Last week an interviewer asked me who finds value in what I write and who “learns” from me. The interviewer added that “they didn’t learn anything so they were wondering if anyone did”. Starting from the fact that I have nothing to teach (duh!), I have been thinking about the role of media in the administration of critique and dissent. In turn, as is often the case, I have been left with more unanswered questions of my own.
- Who cares?
- What matters? (Nothing? Some “stuff” matters? Who gets to define that?)
- Whose feelings?
- Whose discomfort? and simultaneously, is there a discomfort threshold? (“I can bear so much of your rhetoric, after you passed the discomfort threshold of what is allowed as “critique” or resistance”, etc).
- “Crying without tears” is often referred to as a mockery towards the performance of emotion without emotion but what happens when, after crying all the tears one is left with a rictus and how is that represented in media? (mostly, the tearful trope of the wronged member of the dominant culture who is played against the “callous” outsider)
- Anger as both the shunning and the path towards political gain (whose anger is a site of obturation and whose anger is an electoral gain?)
- Silence. Silence. Silence. (the administration of “topics that matter” etc)
- How much of what passes for my local mainstream media is nothing more than “cognitive pollution”?
- Mainstream media as a site of strategic/ active isolation (nobody is expressing what you feel or live or experience; hence, you are alone; hence, you are wrong, etc).
- How does the dominant culture operate in “the administration of dispute” (whose voice is allowed to break the silence and subsequently, the management of dissent in media).
- The editor as a ruling class (again, on the management of dissent, how is this dissent allowed to be expressed and how is that administration enacted).
I am fine with the fact that nobody “learns” from me. Actually, I’d be alarmed if anyone thought I have something to teach to begin with (I am not comfortable with being anyone’s “didactic experience”). However, I am left with the ultimate question: how do we subvert the role of media as one of the main sites of epistemic injustice?
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