Abstractions, Distractions and the Falsifications of Reality
in Operation Protective Edge
Il fallut détruire l’héritage mnémonique des objets, c’est-à-dire oublier, et le tableau devint non la fiction d’une autre réalité d’une autre réalité , mais une réalité avec ses propres conditions.[1]
It was necessary to destroy the mnemonic heritage of
objects, that is, to forget them, and the painting became not a fiction of
another reality, but a reality with its own conditions
Though art historian Carl Einstein was writing about
the principles behind the movement known as Cubism, what he says here can
transfigured to begin an explanation of why and how so many contemporary media
people—from reporters in the field to rewriters and editors in the offices of
newspapers and television networks—cannot recognize the truths of what has been
happening in Gaza and Israel during the summer months of 2014. Let us begin by adjusting Einstein’s comment
to a more contemporary idiom and with a focus on the production of “facts”
rather than of cubist art. Thus the art
historian might have said something like this:
It was necessary to destroy the images and sounds of the events
occurring before our eyes and within our hearing, that is, to forget—or rather,
to replace and recreate—that scene, so that the story we sent out into the
world represented not merely an objective version of the news, but a different
event had its own false sense of reality, “graphic” vividness and seeming
logic—its own apparent internal consistency.
What
is described as happening fits neatly with what theoreticians of art, rhetoric,
fiction and psychology call enargeia.
Usually translated as vividness, enargeia
refers not so much to energy—by which is usually meant drive, power and
intensity—as a convincing sense of reality.
This is related to the ancient sense of historia from which comes not only our own current notion of
history as the record or memory of past events experienced by ourselves or
recorded by others in word and image, but more usually fell within the range of
concepts such as histrionics and histriones
or theatrical actors. As a legal term in
the ancient world, history referred to the power (energy) of lawyers to create
such an overwhelming sense of what had occurred—either to defend a client from
charges of committing a crime of some sort or to parry the defence’s version of
events so that either there was no case to be answered at all or some other
person known or unknown was guilty of the action. This kind of historia was filled with such vivid words and images and histrionic
acts (such as voice control, facial gestures and bodily performances) that any
other version of events was replaced, profoundly modified or forgotten. Chronological sequencing, logical moves from
the known to the unknown, and emotional responses once considered genuine and
plausible were broken apart, scattered, and reassembled—sometimes with new
fragments—in a powerful argument.
Unlike
logic itself, the aim of rhetoric in classical, medieval and Renaissance times
at least, was not to prove a case by reasonable and objective presentation of
facts; rather it was to move the audience and spectators through emotions,
through the rousing of feelings of sympathy or disgust and then to stimulate
the desire to action to reject prior arguments and to punish liars and wrong
doers. I have explained often how these
processes were performed, and the relationships there were between different
kinds of texts—purely verbal, sometimes visual, and occasionally performative
in rituals and drama. There could be a
text and a counter-text, where each version has an acceptable plausibility and
a reasonable logical conclusion, so that a judge and jury could weigh up the
evidence and its appropriateness to the occasion.
However,
there was more often a confrontation between two counter-texts, acceptance of
either of which would undermine the plausibility and coherence of the other,
thus once a decision was made to accept one rather than the other as the text,
the remaining counter-text had no legitimacy, yet could still be discussed and
at another time, as in an appeal or an election, be spoken again. The fundamental facts of the case were mostly
agreed upon, and the basic methods of discussion and debate because fundamental
facts of the case were agreed upon, and the basic methods of discussion and
debate we shared, and the argument did not threaten principles of law, logic
and perception.
Therefore,
when those principles do come into question, there will be a confrontation that
does not operate within the polite and political structures of the state., What occurs then is between a text and an
non-text, the non-text not only becoming implausible and unreal as an argument
but fading into silence and invisibility, the historian who attempted to
present it on behalf of a client or defend it as a marker of his own knowledge
and skills discredited and thus likely to punishment himself. The two sides do
not agree upon the fundamental facts of a case or a fact of political existence;
they question the sincerity and rationality of the other’s motives. The political power, the social influence and
other intellectual pressures of each side seek to remove legitimacy from the
other, for to accept for the sake of argument the premises of the other side
would to stabilize the basic perceptions and traditions of the other.
But if
the situation is such—caused by politics or by some natural disaster such as an
earthquake. tsunami or major epidemic, incursion by external nations—that what
seemed to be a judgment made for one of the counter-texts is overridden and the
other given authority, then the normal rules no longer apply. The formerly and formally rejected
counter-text becomes an anti-text, that is, its hegemonic place requires that it
crush the opposition, imprison them, eject them from the state, or kill
them. Any attempt to voice the
previously favoured argument becomes an act of treason or blasphemy.
At its
most extreme, a confrontation might occur between two kinds of texts, one of
which is revealed as a non-text, an argument so intense and pervasive that if
it were allowed to stand as a possibility it would destroy the very premises of
order, logic and reality; and indeed when heard and seen, when experienced as
part of the legal procedure already begins to delegitimize the concept of law
itself, leaving only violence and chaos in its wake.
The
paradigm outlined here remains fairly static and academic until we factor into
it several other dynamic features of history and psychology. Psychohistory and the history of mentalities
develop to deal with the reality in which a high proportion of human activity
and especially decision-making is driven less by conscious motives than by
unconscious forces, and by the way in which small and large groups operate
beyond the awareness of individual minds, for instance by imitation,
suggestibility and trance-like states of excitement. Nor does all cognitive communication travel
through spoken language, but via images, ritual actions and mass events. Just as dreams are the royal road to
understanding the unconscious, as Freud discovered, so too is the body the map
on which that road is traced: but more than just the neurotic symptoms emerging
to the surface of the person in the symptoms of his or her illness in a set of
embodied images that require careful analysis and interpretation , so too the
behaviours of families, communities and whole nations, each revealing the
fantasies and hallucinations generated by their discomforts, anxieties, fears
and uncontrollable passions.
How this
is relevant to both sides in the Gaza Crisis will be discussed further in
coming sections of this essay. But above
all, our concerns are with the self-delusions and rationalizations of the world’s
media, the intellectuals who profess a post-modernistic political correctness,
and the puboic who are bamboozled by the plethora of misinformation and twisted
versions of reality.
[1] Carl Einstein, « Notes sur le
cubisme » in I. Meffre, ed., Ethnologie
de l’art moderne (Marseillais : André Dimanche, 1993), p. 31, cited by
Eric Michaud, « Le construction de l’image comme matrice de
l’histoire » Vingtième siècle :
Revue de l’histoire 72 (2001) 51, n. 5.
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