Duration: 01:37:37; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 106.619; Saturation: 0.027; Lightness: 0.152; Volume: 0.277; Cuts per Minute: 6.064
Summary: Chair/Discussant: Ravi Vasudevan, CSDS, Delhi
Panel Coordinator(s): Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum
Title: The Secret and the Transparent after Media Modernity
Panelist: Ravi Sundaram, Sarai/CSDS
Abstract: Technology and media access, once slogans of the 1990s, are now marked by their remarkable efflorescence all over the country. Today growing sections of the population, including sections of the working poor, access low cost media like cheap mobile phones that combine voice, digital photography and video. This media-enabled urban population produces amateur photographs, videos, text messages that are shared horizontally or in online social networks. A massive media archive of amateur and recombined media now reaches the internet and draws from politics, culture, and everyday life. This media producing population is now the source of various efforts to mobilize and channel its potentialities – by government, civic groups, communication companies, media industries. At one level, the idea of ‘transparency’ through media technologies seems to vitalize both modernizing schemes as well as new stories of empowerment.
Transparency stories make their way into statements by judges, police criminology, RTI activists, and reform discourse in general. Transparency has now emerged in liberal public discourse as the ethical filter to understand the world. This discursive space includes information activism as well as the television sting.
The other narrative is the significant disruption of a domain that was considered secure, notably the ‘inner’ life of individuals. The idea of the secret may have to be updated for the digital age; the ‘leak’ and the ‘sting’ almost seem integral to contemporary culture afflicting both the very powerful and the ordinary. Personal(and sometimes public) media archives of audio, photos and videos are rearranged and re-circulated everyday- sometimes publicly and brutally – a failed relationship with images/videos circulating online, scandals, images of death, tragedy, sexual intimacy, a politician’s conversation. Existing arrangements to manage these worlds are in a state of disorientation, courts puzzle over new domains that demand their attention everyday.
In the first narrative ‘transparency’ becomes the tool to harness the energies of a post-media population for liberal modernization, in the second, mediatisation produces new sites of disaster. This presentation looks at some of the sites of this disruption and considers what is at stake for media and social theory.
Title: Framing Conspiracy: Terrorism, the City and Cinema
Panelist: Ranjani Mazumdar, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Abstract: This paper looks at the terrorist films set in Bombay to explore the relationship between conspiracy, surveillance and the city. The films I look at are Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, Raj Kumar Gupta’s Amir, Nishikant Kamat’s Mumbai Meri Jaan and Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday. All these films refer to various terrorist attacks of the last 20 years. The films work with an investigative cartography, mobilizing the city through narratives cluttered with evidentiary details, an aggressive marking and arranging of information and a constant presence of the television camera as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. Conspiracy works as the organizing principle through which urban paranoia, civil disturbance and political intrigue, find a voice. Conspiracy also produces the movement between the police, the interrogation room, the terrorist hideout, the site of death, government offices, the news room, public spaces and courtrooms. The films open out the events through re-enactments and precision style unravelling to generate ‘fantasies of knowing’. Thus a “mobile script” on terrorism is carved out to negotiate the relationship between paranoia and citizenship. If the social practice of paranoia is rooted in the belief that the truth is not fully available, then in these films, conspiracy is the form through which the spectator is provided a sense of comfort and sense of control over contemporary events, the city of Bombay and history.
Title: The Erotics of Law and Scandal
Panelist: Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum
Abstract: The Sting Operation’s revelation of public corruption and SMS sex scandals have been two important signposts of contemporary media life. They have also been at the heart of legal debates over privacy, media ethics and the legal disorder. The ‘scandal’ has always been of one of the sites for the production of a public discourse on law and the relationship between the public, private and the secret, the accelerated world of media circulation reworks our understanding of the scandal and the divide between ideas of public and private. What conceptual challenges do they pose to the law, and how have legal institutions responded to the erotics of power and corruption. This paper examines how the discourses of corruption and sexuality in media constantly reference each other as they meet in the ‘inappropriate overlap of public and private desires’.
Title: The Secret and the Transparent after Media Modernity (PRECIS)
Panelist: Ravi Sundaram, Sarai/CSDS
Abstract: Technology and media access, once slogans of the 1990s, are now marked by their remarkable efflorescence all over the country. Today growing sections of the population, including sections of the working poor, access low cost media like cheap mobile phones that combine voice, digital photography and video. This media-enabled urban population produces amateur photographs, videos, text messages that are shared horizontally or in online social networks. A massive media archive of amateur and recombined media now reaches the internet and draws from politics, culture, and everyday life. This media producing population is now the source of various efforts to mobilize and channel its potentialities – by government, civic groups, communication companies, media industries. At one level, the idea of 'transparency' through media technologies seems to vitalize both modernizing schemes as well as new stories of empowerment.
Transparency stories make their way into statements by judges, police criminology, RTI activists, and reform discourse in general. Transparency has now emerged in liberal public discourse as the ethical filter to understand the world. This discursive space includes information activism as well as the television sting.
The other narrative is the significant disruption of a domain that was considered secure, notably the 'inner' life of individuals. The idea of the secret may have to be updated for the digital age; the 'leak' and the 'sting' almost seem integral to contemporary culture afflicting both the very powerful and the ordinary. Personal(and sometimes public) media archives of audio, photos and videos are rearranged and re-circulated everyday- sometimes publicly and brutally – a failed relationship with images/videos circulating online, scandals, images of death, tragedy, sexual intimacy, a politician's conversation. Existing arrangements to manage these worlds are in a state of disorientation, courts puzzle over new domains that demand their attention everyday.
In the first narrative 'transparency' becomes the tool to harness the energies of a post-media population for liberal modernization, in the second, mediatisation produces new sites of disaster. This presentation looks at some of the sites of this disruption and considers what is at stake for media and social theory.
9/11
Aamir
Amir
Anurag Kashyap
SMS
access
amateur media
cinema
citizenship
city
conspiracy
death
desires
erotics
fantasies of knowing
horizontal
interrogation
leak
liberal modernisation
low-cost media
media
mediatisation
mobile phone
modernity
paranoia
private
public
recombined media
scandal
secret
sex
sting
technology
terrorism
tragedy
transparency
The secret and the transparent after media modernity*
Ravi Sundaram
*This is a short, conceptual presentation, minus the detailed discussion of material, that is there in the longer paper.
Secrecy, wrote Elias Canneti, is at the core of modern power. The secret of the state produces a kind of peculiar enchantment, generating a fetish power for those who construct it, and who remain consumed by the fear of the dissolution of the secret. Today after media modernity, the secret seems under greater turmoil than ever before. The secret is now encased in a perilous sieve, where necessary sharing of information in multiple networks produces constant conditions of seepage. This sharing was seen as a necessary condition after the computer and internet age, the digital distribution of information increased systemic velocity and efficiency. In short, proliferation is fundamental to our time, information has value only if it has some velocity and is exchanged. Information once collected, always moves, at some point. The leak is a fundamental potential of all digital information models of our time – this is also a condition of our unstable present.
In this sense, after the digital, the old secret of the state is increasingly subject to a kind of tense postponement of its eventual demise. Now the secret and the modern leak share in a perilous dance with death, at some point the leak chips away at the edifice. Whose secrets are permanent anymore? Yet, when moment of dissolution happens, there is a fleeting and temporary paralysis of power, with a surplus spreading beyond the event. Canetti calls this moment of the secret's exposure "a flash," almost like lightning, we can see the recent case of the Wikileaks and the Radia tapes. – the public shaming of power, a drama of unmasking that we can all partake, even temporarily.
In his book Defacement, Michael Taussig builds on Canneti's insight to suggest that secrecy, is 'an invention that comes out of the public secret' (p. 7). The public secret is ''that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated' (p. 5). The public secret is a known-unknown, ex. torture in Kashmir, the power of capital in media and government, army corruption, at some point all these public secrets erupt despite great strategies of concealment.
One of the main reasons for the fragility of the secret in India is the new media landscape.
The last two decades have seen the massive proliferation of media infrastructures in India and many postcolonial societies. These include large media industries like those of television and cinema, as well as thousands of informal sites like greymarket bazaars, small video cinemas, and cable networks that are run by local operators. Around 700 million Indians have cellular phones that now also produce text, video, and digital images. After the cellular phone, a growing section of the population is now the source of new media produced, - that in turn links to online social networks, mainstream television (through 'citizen' journalism), and peer-to-peer exchanges of text, music and video. The cellular phone has become a transmitter and media production device: activists capture police brutality and protests, ordinary people enter the world of mass photography and share them with their friends. These massive expansions of the older media infrastructures have thrown the old control models of the regime into disarray. In a situation of media porosity, the information 'leak' from the state is regular and widespread: leaked audio surveillance, secret documents – all of which leaks and feeds into the media 'event', and as such calls for a new reflection.
The new, self-proclaimed antagonist of the secret in a post-digital world is the slogan of transparency. Just about everyone seems to want transparency today, the media, legal rationalists, government modernizers, information activists from left to right, consultants, corporate reformers, angry television anchors, the Reserve Bank of India. Transparency is the legitimate progressive slogan of our time, much like planning in the 1950s, or modernity a decade ago – and often connects activists with government reformers.
Transparency had its first origins in French Enlightenment ideas on vision, light and optics. Light, it was believed, had the great power to penetrate dark spaces. The power of transparency lay, as Foucault pointed out in his Eye of Power, in the ability to see, without being seen. The new strategies of illumination were political technologies of visibility: statistics, hygiene, criminology, and the human sciences. In the first half of the 20th century, transparency as a concept had become the mainstream wisdom of the social sciences, rather than the older 19th century optico-political register. By the post World War 2 period transparency arguments had dissolved into the larger body of modernization theory and development in the Third World.
Transparency's great revival was in the 1990s, in a decade of neoliberal ideologies, financial speculation, and the delegitimation of a large corpus of the older human sciences after the critiques of the 1960s and 1970s. This was the discovery of new sources of opacity, along with legal rationalism. The new concern to make the invisible visible, moved into a diverse set of interventions: Hernan de Soto argued for formal property rights to mobilize what he called the dead (informal) capital of the South, corporate reform called for new 'transparent' models of financial disclosure, NGO activists called for legally visible and enumerated rights for migrants, microfinance, and new forms of documentation. A vast army of consultants and new forms of expertise emerged devoted to extract some form of visibility that could be measured for efficiency. This began an era of periodic institutional audits, review reports, and new standards set by consultants, ushering in what the anthropologist Marilyn Stathern calls the 'tyranny of transparency," the suppression of experimental and long term possibilities, in order to denote quantifiable standards.
Transparency is also a significant argument for the massive rollout of information infrastructures all across India. These initiatives range from biometric cards for slum dwellers which are linked to governmental welfare schemes, enumeration of urban land by linking it to digitized property titling schemes, CCTV platforms to survey streets and neighborhoods, massive transportation databases that are linked to GPS enabled road machines, and large GIS mapping initiatives sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology. Along with the recent UID scheme to be deployed at the national level, these technological interventions have little parallel in any postcolonial society, dwarfing many such schemes worldwide in their ambition. The new technological initiatives have tapped into an information populism that cuts across activists, judges, elite managers and liberal modernizers. Transparency has now emerged in public discourse as the ethical filter through which infrastructure is made visible.
In my larger presentation I show the experiences of a large GIS map in contemporary Delhi that seeks to re-assemble 45 urban databases, old cadastral map data, real time photography of city buildings, and new coordinates of property titling. The GIS project has been pushed by Delhi courts, property reform, the city government and security paranoia. The GIS map has emerged as a transparent fiction for all: courts hope that it will resolve the problem of the legal and illegal, property reformers hope that it will make land value visible and linked to title, and government departments hope it will solve administrative conflicts.
It is possible to read the new moves to information infrastructures as a functional supplement to a larger story of class differentiation and elite assertion after globalization, a sideshow in an essentially political dramaturgy. Equally, it is also possible to see these as the rollout of new technologies of visibility, a biopolitical expansion for the twenty first century.
Or, perhaps we can add a third, supplementary proposition. The information projects, for all their crackpot schemes and techno-fetishism still locate themselves as transcending an epoch where the urban population was seen as a passive absorber of welfare mechanisms and technologies of control. They now address a population that actively produces media, or is increasingly implicated in information infrastructures of mobile telephony and media use. Populations now participate as part producers, part consumers and proliferators of media. This changes the dance of the secret and transparent.
More than the state, for transparency it is the new mediatised population that is the source of the secret. New technologies of visibility seek to prise open this riddle, not just by stabilizing it, but also channeling the opaque energies into formal structures of money, consumption, documentation. Its great wager is a vitalism of a growing population whose proximity to an emerging expressive media culture gives it radical strengths of subverting power, and terrifying vulnerabilities. Along with the great exposes of police torture, and land grabs through mobile photography that we have seen recently, there is also a larger archive of collapsed inner worlds of a post media population also recorded on phones – that reach social networks, and moving through lightning speeds between users. Here, following Cannetti, the secret explodes, with a terrifying regularity.
It is in the interstices of this world that we may possibly see the future of transparency being fought out.
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