Page 171 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

wonder about the distance of those on the much more immediate sidelines of
the violence, say in Manado, and if for them the violence at times threatens to
dissolve before their eyes into a black on white, abstract series of provocator, isu,
and kasus, number after number of casualties, or of yet more generic houses of
worship going up in ®ames. This is certainly a possibility. This reading also sup-
ports the logic according to which serialized categories like “religious con®ict”
(in Maluku), “ethnic strife” (elsewhere in Indonesia), or simply the New Order
acronym SARA circulate widely, are continually reproduced, and become in-
serted into highly mediatized if diverse scenes of chronic violence and war.
There, taking on a life of their own, they become “good to think” with, provid-
ing a ready-made, on-hand appropriable clarity for those on the sidelines and
often, too, for those immersed in war’s destructive messiness. The easy avail-
ability of “religion” to explain violence builds upon the cultural politics and
policies regarding religious practice introduced by the New Order regime—
speci¤cally “religion’s” codi¤cation as agama for particular ends, too compli-
cated to go into here. Nor should one underestimate the value of such facile,
primordialist explanations which leave the state, the army, the police, and other
common instigators of violence in Indonesia comfortably out of the picture.
There may be another important effect of the streamlining and spectraliza-
tion of violence that I have tried to characterize here. One can imagine that
when violence comes to be seen as lacking an identi¤able origin, when it lurks
both nowhere and potentially everywhere, when its source is largely unseen,
that this can engender a terrible fear. Without a clear object to ¤x on or turn to
for reassurance, the response to such an engul¤ng fear may, in the right circum-
stances, be a recourse to violence. In an age of transparency, when violence pro-
liferates and events have no mercy, terror sets in to precipitate more violence.
As if above and beyond it all, the media then step down from the immediate
sidelines to enter the spiral of more merciless events.
In the preceding pages I have lifted one strand out of the highly complex,
vigorously contested, and expanding post-Suharto mediascape of Indonesia.
Drawing on my conversations with several journalists involved in the aborted
project of the newspaper Radar Kieraha, on my perusal of examples of this pa-
per, and of the page bearing the same name that was subsequently inserted in
North Sulawesi’s Manado Pos, I have suggested what the phantom implications
of the advocated pruned-back media prose might be. One may object, however,
that the consequences of such stark reports, codi¤ed language, and bare-boned
enumeration depend considerably on how they are received—that is, actually
read, talked about, and used. While this is something I have not pursued, it is
clear that such reading and talk from Manado to Maluku would necessarily be
somewhat different. Moreover, as a practice, a politics, and a form of public
imagination emergent in the post-Suharto era, I ¤nd this kind of proactive
journalism itself intriguing for what it reveals of the processes of re®ection and
the dilemmas faced by media practitioners in our own general times of avid
publicity and proclaimed transparency.
Surrounded on all sides by areas of con®ict, Manado prides itself on being a

160 Patricia Spyer