Media as Infrastructural Translation

The articulation of ritual, juridical and scientific scenes I’ve been working on the last few posts open up a new approach for a discourse on media. I’ve been working with the ritual/myth binary, grounded in imperative exchange with the center, for quite a while: ritual enacts an originally sacrificial exchange with the being at the center and myth accounts for when the promises extracted from the center are not fulfilled. A tribe hunts deer, so their deity is the deer-god—in killing the “token” deer, the group brings the kill to the ritual center, returns some of it to the deer-god (the “type” deer) and, more generally, treats the meal with honor and respect, as the gift that it is. The deer-god, in return, agrees to donate some of its flock, or people, to the tribe. Sometimes the deer are hard to come by—how could that be? Here’s where myth enters, building very precisely on top of and out of ritual—the two, in fact, are articulated in prayer, recited during the ritual—some failure to fulfill the terms on the part of the members of group is the most likely explanation, and this leads to all kinds of inter-personal dynamic (who is guilty? who let us down?) and introspection (was it me? was my will crooked even if my actions were straight? Etc.).

The creation of juridical structures under monarch/judges, independent of, but certainly still embedded in and imitative of, ritual, is generative of entirely new theological, scientific and literary discourses. I wonder how much of an exaggeration it would be to say that every single literary work depends upon some “case”—some situation in which “justice” is demanded, denied, received, tested, questioned, literally or metaphorically. Look even at lyrics and love poetry and see how often charges of “betrayal” or a failure to fulfill some obligation, some violation of trust, all of which invoke some image of juridical proceedings, some demand that someone judge between us, are at the center of the discourse. In a ritual order, resentment is directed at those who perform the ritual incorrectly; in a juridical order, resentment is directed at those who don’t deal justly, i.e., in terms that would be affirmed by the authoritative judge we imagine through models from our tradition. There can’t be any more important question, then, than what it means to deal justly—with God, with others, with our social order, with ourselves. All of our narratives are attempts to answer that question, or to teach each others how to prepare themselves to do so.

A just order, in fact, would be (by definition) one in which judges ruled: there are institutional relations in which everyone is allotted a role governed by tacit and explicit conventions and rules and disagreements and complaints are either settled informally, on the model of how they would have been settled formally, or they are taken to court, to be settled formally. Everything—property damage, adultery and other sexual transgressions, slander, fraud, murder, could all be handled this way—and once was, more or less. This order was undone by the claim that the judge could himself be unjust, and in need of judgment; once this case is made (also in juridical terms—the king is marked as a criminal, a traitor, etc.) then we have “politics,” meta-juridical procedures for ensuring that whoever is judge for the moment can in turn be judged. This in turn leads to the creation of whole new disciplines dedicated to determining the logic or grammar by which the judge can be judged, by whom, in accord with which procedures ensuring that the judges of the judge could themselves withstand judgment in turn.

This is really a form of disorder that I think is specific to the “West,” and responsible for its glories and well as its deformities and pathologies. I take a minimal definition of the “West”: in the West I include all the successor states of the Western Roman Empire. There might be some boundary issues involved in applying this definition but I think it would hold up pretty well and be illuminating. Rome articulated the three social orders that were bold enough to place the occupant of the center on permanent trial: the Greek city-states, fiercely anti-monarchical in their prime; the Judaic quasi-nation, gaining and losing limited forms of sovereignty that never recognized the imperial order imposing those limitations as fully legitimate; and the Roman Republic itself. If there’s one thing that all the citizens of the West have in common, and that differentiates them from “the rest,” it is being on perpetual hair-trigger to denounce as illegitimate whoever happens to occupy the center at the moment.  Insofar as we are of the West, we feel it is our obligation to be so prepared. Any reordering of the West will have to address this, but that won’t be done effectively if we forget that this permanent, inbred suspicion of the center results from the ancient empires’ creation of masses of non-people existing outside of the sacred order. We will not be able to uncommemorate the recognition of the victim of violence who, in certain events, stood in for those masses and bore the brunt of imperial violence in their name, even if unintentionally and retrospectively.

That may have been a digression, but it may also help us to zoom in on the functioning of the media. The media is speech and writing publicized, transmitted, broadcast and preserved through technological and pedagogical—scenic—infrastructures. We have “media” rather than “myth” or “scripture” insofar as we have propagated scenes purporting to judge those who judge those who... That is, the “media” corresponds to desacralized power, and is organized constitutively and pre-emptively against the “tyrant,” that creation of desacralized power. In the West, the Christian forms of kingship served as a bulwark against the outbreak of the media, while the means for deposing those kings and demolishing those forms of kingship were created along with more rapid and expansive forms of media. I’m not going to go through the history of media from the Renaissance to the present but something fundamentally new happens with the emergence of the “press” in the 19th century. Now, all authorities, from the highest government official to the lowliest impoverished parent, can be placed on trial, and are placed on trial, in a way and at a rate that follows inscrutable battles within the bowels of the state and obeys the rigor of publishing deadlines and subscription numbers. All of the sensory and psychological transformations we can trace from the printing press and through the universalization of literacy and “print capitalism” to today’s electronic media can be discussed in terms of each individual being placed with ever greater regularity and urgency on perpetual “call” to add one’s own voice in judgment to the crowd directed at the target of the day—but also in terms of the intense desire to be exempt from that judgment. The technology increases the rapidity with which we move from one scene to the next and oscillate between the positions of spectator and participant. The unbridgeable gap from the attitude of readiness to condemn and one’s complete inability to affect events is filled with simulations, identifications and antagonisms that one must always assign a virtual proxy to perceive, enjoy and engage. Much of the media generated consumer culture, meanwhile, is the ongoing promise to make us the kind of person who has an a priori stamp of approval from the crowd and therefore need not fear the roving scenes of judgment—you can even hope to repel judgments and boomerang them back on those who would make them. This is what media generated scenes entail, and we could examine the way mass-produced fictions provide revenge, vindication and salvation fantasies of realizing these virtualities in forms marked by regression to ritual order while occasionally (when some rogue operator can momentarily commandeer the machinery) alienating us from and satirizing those fantasies. There is, now, a more scientific or disciplinary component to the media, insofar as it is curated and organized through algorithms and the authority of the disciplines is used to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable positions, but this just refines the practice of instigating increasingly automated and closely controlled simulated “citizen’s arrests,” provocations, and confidential informants.

The press was no less dishonest and scurrilous than the media today—there is no call for any nostalgia here. All the media does is stage trials and invite the audience to participate vicariously as judges, jurors and, increasingly, enforcers. This cannot be fixed. The current mania among leftists to stem “disinformation” is breathtakingly dishonest and itself the greatest source of disinformation today but this strategy has been chosen because the previous mechanism for control of information—large monopolized media companies with professionalized staffs working in close but deniable collaboration with their government “sources”—has broken down, and large scale coordination may, in fact be seriously disabled by the proliferation of incommensurable sources of information. On some level, we all have to be able to say that the same thing happened, and it has become easy to imagine that becoming impossible. But the juridical framing of the media might provide a clue to reforming it, by which I mean completely shutting it down and replacing it with something radically different.

The juridical provides the frame for determining what counts as “news,” or what the public has a “right to know.” No one, I think, will claim to have a right to know what his neighbors discuss at their dinner table, because it’s not a public proceeding, which is to say, not a proceeding subject to some kind of formal, juridical oversight. If my neighbor beats his wife and the police come and haul him away, it has become part of a public proceeding, and now I have a right to know, which is to say, to enter the case vicariously as judge or juror, surround the scene, bay for justice. But we only expect to be provided with this spectacle because we feel ourselves to be called upon sit in judgment upon the judges, and those who judge the judges, and so on (one media company will now call upon us to sit in judgment on another media company). That’s the assumption behind a public proceeding. We eliminate the spectacle by insisting that only those with standing in a case, or called in to exercise some institutionally sanctioned judgment, need to know what has happened. If there’s some form of neighborhood justice that I am obliged to participate in, then my neighbor’s treatment of his wife might very well be my business; but otherwise, not. The juridical system still seems capable of imposing closure and secrecy on cases being judged when it really wants to, so the principle could be extended. If I help to render judgment as I am duly obliged to in my neighbor’s case, can I now speak about it to others, and allow word to spread, thereby defeating the entire purpose of making proceedings “privileged,” rather than “public”? I probably couldn’t be stopped from doing so, but part of such a regrounding of the juridical would be the right granted to my neighbors—maybe the husband and wife themselves, but maybe members of their families or others carrying out their sworn duty—to sue me for unauthorized disclosures or misrepresentations. But how would injustices be exposed? They might not be, but a robust appeals system that remedies them would be better. A remaking of the juridical order drawing upon existing institutions with some modifications—making libel and defamation laws more robust, expanding the range of “gag orders”—could easily be imagined that might accommodate the privileging of the privileged scene.

What would the vast media infrastructure we now have be for, if not to continually alert us to and position us in relation to the latest injustice perpetrated by some tyrant? Would we all just “talk about our day”? Are we to expect that we all spend the time returned to us as we are released from the compulsion to remain glued to screens boning up on the classics? What follows from the determination that a desire to know about events which you are not in fact required to judge is the very definition of “obscene”? For that matter, if there are still to be fictional narratives, what are they to be about? What people will not only have a “right” to know but need to know are the actions through which they are being included in the work of ensuring social continuity. I’ll repeat in abbreviated form the alternative to media spectacles I hypothesized in Anthropomorphics. Those in charge of institutions are in charge of those institutions insofar as they select their successors and once they grasp that responsibility they will want to choose successors who will be equipped to choose their successors, and so on. This will be universally recognized as an extremely important decision, and an extremely difficult and dramatic one. There would be twists and turns—changed circumstances, or new assessments on the part of those in charge would elevate the hopes of one candidate and dash those of another—but the infrastructure of the scene would be such that no one could display any emotion other than a desire that the best candidate be chosen (a form of attitude management we are familiar with from well-run sporting events and, for that matter, beauty pageants). Candidates will be selected and tested, which means that institutions will be designed so as to produce such candidates, from top to bottom—whether we have presidents or kings, or CEOs or something new, there will continue to be social “heights” focused, as I have been arguing recently, on data security, and they will set the tone for the more local events.

Media obscenities would be completely unacceptable simply as a matter of the enormous data spillage and spoilage it involves—the media spectacles we gobble up today would provoke a visceral disgust. The practices of succession would be carefully staged, orchestrated and choreographed; they will reach deep into all social practices and disciplinary spaces which would be designed so as to enact their own succession practices and produce candidates. Genuinely newsworthy events, like those regarding public safety, would be dealt with in a privileged manner but represented within the frame of putting forward candidates for succession. Families and regions would engage in vigorous competition over their suitability to produce candidates—they would celebrate and take pride in the selection of candidates they produce, and take a keen interest in the probity and relevance of the selection process. In this case, carefully curated and authorized representations of privileged processes might be submitted to public scrutiny, but in accord with a timing and in a context that eliminates any sense that there is a “public” being called upon to judge in unison (most of us would probably be able to discuss and make judgments upon what were highly controversial cases years ago in a calm, disinterested manner); at the same time, that each system would want to show all its “systems” to be in order would create a sense of responsibility for handling matters of justice. Those in charge would have access to the information needed to preside over scenes of succession, and since the stakes of getting it right would enormous, attempts to falsify the records surrounding the promotion of candidates would be impossible. Today the media translates an infrastructure predicated upon an infinite and accelerating practice of vicarious judgment; under inscripto-punctualism. an infrastructure predicated upon the privileging of the privileged scene would produce a world of shared performances and narratives that would be both extremely captivating and unironically wholesome. It would maximize the sporting and competitive spirit so evident in the West (perhaps a positive result of its hostility to any occupant of the center) and the media technology we have, including social media, is with the necessary modifications especially well-suited to projecting such scenes of succession.