A few quick reflections on the Charlie Hebdo affair…
1. In the age of social media, we are all producers of images and meanings. The difference is only a matter of degree.
2. In a globalized world, those who traffic in media ought to have some knowledge of the cultural and ethical implications of their trafficking.
3. This means we are all called to develop our own standards for engagement in global media — our own “cultural policies.” So, for instance, when a faith group of 1.6 billion, or at least a significant proportion of them, believes that their prophet should not be depicted in images, and particularly not irreverently — that’s their cultural policy — each of us who traffics in media production needs to decide whether and how we will abide by that.
This blog, with its two to three hundred subscribers and score of other visitors, hardly qualifies in the ranks of Charlie Hebdo, which traffics at a far higher scale and knows full well the kind of effects it wants to trigger. Hebdo is in the business of iconoclasm, perhaps even iconoclash — that’s its cultural policy and its raison d’être.
But we all traffic in a world of iconoclashes, where the standards of modernism — free right to full visual and narrative expression, and so on — are not accepted by all, nor maybe even by a majority.
Last night at my university, Salman Rushdie defended the rights of satirists everywhere. I agree with him, at least when the satire is aimed at powerful interests. And I agree even more with the case he made for stories — a case for the multiplication and pluralization of stories, as part of an “opening up” of the universe, as opposed to its closing down. Surely an open universe is an idea I can get fully behind. (As did William James and A. N. Whitehead, for instance.)
Even so, it’s not so clear who the powerful are in today’s world, and any trafficking in images necessarily has to take sides and commit itself to engagement with those we might not agree with. In particular, it ought — this, at least, is my own chosen cultural policy — to respectfully engage with those who are less powerful than the ones whose cultural power I, knowingly or unknowingly, benefit from. (By the latter I mean the white, western, liberal-modernist establishment.)
That’s hard work. But it’s what being a media producer calls for in the twenty-first century.
(Okay, you say, so why did I choose not to include Mohammed’s face in the image above? For one thing, because it isn’t necessary to make the point.)
