Who is afraid of WikiLeaks? Media and Counter-memory.

Traditionally, liberal democracies envision media freedom in two ways: as negative

freedom, in the sense of lack of constraint on what the media can do or be; and, as
positive freedom, or the power the media have to affirm themselves in and through
what they do. Little understood, or at least not well articulated, third
conceptualization has emerged in the last few decades: freedom as the power to
transgress the limits of what one is presently capable of being or doing rather than
merely the freedom to be or do those things.

Michel Foucault, the most frequently cited author in the humanities
1
today, called
this novel conception of freedom counter-memory: the dynamic and real rather
than merely abstract possibility of overcoming the stupor of memory, identity and
history. All of which, due to their inherent tendency to conserve that which is by its
nature fluid, have a tendency to cartoon-ize media, culture and politics and hence
its subject, or us.

But counter-memory has proven to be an exceedingly complex and challenging
notion for scholars, activists and journalists alike. After all, what does it mean to
continuously transgress what we are capable of being or doing? And what
amounts to the same thing how can we accomplish that which, by definition, we
are incapable of undertaking as ourselves? Foucaults and many others who share
his vision for radical transformation answer has been enigmatic: by setting up a
never-ending process of becoming-other, or finding that which we already are but
cant as yet perceive as ourselves.

But what exactly does this mean? And isnt this what were doing already?

Well no.

Suppose I hide a coin in my pocket. I then look for it again and find it in the same
place. What have I accomplished in my search? I have indeed discovered a reality,
but it is a reality of little value, a thoroughly anthropomorphic and self-centered
reality I have merely found that which Ive set myself up to find in the first place.

Yet this is precisely how matters stand with regard to seeking and exercising
freedom of and in the traditional media today: How can true freedom of expression
be found within the realm of what weve understood, defined and legislated,
whether by law or custom, as the natural domain of this freedom? Must not instead
the highest horizon of media sovereignty be found where the questions of freedom
and its limits do not arise at all where media freedom, if effectively practiced, is
radically unpredictable, and thus capable of accurately reflecting reality, which itself
can never be contained by laws and regulations?

1
According to Times Higher Education 2007 statistics
(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=405956).

***

In 2005, Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations at the time,
attended an opening of an Aboriginal community centre in a small northern town in
Alberta, Canada. As a reporter at a local daily at the time, I had the good fortune to
talk with him after the ceremonies. As Fontaine sat down, he looked at the running
tape recorder, and simply said: We have been threatened, bribed and bullied by the
Canadian government for generations. But still, we persevere, we educate ourselves,
we survive as distinct people.

Fontaine was very precise: Aboriginal self-determination for him is not a question of
self-redescription one need only to think of the dreary tediousness of the
ubiquitous language police who would have us think otherwise but of promotion
of a certain type of self-overcoming consciousness which, if allowed to articulate
itself on its own terms, will take a material form that gives it what it needs to
survive as counter-memory: as that which finds vitality in without defining itself
as the struggle itself.

Now, we may all well agree that self-creation, or living as if on purpose, is
important. Still, for most of us and certainly for traditional social institutions
self-creation does not mean self-transformation in any deep sense. It means merely
self-redescription a change in how we think about who we are for we take this to
mean that epistemological change, or change in knowing, language and narratives
that describe us to ourselves, is enough to ensure that we are taking responsibility
for our time.

But philosophically, politically and culturally a point both Fontaine and many of
todays leading intellectuals, like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, seem to see quite
clearly this is an extremely weak position because our social, economic and media
structures turn oppressive not at the point at which they stop us from expressing
ourselves, but and precisely to the contrary at the point at which they force us to
express ourselves, for it is here, where they are closest to us, that these discursive
structures reproduce themselves as us unbeknownst to us.

In other words, the very way we currently conceive of a possibility for change
evident in how we practice knowing, storytelling and symbolic representations
more generally (i.e., the media portrayals of race, gender, science, politics, etc.) all
but ensures stagnation and the status quo, as many a commentator points out. What
is new today, is that we are starting to realize that real change political
revolutions, scientific paradigm shifts and the seemingly imminent doom of climate
change is never about interpreting reality; it instead forces itself upon us,
unrecognizable and unexpected, as a new reality. And in so doing it presents us with
a wager: experiment with the unknown and unknowable and as in any experiment
some things may go horribly wrong along the way or become irrelevant.

It is in this sense that WikiLeaks can be thought of as a harbinger. Its importance lies
not in its function as a gossipy outlet for nerdy whistleblowers or a depository of
government secrets which, according to the more domesticated commentators,
help us to practice reality in a more informed fashion but in destabilizing the very
setup of power structures and information management, thereby showing to us that
an entirely different take on reality is not just possible, but reasonable as well.

***

All this brings into sharp relief another darling dinosaur of modernity, one that
thrives in contemporary media, and which prevents counter-memory, or the
freedom to be other than what we are, from seeping ever deeper into social and
media structures: the ubiquitous separation of the public from the private.


Yet and this is a key observation this innocuous- and progressive-seeming
dualism can only function if we take for granted that which we ought to question in
the first place: the good will of our social contracts and institutions both the
public and private.

In an infantilizing yet clever twist, this dichotomy has acquired, especially under the
rather cynical neo-liberal agenda, a sort of divide and conquer function it
sneakily manages to imply that Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, not to
mention Syncrude and Pfizer, have your best interests in mind or at least are
compatible with them and all you have to do is sit back and choose in whom to
invest your trust.

But does this rather juvenile mystification not scatter and stratify the power of
journalists, academics and bureaucrats, whose language today tends towards the
now macabre-light, now Orwell-style sterilized: APART FROM GLOBAL WARMING,
ETHNIC CLENSINGS, GENOCIDES AND FAMINES, REALITY WITH THE HELP OF
NEW POLICY INITIATIVES AND INNOVATIVE SCIENCE SOLUTIONS IS ON A
PERPETUAL UPWARD TRAJECTORY! And have not our topical issues, perhaps
quite despite ourselves, turned increasingly dj vu-like: over-institutionalized,
over-intellectualized and just plain humanities education-irrelevant?

It is true: we do not need high philosophy or the much vaunted graduate degrees to
realize this self-evident and urgent truth: any we that were so fond of speaking in
terms of we the public, we the social activists, we the middle class, the
liberals, the single mothers, the lesbians or orphans can never be posited as
preceding the problem, any social or political problem for it is itself always a part
of what the parameters of the problem are. And that is why so many of us find the
WikiLeaks phenomenon confusing: it forces on us new terms alongside of which we
are not quite ready to rethink not just the artifact in question, but the subject or the
questioner himself.

The question of the actual significance of WikiLeaks notwithstanding, real freedom
in the media today can no longer be an exercise in brilliant reporting, an affirmation
of some set of facts or truths about the we, or a fascinating political or social
commentary. To function as change at all, our freedom as scholars or activists or
journalists must include the power to transgress the very limits of what the we is
presently capable of being or doing, in public as in private, rather than merely the
freedom to be or do those things.

Michael Urbanski is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies, and his work has
published in the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post and other papers.