tostdavid

Let us first consider news as information; one kind to be sure, but a powerful force for us all socially. The war in the Balkans is far from the first time that the brutal realities of life-the death and atrocities and moral uncertainties of any conflict-have become semiotic as well as visceral. Kosovo recently has been both a deathly fight between the signified (conflicting ideologies, ethnic groupings, beliefs, most importantly weapons and soldiers) and the signifiers of this conflict (the reporters, the academics, the politicians).

Nor is Kosovo the first example of this, in so many senses absurd, battle. Truth has always been the first casualty in war. The classic study of war reporting is not called The First Casualty for nothing. Its practical relevance to Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Kosovans, is at best marginal, at worst a moral outrage. However, war in so many arenas causes a polarisation of opinion-and opinion is a key concept here. As we try to understand information, to separate it from judgement, to establish fact, we find ourselves in a free fall: we bring to information, to judgement, to ‘fact’ our opinions and views-which are in part created by the very manifestations of information, news and opinion that we consume. It is cyclical: the Slovenian philosopher and literary theorist Slavoj Zizek calls this the ’stain’. To explain this briefly: our choice of reading or viewing (our choice of ‘gaze’) of one story or item: marks the point in the object [in this case the news story] from which the subject viewing it is already gazed at, i.e. it is the object that is gazing at me…the gaze functions thus as a stain, a spot in the picture disturbing its transparent visibility [in Reithian or old Fleet Street terms its moral reliability and educative import] and introducing an irreducible split in my relation to the picture [or text]: I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me, i.e. the eye and the gaze are constitutively asymmetrical [we, as consumers, are always at some ironic angle to the “truth” of any news item now, we know why we are watching or reading, as well as that we are watching or reading]. The gaze as object is a stain preventing me from looking at the picture at a safe, “objective” distance, from enframing it as something that is at my grasping view’s disposal.