Journalism versus the press. Notes on a Latin American Chronicle
In July 2021, after the first massive protests against the Castro regime, Semana Magazine asked me to write an article on this topic. I said no. An article about Cuba would only have served their interests diametrically opposed to mine, and they would have ended up saying something contrary to what I said, because closed media consortia, backed by family, caste and lineage, weave a vast network of meaning dominant sense based on the institution of capital not as production and circulation but as inheritance.
There it matters less what was said or who says it than where it is said from, and the only way to subvert that scheme is to be able to engage in anti-press journalism, which is generally what the Case is when a medium publishes something that would not be published Appears to be able to post something. I notice this as a magazine editor who can’t quite escape the demise of torpor. This web of meaning is what we know as language, promotional codes articulated around the news slogan, with the word being just another element.
I wrote a lot about Cuba at the time, but I chose where to do it, just as far away from the cenacles who see themselves as bastions of resistance, possessors of a countercultural identity (which doesn’t exist), morally orderly, economically legitimate and… see in the same way, of course, mostly inefficiently in that they behave similarly to what they dislike: a typical consumer category for their audience; Relationship between owner and customer in which, as in any mirror link, one thing is the other: I’ll give you what I want, but in reality what you want determines the limit of what I’m allowed to offer.
A loyal audience is characterized by the dissemination of a main idea hidden in the seemingly diverse presentation of the facts. The fact that journalism is done against the press does not mean it is done outside of the press, as we are an active part of the power we want to transform.
Many of the places where I wanted to publish about Cuba, a worn-out signifier, were owned by corporations, like all national references, but what distinguished such places from Semana magazine is that they were liberal newspapers and not an enclave , which represented Cuba reflects an oligarchic economic structure, the rites and superstitions of a class as powerful as it was dead. Semana is a pre-modern publication and I just want to mention it to remind you that the political and aesthetic discussion surrounding journalism is a discussion that can only be established in the historical period of modernity, which, as we know, is only one of many times of the present.
Journalism is a profession designed within the framework of liberal ideology and conforming to some laws that allow it to become a press. As a cultural concept, journalism transcends its own beginning while the press remains forever a device beginning in the second half of the 19th century. There are three basic imperatives that inspire the logos of the press and the serialization of information: objectivity, impartiality, and altruism. This secular trinity wants to be seen as natural, as an immutable legislature not historically constructed. The code of ethics of the press, of course, produces specific aesthetic insights that define its scope or political function, but this code of ethics, in the face of the agony of liberalism (and the diagnosis still seems generous), produces more and more conflict. Morality for anyone who chooses journalism.
It is a scheme that can no longer be believed in without the cynicism of the usurer or the stupidity of the bureaucrat, which is why the specific aesthetic knowledge becomes increasingly limited knowledge and conventions, and its political function is then extremely reactionary and complicit. What is the blind spot that enacts complicity? The impossibility of controlling and perishing with the death of the ideology that invents you. What worries me is not that the press is dying, but rather that it is dragging journalism down this path and trying to impose its fate on it.
What characterizes neoliberalism politically is not the dissolution of the state, as has been said, but its hijacking, the reduction of its functions to the moment – yes, fundamentally – when the company needs to be rescued again. Destroying the architecture of the Fordist world, its simulacrum continues through the press, a story about reality or a story that is reality and pretends to be unaware of it, though probably unaware of its own mirage state is. Neoliberalism had the press watch over an unburied corpse: the corpse of the liberal world. In neoliberalism, the body politic is a victim body. The press is the cop content to censure the scapegoat subtly handed over by the killer himself, for the cop’s primary concern is to live up to his rigged efficiency rates, not to intervene in life.
The control of the state, the legislature, the executive and the judiciary is not enough. Each of these powers is the avatar of a fluid order, an intricate network of declared and tacit economies, all post-national and essential to and for each other. Today, if a journalist were to expose or denounce illegal activity, he would not necessarily be doing journalism, even if the dictates of his profession pardoned him, because legality is just as criminal and individuals must constantly evade it in order to survive. In Havana, communist television reporters took to the streets to denounce the ragged truck drivers who, without official permits, sold some groceries and fruit to their peers. This brief fable of real socialism is less the exclusive property of Stalin than of modernity as a whole. Less Castro and more Kafka.
The latest trick of objectivity as an analytic category has been to deny its very existence. In the crisis, its vitality as the organizing principle of facts has preferred issuing a false death certificate rather than admitting what it conceals: the subjectivity of the system. Every body must be buried with its name. Objectivity does not exist, but what was in her existed, and what was in her had to harmonize with her mask.
Impartiality, on the other hand, is limited to the representation of power relations, it is a photograph of evil, of misery or, in the negative, of injustice and inequality. The aestheticization of reality frees the journalist from the risk and the obligation to intervene in the composition of the picture. Attractiveness, of course, acts as a makeup on what the tamed eye of the public sees, the eye of the indebted individual, the individual who uses, be it cocaine, travel packages, or news and derivatives thereof.
The long ban on the use of the first person in journalistic text, in turn, as an ideology that accompanies the rise of capital, pursues the very transformation of the journalist into a mechanical part of a symbol factory, his depersonalization being the necessary condition for the ethical observance of a trade that deals with words works, but follows a technical logic, industrial productivity. The violence of this operation, which decides how we first tell the world to ourselves, partially explodes in the hands of postmodern hedonism. So the exhibitionism of the self would only be justified in a certain spectacularity of the story, in the extravagance of the event that the chronicler would be willing to experience, but the press calls eccentricity and journalism calls singularity; The press tells you that the news says a man bites a dog, and journalism tells you that the chronicle says a dog bites a man.
The Vice story, continuing in search of the man who bit the dog, is the continuation of the press by other means, adapted to a new substance: the languor of late capitalism. Either the formal presence of the ego disappears so radically that it does nothing but manifest, by omission, the effort that ego has made not to appear, and of course constantly appearing that way; or else the outrageous feints of self result in not having to answer the real questions and again blocking the full possibility of the reporter, which is nothing other than the translation one can make of oneself, by and thanks to the voices another.
In a chapter on the dehumanization of art entitled A Few Drops of Phenomenology, Ortega y Gasset presents the following situation: A famous man is dying and is accompanied by his wife, a doctor, a reporter and a painter. The woman who is close to her lover writhes in pain. The doctor who is present because of his professional duty also pays considerable attention to the patient’s situation. He is responsible for what happens to him and his reputation is at stake. The painter is in a purely contemplative attitude, intent on capturing the details of the scene accurately.
The reporter, halfway between doctor and painter, doesn’t really know what he is. His job, the youngest of all, is not affirmation and is shaped by what the others are not: “We warn that we have distanced ourselves enormously from this painful reality.” that we have lost all sentimental contact with the event. The journalist is there like the doctor, forced by his profession and not by spontaneous and human impulses. But while the profession of doctor obliges him to intervene in what is happening, the profession of journalist obliges him not to intervene, he must confine himself to observing. For him the fact itself is a mere scene, a mere spectacle that he later has to relate in the newspaper columns. He does not participate sentimentally in what is happening there, he is mentally exempt and excluded from the event…”.
This journalistic practice reduces reality through the dictatorship of notarial truth to what the press sees as rigorously verifiable. The facts appear to be verifiable in their entirety, but only after they have been dramatically amputated. It doesn’t count what happens, it counts what seems to be the only thing that can happen. Any referenced area of events, whether glossed over or diffuse, is outside the reporter’s work, as if reality were limited to what is happening and the variations, readings, and interpretations of events were not things that also happen. One such method finds its most neurotic expression in the fact-checking politics of gringo journalism, which aims less at what is false than at what is possible, eliminates all investigative risk, and suppresses widening the gaze.
What the fact-checker cannot verify, and his positivist verification methods are quite flimsy, is not accounted for in the story. Most of what is repressed has happened. There is a tragic censorship of life, for the sublimation of this emasculating procedure, copied without embarrassment urbi et orbi, mixes pure and hard data with the societal construction of truth and celebrates the habit of surveillance as journalistic rigor.
Basically, the sad spot where Ortega y Gasset places the reporter doesn’t exist. The real reporter is someone who looks at the famous man from the doctor’s seat, because only from this close up can he talk to the woman and observe like the painter. For the rest, journalism, as a chorus of records, necessarily involves the possibility of taking charge of the events where the journalist was not present.
Timothy Garton Ash recalls quoting the writer Jerzy Kosinki: “It is the truth that interests me, not the dates, and I am old enough to know the difference.” But later he says: “Thucydides allowed himself to put words into Pericles to shut up like a novelist. “We don’t.” It is not true. Thucydides does not put words in Pericles’ mouth like a novelist, putting words in someone’s mouth is not an exclusive exercise of the novel. Thucydides puts words into Pericles’ mouth like a chronicler. They are words that replicate real speech, relate to real events, and are heard by real people. There is no truth without data, but the data is not truth, and there is even more fraud in not putting a word in Pericles’ mouth just so that a fact check can legitimize and authorize the publication of the Athenian historian and military book, than in the fact that one dares to recreate them. The Reading Pact, which is a political pact in that it is a pact with events, should recognize that these speeches are being replicated and glossed over, and it is precisely this recognition that the press ultimately does not allow journalism to do.
Herodotus tells what he sees, what they tell him, what is whispered, what happened 2000 years ago and what is happening in his presence, he also takes care of people’s fables, imaginary creatures, their exaggerations. Before the classifications, it draws a spiritual map without being blackmailed by convention and grinds everything worth mentioning into a narrative machine that finds a rhetorical tone and a precise distance for each of the data recorded. He neither lies nor omits anything. The chronicle must always be written as if Aristotle had not yet appeared.
With this in mind, I ask myself the following question: What does it mean to be a Latin American chronicler today, or what would make you a Latin American chronicler today? Of course, I am not talking about a geographical territory, about passive belonging to a place by birth certificate, since every place must deserve it, but about a proposal of truth, a discursive uniqueness. Latin America is full of gringo journalists writing in Spanish, and the Latin American Chronicle, its modern manifestation, begins with a shift, an unfocused site of expression.
A Cuban, José Martí, writes from New York for Argentinian and Mexican newspapers, and an American, John Reed, narrates part of the Mexican Revolution from the heart of Pancho Villa’s troops. Both share, and this is the Latin American Chronicle, a non-liberal exercise in journalism, not even because they oppose it, but because they are unaware of it, at least not as a sacred profession. They are ahead of this whole or alien to it. Both practice a militancy of writing.
I know that the word militancy will cause many to draw their guns on the immediate memory of the insane number of propagandists in the region who have masqueraded as writers, reporters or artists over the past century, protected by their moralizing interpretation of intellectuals Organicity, but Benjamin warns: “The tendency of a work can only be correct if it is also literary correct. That is to say that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency (…) It is this literary tendency – implicitly or explicitly contained in any correct political tendency – and not something else that gives quality to the work.”
This militancy implies an attempt at formal innovation and does not necessarily involve a dissection of the fundamentals, shall we say, of the tactics of the liberal practice of journalism, namely: the contrast of sources; the independence of political parties, governmental organizations and business leaders; the reduction of voluntariness, didactics and judgments without data; the obligation to listen to the perpetrators and not to feel sorry for the victims; Understand that form is in the facts. They are the ones who say how to count and prioritize the enlightenment of the gaze.
The militancy I am talking about is strategic in nature. The texts must follow an organizing function which, to continue with Benjamin, ensures that the chronicler eventually becomes the author, someone who not only provides the means of production but also intervenes in them, runs them. Unlike the novel, the Chronicle cannot practice avoidance or sensationalism, and it is likely that a Latin American in the long run cannot either. We need to move from tyranny to data democracy. That the data is contained in the plot. Integrated, non-overlapping. Not only as a character, but also as an idea or drive. We call the political horizon that opens up this aesthetic bet beauty.
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Withdrawn from La Rinconada for this Sunday, June 25th. Photo: INH
