Page 170 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

particular time, since it can be mirrored anywhere and repeated any number of
times. These are signs that point to a great distance. (Quoted in Cadava 1997, xxii)

Jünger described this deracinating effect of mass media—the abstraction of
the event from particularities of time and space, its transformation into a dis-
locatable, exchangeable, circulatable, repeatable, serialized entity or, in Marxist
terms, its commodi¤cation or de¤nition in terms of exchange value, and, relat-
edly, the subordination of the event to the fact of its mass-mediability—already
in 1934, the year of the Nuremburg rallies. If at this relatively early moment
Jünger could write of the production of an event for a planetary broadcast, then
it goes without saying that the movement of global capital and the explosion of
televisual possibilities owing to the communications revolution have, if any-
thing, only aggravated and magni¤ed the processes of which he spoke (Allen
1999, 37). 15
While media language post-Suharto has been changing, approximating more
closely in certain respects everyday, popular, and regional forms of speech, new
kinds of standardization have also set in and, notably, in the expanding vocabu-
lary of violence. Words like provokator, pihak tertentu, kasus (event/case), isu
(issue), or the acronym SARA serve not only to standardize the language of
violence but also to universalize the events and social actors they describe—
across newspapers but also websites, chat groups, and so on, as well as on the ra-
dio and television. And they do so even with respect to media sources that cater
to the identitarian-bounded interests of speci¤c audiences and social groups
which in other important respects are involuted—physically within a divided
Ambon boasting its own “Gaza Strip” (Jalur Gaza), ideologically, and also to
some extent—given the split and doubling into a “Christian” and a “Muslim”
media—in terms of what people on either side see, hear, and read.
I have focused here on print media. In the context of Mbembe’s new
“geography-in-the-making” (Mbembe 1999, 15), across the ever more porous
boundaries of the nation-state and beyond the limitations of national language,
the televisual media especially play a dominant role in the process of standard-
izing and codifying what counts as violence and, importantly, what it looks like.
Increasingly today, violence must not only be seen to be believed but only exists
when it can be seen—and then, over and over again. “Forms of violence that are
not ‘telegenic,’ that are not selected by the media for transmission tend to be
ignored and, in the process, forgotten or devalued” (Weber 1997, 82). Along with
other dimensions to the spectralization of violence that I have touched upon
here, this ¤guring of the violent as increasingly televisual is part and parcel of
a globalized situation in which politics and history need increasingly to be com-
prehended in terms of their derivative and secondary relationship to telecom-
munications (Ronell, cited in Cadava, xxiii).
The epigraph at the opening of this paper, from Atwood’s Blind Assassin,
evokes the unreal blur of war watched from a distance, a war waged two dimen-
sionally in black and gray, a war of the time past of World War II. One can only

Media and Violence in an Age of Transparency 159