refashioned into each other with relative ease. And where all the forms are inextricably connected to the global distribution mode of the Internet.
It is both dreadful and exciting, this new media. On the one hand, it heralds a new, more democratic means of media, making it easier to produce and distribute work. On the other hand, we cannot escape the idea that the technology we use is inextricably connected to a network of forces and transactions that fuel the very powers that make globalization possible. This is, of course, not new. Technology has always played a major role in the expansion of finance markets that dominate our global economic landscape today. But this expansion has not only pushed outward, connecting corporations with nation-states to monopolize the channels of information that is the source of the new capital. It has also expanded inward, creating new layers of technology to mediate every personal mode of communication and production, making it impossible to disassociate the enabling powers of technology to connect, produce, and agitate, with its connection to a political economy that privatizes information, erodes civil liberties, and reduces cultural and social differences to the level of transmittable commodities. This dialectic of technology has proven to be very productive for activists and producers connected to the movement against globalization. Not without irony, we have globalized democratic media. The work continues but the focus have shifted, at least for us in New York, because some time ago, a force in the form of a disaster ruptured the social fabric we have worked so hard to rupture ourselves.
o o o
We who survive the disaster do not survive unscathed. An event so unique in its horror and intensity leaves its mark on us by taking away the very thing that could connect meaning to experience; our language. We are left utterly speechless, unable to make our way out of this aftershock that the disaster creates in its wake. No articulation of speech, no order of language, seems able to contain, much less represent, the reality, and more elusively, the meaning of the disaster. This is why Maurice Blanchot believed the idea of the disaster is that which is excessive to language, that which escapes the reason and form language imposes on experience. Blanchot writes, "When the answer is the absence of any answer, then the question in turn becomes the absence of any questions. Words pass, return to a past which has never spoken, the past of all speech. It is thus that the disaster, although named, does not figure in speech." Speech fails us. No amount of words can bridge the gulf between us, the survivors, and this meaninglessness, which is not the opposite of meaning, but its broken shell. Yes, speech fails us, but everything has a limit, even failure. And so we find a surrogate for our lost speech: the media, who in turn speak for us, to us. What kind of speech does it give us? Not information, since its accumulation does not amount to anything we would remotely call knowledge. Under the pretense of the new, we are instead given the echo of information, which is always "breaking" but always already never new, like the painful repetition of a flashback that revisits the disaster without every knowing it. This phenomenon that immobilizes us with an endless testimony of an echo without meaning or history has an illustrious name: it is trauma.
Media is traumatic. As a network of networks that produce the news by reproducing the new, the media speaks incessantly what we already know, that the disaster is unspeakable. This becomes repeated in endless variations; news bites, color commentary, expert analysis. This is also why it is so intoxicating, for the repetition lulls us like the sound of ocean waves crashing on shore. It gives us a sense of knowingness. Even empowerment.
Everyone says it; from the New Black Panthers to the new Morgan Stanley commercial: Knowledge is power. It resonates with an echo of truth proper to any cliché. Perhaps it’s more than an echo. Does it empower us to know that the Afghan people have been enduring our freedom for quite some time now? Does it help us to make sense of this void of speech, which is also a void in time, to know that Al Qaeda was funded by the US government for the express purpose of driving the former Soviet Union out of Afghanistan? Or that our government's connection to radical fundamentalist groups like Al Qaeda is much more politically intimate than we would dare imagine during this battle between civilization and barbarism? Perhaps. The voice of independent media has been reminding us of other histories and other bodies for quite some time. For as long as media proper, that is to say, corporate media, has practiced the fine art of selling trauma, independent media, or media independent of its own sordid history, has practiced a kind of counterpractice that seeks to generate participation, rather than trauma, by enlightening, enlivening, educating, and above all, empowering. To know that under the guise of preserving freedom our federal government has passed legislation essentially criminalizing political dissent is to empower us to fight against this domestic war to destroy the freedom of speech being waged under its own name. To know that Operation Enduring Freedom is both illegal, under the United Nations Charter of International Law, and irrational, in it's aim to root out a small network of terrorists by carpet-bombing a whole country, gives us the courage to say no in the face of this bloody absurdity. Indeed, knowledge is power. There is no denying the echo of truth we hear. But like any self-respecting echo, there is a certain emptiness in its sound. I believe this comes from a simple fact: we are not masters of the universe. Even those of you who have read everything Noam Chomsky has ever written, including his work in linguistic theory, cannot claim to know beyond the pale of history. It makes no difference whether you are a Marxist or a mason: knowledge has its limits. Worse, only knowledge that can service the progress of power is considered knowledge proper. Those of us in the business of empowering, whether it's students in a classroom or neighbors in a disenfranchised community, can perhaps attest to this. What is unknown or unquantifiable is not useful because they cannot be transformed into a purposeful end, and therefore falls outside the purview of our attention. Knowledge is power only when power dictates the horizon of that knowledge. This is dangerous and Blanchot knew this. In his book, The writing of the disaster, Blanchot writes about the limits of our knowledge as it grapples with events so unspeakable they leave us speechless. He writes about the dangers of this collusion between knowledge and power, an equation that provides us an illusionary answer and a false sense of security. He writes, "Knowledge which goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it, reveals the horror of knowledge, its squalor, the discrete complicity which maintains it in relation with the most unsupportable aspects of power." The question for Blanchot, and now us, is how do we come to understand a disaster, this rip in reason, without servicing a power that will come to use this understanding for its own end? How do we know horror without being horror?
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Mourning always follows trauma. The work of mourning is grief's way of giving expression to an offence to reason made real. And it is perhaps the closest we, as survivors, come to an understanding. But this understanding does not come as knowledge. Instead, mourning works to give shape to trauma through the medium of remembrance. In New York City, the most poignant reminder of what took place on September 11th is not ground zero, or the smell, or the maddening persistence of police sirens. It is the flyers. Thousands of letter sized missing person flyers in a mosaic of styles and colors continue to haunt the streets of Manhattan, on lampposts, sides of buildings, mailboxes, even on subway cars. They always show a picture of the missing from a family album. Or they use a snapshot taken by friends. The captions that accompany the picture are invariably simple and direct: name, height, age, type of clothing they last wore, what floor they worked on in the twin towers. But what I find most telling is the consistent additional caption of whom the missing person is survived by. Does it help the search for the missing to know whom they have left behind? Unlikely. But this is precisely what makes the flyers compelling. They are not simply a call to action (please help me find my father, my mother, my lover, or my friend). They are also an act of remembrance (please help me remember my father, my mother, my lover, or my friend). Like flipsides of the same coin, the two faces of the flyer each speak in a different voice that together give semblance to an experience beyond language. Knowledge cannot do it alone. It is up to memory to remember what knowledge cannot grasp, so we do not forget the questions that we cannot answer.
The heart of this enigma holds the promise of a kind of media that is new, independent, and other. Asking questions that reach beyond our means of answering them have historically been the job of art, literature, and that old horse, philosophy. Can we perhaps recruit media for this task as well? A new world demands a new language. Technology has given us the reach and the means, politics, the will. What remains is the gift of the disaster.