[Reader-list] Witnessing Madness 24/7

[Aarti Sethi]

Also posted on www.kafila.org


What is *happening*? The Taj is burning, gunmen are shooting, the police is
storming, the Oberoi is burning, the army is descending, people are running;
bleeding; dying. Barkha Dutt is talking, Rajdeep Sardesai is talking,
Srinivasan Jain is talking, Vilas Rao Deshmukh is talking, L.K Advani is
talking, Manmohan Singh is talking, Vikram Chandra is talking, an
eye-witness is talking, the army chief is talking, the naval chief is
talking, an ex-hostage is talking, the terrorist is talking, Javed Jaffery
is talking, Arnab Goswami is talking, is anyone even listening, is everyone
listening—But what is *happening*?

Over the last two days I am struck dumb by the spectacle of violence
unfolding on the television screen. And yet as the spectacle lays bare the
poverty of language, we rush to pitch words into, somehow fill with
phrases/sentences/metaphors, this well of silence lest it engulf us all…It
seems to me that we have been seized by a collective horror of being
stripped of our descriptive prowess—how else do we explain the incessant
media chatter, the barrage of words emanating ceaselessly, round the clock,
24/7, slipping, sliding, enfolding the event, attempting to trap it in a
mesh of words. Who knows who or what might slip in through a chink in this
barricade of speech, through a few unguarded seconds of silence?

In the era of twenty-four news and live televisual broadcasts, the 'mute
spectator', the witness rendered linguistically paralyzed by what unfolds
before her, is lost. And when words fail, even of those whose job it is to
supply them, there are always the images. The images are centrifugal, they
gather words around them. When no words can explain what is *happening*,
they can describe what we are *seeing*. The images can be linked to other
images, to other devastations, to other iconic symbols of power laid waste.
Without the images, there are no words. To say something, anything, we must
be able to *see* it.

We must be at '*the scene of the action*',  in the '*war zone*', pay
attention when the '*the location of action has shifted*', rest assured
that, 'CNN-IBN/NDTV/Times Now *will be there every step of the way*',
bringing us, '*live action as it unfolds*', '*continuous non-stop coverage*',
up close to, '*the face of terror*', as, '*locations are sanitized*', and we
prepare for, '*the final assault*.'

And we remember, as those who do this want us to remember, another day and
another mutilated skyline 6 years ago. This is always-already the day that,
'*transforms a nation's thinking*', a '*decisive moment of no return*', the
day, '*India gets tough on terror*', shows its willingness to, '*take what
measures are needed to protect our people*'. This is a '*global tragedy*', '
*India's 9/11*', the '*final straw*'. Indeed it is. That other skyline
produced two endless wars, over 300,000 dead, the US Patriot Act, the
out-sourcing of torture, the globalisation of terror. That skyline gave us
London 2005, Madrid 2004, Bali 2005, Istanbul 2003, Casablanca 2007. And
now, it appears, Mumbai 2008. What will we do with it, what will it bring
us?

For we are no longer in the realm of cause and effect, of injustice and
retribution, of revenge and redistribution, of politics and ideology. For as
Baudrillard, writing in the wake of September 11, reminds us,

"Terror against terror—there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now
far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic
cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy) does not
aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to
radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the
world) through force."

This is not the revolutionary violence we understand. It does not seek to
take-over the system, remake the world in its own image. And it is no longer
impersonal violence. It gathers the violence around it and hurls it back in
vast, transmuted form—'for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror
of the system's violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it
cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death.
This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but
symbolic death of a few individuals.'

What response can there be to an attack that reverses the rules so
radically? We are terribly weak because we don't want to die. What greater
vulnerability than the weakness for life? If like a sacrifice this violence
builds no transformative relationship to the 'real' world, only a
transcendental world, then we can only offer the materiality of the
everydayness of life in response. And when that everyday is itself so thin,
so sparse, so poor, what hope do we have? For in this terrible barrage of
words lurk the shadows of all *those* words that cannot be said—Bombay 1992,
Gujarat 2002, Best Bakery, Srikrishna Commission, Nanavaty Commission,
custodial torture. We need to say them. So we may at the least have a
symbolic response to the death that cannot be answered.

Maybe there are lessons to learn, as others have said, from an old man who
died, attempting to transform the rules of engagement. He learned that if
you attempt to confront the system with an equality of violence, you will
always be outmatched. Always weaker before the enormity of power arrayed
before you. Gandhi fashioned a body that resisted violence, even that
committed unto itself; but we are not in possession of monumental bodies. We
are only in possession of a tattered set of rules that we once laid store
by. Maybe at this moment, like obsessive grammarians, we must insist on
repairing, painfully and slowly, the *structure* of language. Return words
like—fair trial, impartial judiciary, freedom of religion, equality before
law, secular government—to their proper place in our shared lingustic
systems, so they can be used without qualifications…