Framing a New View – a dangerous year yet to be lived

Jacopo Moroni

Know everything, understand nothing. The danger, then, is to be subsumed by the sheer amount of information that on a daily basis ‘describe’ reality, doing so without a truly critical and informative stance, a faceless sequel of names, opinions and ideas barely scratching and denting the surface of the contemporary global order. There is something missing, something that escapes the simple methodology of how the piece of news itself is divulgated to the general public. The contradiction, seemingly unsolvable, is that never before we could gain that much from the channels of information while, at the same time, it has never been so difficult to come to terms with and place into context the on-the-ground implications of the events – in short, how should one appreciate what has been acquired, how should one re-act?

            In the enterprise of filling the gap between the elements of this contradiction, a useful exercise could be that of reconsidering the concept itself of ‘news’. One, after all, could argue that it has altogether lost its raison d’etre with the tabloids and 24-hour news channels - the ubiquity of its simulacrum denying by implication its real relevance. By contrast, by taking the simple dynamics of what occurs around us as a temporary surrogate concept, one could attempt to resolve this contradiction. In this context, history must be intended as a lived (as opposed to readable) discipline made of a continuous succession of historical burst – a jerky, often uncontrollable series of events that delineate and force upon each other societies, peoples and ideas, whereby the agents of historical action and the full social, political and cultural implications are never denied.  The creation of a new framework of analysis, of a New View that defines our sense of past, current and global affairs would take into account the importance of such ‘raw’ history. Deprived of the usual ‘manufactured’ pieces of news and hit by the full scale of a complex narrative, the task of the commentator or of the reader would be to highlight these implications and act as a consequence.

For the novelty of this approach is the rediscovery of hidden voices and unrefined connections that are rarely offered to the general public as ‘news’ and which by and large history as an institutionalized academic discipline often ignores by principle. Indeed, from this perspective, resolving the main contemporary contradiction in the realm of communication involves the realization that that the raw history that is so often denied stems from a particular vantage point – that of dissent and opposition to the established order. In this context, the manifestations of dissent that act in opposition to current trends of neo-liberalism on a global scale represent an organic and contingent reality ‘from below’ that is for us to discover and which ‘balances’ the imperfect, a-historical vision that defines the commentary on global affairs at the present moment of time.  In this sense, what have we gained from the commentary of the French events of November 2005? Can the implications of these events – the perfect example of the jerky and unrefined bursts of raw historical power I referred to – be finally inscribed in an original narrative framework or rather will they have to be confined to the surface realm of the ‘news’, whereby they are detached from the social realities of France, Europe and the World? Can the tools of mass media report the irreducibility of an incredibly heterogeneous global underclass that stretches from the peripheries of London, Paris and Los Angeles to the bidonvilles of Rio de Janeiro and Calcutta and that finds, one would hope, its echoes reverberating in the political activisms of millions of people in the over-developed world?
The year two-thousand-and-six is here to be lived dangerously.  The dynamics of historical reality that will engulf us and the implications of historical agency are, in the end, for us to define. From below.

London, January 2006