What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
The image, like the sign, is a consciousness.
Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries.
De nieuwe taakstraf: terug naar de oude schandpaal
In De Telegraaf van 30 augustus lezen we over de nieuwe aanpak van Reclassering Nederland en het OM met betrekking tot de taakstraf. Het is de bedoeling dat mensen die zijn veroordeeld tot een taakstraf voortaan een oranje hesje dragen tijdens het uitvoeren daarvan. U weet wel, zo’n hesje dat we dagelijks gedragen zien worden door hardwerkende bouwvakkers, wegwerkers, en straatvegers. Het verschil? De veroordeelden dragen er een met de tekst ‘Werkt voor de samenleving’.
Dit nieuwe initiatief is onderdeel van het aanpakken van een imagoprobleem waaraan de taakstraf zou lijden. Volgens Sjef van Gennep, directeur van Reclassering Nederland, is de heersende opvatting dat een taakstraf weinig voorstelt. Het idee achter de hesjes is dan dat het dragen ervan een soort zichtbaarheid creëert die in de hoofden van mensen zou bijdragen aan een besef dat veroordeelden niet verdoemd zijn tot de criminaliteit, maar dat ze ook een productieve—ofwel gewenste—bijdrage kunnen leveren aan de samenleving. De taakstraf is daarmee een instrument dat drie dingen zou moeten doen: het straft de veroordeelde persoon voor zijn of haar ongewenste gedrag; het levert een concrete bijdrage aan de samenleving in de vorm van de werkzaamheden die verricht worden door de veroordeelden; en tot slot demonstreert het aan de samenleving én aan de veroordeelde zelf het nut dat hij of zij kan hebben in de wereld.
Vooral die laatste component van de taakstraf is interessant: het idee is dus dat de taakstraf laat zien dat veroordeelden er niet makkelijk vanaf zijn gekomen, maar dat ze juist een positieve bijdrage leveren aan de sociale omgeving. Deze onderneming rust op een sprookjesideologie die ontleend lijkt te zijn aan Hans Christian Andersens ‘Het Lelijke Eendje’ of misschien aan Robert L. May’s ‘Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer’—datgene wat eerst wordt gezien als enkel negatief kan, onder de juiste omstandigheden, heel positief zijn.
Gegeven dit idyllische voornemen is het dan ook, op z’n zachtst gesteld, opmerkelijk te noemen dat de heer Van Gennep het nodig vind om te benadrukken dat het hier niet gaat om het aan de schandpaal nagelen van taakgestraften. De werkelijkheid zit, volgens mij, anders in elkaar. Het gaat hier niet zozeer om het oppoetsen van het imago van de taakstraf in termen van maatschappelijke goeddoenerij als wel om een politieke beweging die geheel in lijn is met zowel de verharding van het strafsysteem als van de Nederlandse samenleving in het algemeen; ‘Lik-op- stuk’ en ‘zero-tolerance’ zijn hier de kernkreten. Dit blijkt ook wel uit het gegeven dat het beleidsinitiatief van Reclassering Nederland goed ontvangen wordt bij Kamerleden van
verschillende partijen en dat zij vooral gecharmeerd lijken te zijn van het idee te laten zien dat mensen gestraft worden.
Natuurlijk beschikken de beleidsmakers over studies waaruit zou blijken dat de hesjes veelal goed ontvangen worden door de sociale omgeving. Echter, waar Van Gennep dit presenteert als een soort aha-erlebnis waarin mensen zich realiseren hoe nuttig taakstraffen zijn en hoe fijn het toch is om taakgestraften zich te zien inzetten voor het goed van de samenleving, is mijn claim dat het hesjesinitiatief een politiek geïnspireerde poging is om aansluiting te zoeken bij de maatschappelijke fantasie dat het zichtbaar maken elk potentieel risico de veiligheid vergroot en dat alleen een harde aanpak criminaliteit in de kiem kan smoren. Wanneer ik iemand met zo’n hesje zie lopen denk ik ‘oh, een crimineel met een taakstraf’. Dat is fijn want nu weet ik precies om wie ik met een grote boog heen moet lopen en wie ik goed in de gaten moet houden!
Het vermeende imagoprobleem lost zich niet op door een oppervlakkige maatregel als het vergroten van de zichtbaarheid van mensen met een taakstraf. In plaats van het ombuigen van het negatieve imago van de taakstraf en het samenbrengen van veroordeelden en de rest van de gemeenschap creëert dit ruimte voor schandpalen en verdergaande maatschappelijke polarisering. Anders gezegd: stigmatiserende initiatieven zoals oranje hesjes met populistische leuzen erop staan haaks op het door Van Gennep uitgesproken ideaal om veroordeelden juist productief te maken voor de rest van de samenleving. Het vergemakkelijkt het toekennen van het hardnekkige en contraproductieve label ‘crimineel’ en draagt niet bij aan de transformatie van eendjes in prachtige zwanen en belemmert grootneuzige rendieren om het helderste licht in de duisternis te worden.
HARDtalk, or: Criticism Without Thought
Note: this is an old post from 2009. I’m in the process of migrating from Wordpress to Tumblr so expect to see some more old posts of mine.
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Perhaps you have heard about—or maybe even had the occasion to watch—BBC’s HARDtalk. For those of you who are not that familiar with HARDtalk, the BBC describes it as their
“hard-hitting flagship news programme” […] “HARDtalk asks the difficult questions and gets behind the stories that make the news - from international political leaders to entertainers; from corporate decision-makers to ordinary individuals facing huge challenges.”[1]
It’s fascinating how this news program—evidently an integral part of visual culture—is apparently at war[2]; the BBC has deployed its flag ship and it’s hitting hard! But the question immediately rises: whom is it attacking? Who is the enemy that is opposed? Just who is at the other end of this war effort?
It took me a long time to figure out the answer and it is actually in the struggle to find a satisfactory answer itself that the solution and the reason for its elusiveness can be found. Having watched quite a few episodes of HARDtalk, I was often impressed with its apparent depth and thought it a quality program amidst an ocean of triviality. However, I must admit that all the items I watched were always concerned with issues I knew little or nothing about. Then, on March 24th, an episode of HARDtalk aired in which Stephen Sackur interviewed famous French philosopher Alain Badiou. Being familiar with his thought, I was excited about this episode. It was a chance for a wider audience to catch a glimpse of Mr. Badiou’s deep and compelling contributions to our understanding of the world. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead of letting Badiou elaborate, Sackur jumps from one topic to another, frequently interrupting his guest by feeding him apparent contradictions in his own thought—contradictions that, upon closer examination, can only exist as such when taking snippets of Badiou’s writing out of context. Badiou is not the most gifted speaker of the English language and obviously could not—or would not—keep up with Sackur’s pace. Consequently, Badiou appeared to be just some poor soul lost in the world of the Parisian salons; a philosopher disconnected from the world of things. Somewhat upset I shrugged and blamed the language barrier for this off-putting interview.
On November 24th HARDtalk aired an interview with famed and controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Since the Badiou-incident I had not watched a single episode of the program; not out of spite but out of confusion. Knowing Žižek as a very fluent speaker of the English language as well as a rhetorically gifted machine gun of critical thought, nothing could go wrong—Žižek would avenge his good friend Alain Badiou. Or so I thought. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the world was against us. Žižek, in enemy territory, could not emerge a champion of substance. Instead, at the end of the interview, one could hardly escape the impression that this Slavoj Žižek was just a blabbering, neurotic idiot; an idiot savant that was neither a threat nor otherwise to be taken seriously.
So what went wrong? Why were two of today’s boldest thinkers not capable of conveying their ideas in the face of Stephen Sackur? Did the editorial board of HARDtalk outsmart these two philosophers? Yes, in a way they did. But my thesis would be that this kind of ‘smart’ is qualitatively different in nature than the kind that best describes the vanquished men of theory. That is to say, HARDtalk operates through a strategy that is directly opposed to philosophy—a strategy that has speech as its fundamental element.
In his critique of Western metaphysics, the late philosopher Jacques Derrida—wholly in line with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger—proceeds to argue how all Western thought ultimately conceptualizes Being as being-present.[3] While part of a very nuanced and complicated argument, what is important, here, is the notion of distance. Being can perhaps be conceptualized as the locus of thought and as such coincides with this notion of being-present. To think is to Be, or so the fable of the Enlightenment goes.[4] Derrida’s critique then focuses on how Western metaphysics prefers speech over writing. As Barbara Johnson explains in her excellent introduction to Derrida’s ‘Dissemination’ (1981):
“The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously. There is no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listener, since the speaker hears himself speak at the same time the listener does. This immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said.”[5]
Writing, then, is of secondary importance; it is an operation that is derivative of speech. It is the representation of speech, which is why we read out loud or read to ourselves with our mind’s voice. Writing can only be an act of distancing. It is the author—the subject that is the locus of thought—that distances himself from his thought. It is an operation through which thought is externalized and disconnected from its originator. In this sense, by transforming thought into writing it is allowed to gain an existence onto itself and—separated from its author—it is not to be trusted.
Now, or so it seems to me, HARDtalk is finally settling the score. It has decided that thought itself is long past its expiration date and its day of reckoning has come. In the final analysis writing fulfills its purpose by betraying that which it supposedly represents. Writing exposes the possibility of a distancing between an author and his thought, and in this very movement it casts doubt on speech’s faithfulness to thought. Is speech not also structured through the logic of distance? Is there not a fundamental difference between that which is spoken, and that which is meant? Is not the Saussurian difference between the signifier and that which is signified a function of the distance between thought and its expression?[6] Thought becomes dangerous because through its necessary expression—its externalization—it is transformed into something that is no longer controllable.
Both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek are thinkers associated with the socialist left. Leaving these two to their own devices is certainly a mistake since their objectified thought—that is to say, their thought in its externalized form—has the potential to undermine the ideological structures that are in place. To be sure, the problem is not so much the thought of these specific philosophers, but is concerned with something much more abstract. The problem lies in the potential of thought in general to take on a form that is opposed to whatever elite is in power. From the moment thought is expressed—externalized—it becomes increasingly harder to control. It is no wonder that information control is an essential part of warfare.
HARDtalk, then, symbolizes a struggle between the consumerist ideology that underlies broadcast media and the thought that opposes it and the ultimate weapon seems to be speech itself. It is speech that can be made to turn on its creator; that is, it is the movement of speech that can be employed as a strategy that radically opposes thought itself. This much becomes apparent when close attention is paid to Stephen Sackur’s role in the interviews. By continuously interrupting his guests by asking questions and confronting them with quotes from their own work that are seemingly contradictory or otherwise offensive, Sackur succeeds in derailing the train of thought of the philosophers. No, it is not a derailing of thought but more like a preemptive strike that prevents thought to come to fruition altogether. By cutting thought short it can never be fully externalized and, as such, can never form any threat to anything whatsoever. HARDtalk operates through the motion of curving the space of discourse. Through the insisting and persisting tone of Stephen Sackur’s voice—in other words a particular form of speech—HARDtalk masks the fact that there is no longer any substantial thought beneath its questions. Speech, in this sense, refers to nothing but itself. It substitutes the signs of depth and intelligence for actual substance. Paying close attention to the questions asked by the host of the show, it becomes apparent that there is nothing there except for a strategy that obscures its own emptiness through simulation. The seriousness and mimetic substance of the show is entirely derived from the premise that it asks the tough questions. A premise that itself is founded upon the belief that rapidly asking questions without situating them in a proper context is the contemporary equivalent of criticism.
Jacques Derrida demonstrated how Western thought privileges speech over writing, but at least the reciprocal or symmetrical relationship between thought and its expression was left intact. Now, speech has been made to turn on its maker. To stifle thought itself in order to finally dispense with thought altogether.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/about_hardtalk/default.stm
[2] Mirzoeff, N. (2005). Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York: Routledge.
[3] Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
[4] It is important to understand that this sketch of Western metaphysics that conceptualizes Being as being-present is part of Jacques Derrida’s attempt to criticize this particular metaphysics. As such it should be understood that Derrida is not in favor of conceptualizing Being in this particular way. In fact, his is an attempt at undermining this particular belief.
[5] Johnson, B. (1981). Translator’s Introduction. In Derrida, J., Dissemination. New York: Continuum.
[6] Ibid.
