https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo190464205.html

Shikhar Goel: Describe for us some intellectual motivations behind writing this book. What were some significant moments that led you to this book project? 

Francis Cody: This book came out of a longstanding interest in news media circulation and publics that I had already developed while doing research in rural South India for my dissertation.  But after a few articles that I wrote based on fieldwork done during that time, I still had a very vague understanding of where I wanted to go with the materials I was collecting until I realized that I was increasingly dissatisfied with how the literature on publics was so thoroughly grounded in liberal political theory.  This was the case even among the most important critics of liberalism.  And since I was approaching questions about democracy and the public sphere from postcolonial theory and the literature on populism, I saw an opportunity to intervene.  The occasion for this was an article, later published as a book chapter in an edited volume, that I was asked to write on the theme of media and utopia by the wonderful media scholar, Arvind Rajagopal.  By examining how crowds of angry supporters of political leaders attacked newspaper offices when their leader had been defamed in the press, and how newspaper editors published articles with the potential for such attacks to occur in mind, I was able to show the co-constitutive relationship that had developed between crowd violence and print capitalism, thereby undermining some of the key binaries underpinning liberal theories of publicity.

My interests had moved past liberalism or its postcolonial critics to hone in on political logics of event-making and spectacle.  And from that starting point, I took my lead from the reporters I was becoming close to.   I paid special attention to how limits were imposed to control what could be published as news, and how those limits were sometimes used as opportunities to amplify the importance of an event when newsmakers chose to breach them.  For example, all the journalists I talked to complained of the government’s overzealous application of criminal defamation laws or the degree to which judges were likely to charge a journalist with contempt of court if they were unhappy with how they were being portrayed.  And yet, I noticed that they would continue to publish news items that drew these charges, and some even appeared attract such charges on purpose for the sake of their own publicity.  I saw this dynamic unfold across a range of contexts, echoing what I had learned about crowd violence against journalists, and I began to realize that this kind of amplification turning into a positive feedback loop was, in fact, becoming a focal topic of my research.  Another significant moment that led to this project was a workshop on law and media technology organized by the Sarai project at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.  It was there that I was able to begin to interpret what I saw happening around me in Chennai with the help of media scholars who had actually studied law and even among lawyers who were arguing before the Supreme Court of India to decriminalize things like defamation or to stop the government from attacking critics with sedition charges.  I was motivated by these encounters, where the need for legal reform is quite clear, to try to put these questions in a wider sociological and historical frame.

Shikhar Goel:  What would be some key contributions that you think this book makes to the existing literature in the field of media anthropology in South Asia and beyond?

Francis Cody: Beyond having reopened the question of political publicity from a new angle, I hope that the concept of the “news event” I develop over the course of the book will be useful to think through a range of topics.  News media become event-makers in their own right, thereby blurring the distinction between events in the world being represented in the news and the event of news representation itself.  And this ubiquitous phenomenon is at the center of our concerns about misinformation in the age of digitalization, for very good reasons.  The fact of an event’s communicability – its capacity to circulate widely, thereby producing value and the production of circulation itself as an event – has eclipsed news media’s power to communicate something about the world outside of itself for many.  But this should also remind us of some much older arguments, like Baudrillard’s claims about the “implosion of meaning in media,” or critical theory’s claims about the “culture industry” and how news is part of a much larger transformation in media circulation.  These are long-standing concerns that have taken on new urgency in our times because of the obvious connections between transformations in technologies of circulation and the rise of populist attacks on traditional structures of representation, both in formal politics and in news media.

What I would like to think I have contributed with the concept of the news event is a way to ask empirical questions about these very abstract theoretical claims – assertions that have often been made without much evidence.  By taking seriously the politics that continue to unfold under the regime of what Jodi Dean terms “communicative capitalism,” my focus on the news event allows me actually track, through events that are as real as they are virtual, how positive feedback loops emerge, and why news makers pursue the politics of communicability at particular historical conjunctures.  The stakes in understanding these phenomena are obviously high in South Asia, with the dominance of highly mediatized anti-democratic regimes in India or Bangladesh, as they are in many other places.  The advantage that comes with having studied these problems in a place like Tamil Nadu, India, is that political actors have been remarkably reflexive about the mediatization of politics there, and have purposefully pursued power through the production of news media from the very beginning of the Dravidian movement that has dominated electoral politics for over half a century.  But digitalization is playing a large role in the rapid transformations in Tamil politics as it is everywhere.  I am developing the concept of the news event in a context everyone is highly conscious of the power and limits of news representation in creating a political climate.  I am also aiming to provide a methodological model of how one might do this kind of media anthropology that is grounded in place, but which does not necessarily follow traditional models of ethnographic research and writing.

Shikhar Goel:  Our readers might be curious to know more about your choice of working with “event as a method” in this book. How did you zero in on it, were there any competing alternatives you had experimented with during your research?  

Francis Cody: My method of tracking events and logics of event-making to raise questions about the media politics of our time took a while to develop.  And it draws inspiration from at least two very different traditions of thinking about the event.  I really had no idea what I was looking for when beginning to do ethnographic research among news consumer and journalists, in addition to spending time in newspaper archives. But I was driven by a general sense that political sovereignty is mediated by news media and it is for this reason that political parties and other activists trying to change the world were so invested in how they are represented in the news and in trying to mold that image.  I was working as a sort of second generation among media anthropologists, as a number of studies were being published at the time about particular news organizations or about particular media technologies.  I realized that this study would have to be multi-sited in an institutional sense and multi modal in the sense of tracking news circulation across media such as newspapers, television, and the then emergent world of online publication and social media, especially WhatsApp.  Books that immediately inspired me in terms of method were asking big questions beyond the study a particular media house, like Amahl Bishara’s critique of “objectivity” under conditions of war and occupation among Palestinian journalists, and Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s study of how digitalization was transforming the way news photographs were circulating and representing the world.

Tracing the event started as a methodology to answer questions I had about how political power was mediated by news representation before it eventually became a concept to be theorized more abstractly.  I draw on Veena Das’s concept of the “critical event” which she developed to understand how an anthropologist might engage with large questions about community, kinship, and the nation when these very categories were being thrown into question in the context of national crises.  While many of the events discussed in the book are for less significant than those that fall under this category, the method of paying attention to the contours of contestation that are drawn when certain thresholds of social norms are crossed by news media or the politicians they report on was very powerful.  The other concept that became important, much later when writing the book, was Bernard Stiegler’s idea of “event-ization” which he develops to capture the processes through which the distinction between a storyline and that which it is reporting on collapses as a result of media saturation.  It appealed to my own sense that methodology must be ground in a processual approach to how events of representation become events of historical importance, and it captured that blurring of the distinction between the world represented in the news and the world of news representation that I saw happening all around me in the world of journalism in Tamil Nadu.

Shikhar Goel: This book pushes scholars across fields and disciplines to relook at some of their established assumptions and concepts by elegantly emplacing media as a fundamental constitutive building block for critical theory in the contemporary. At the same time, the term media itself has promiscuously and generatively become a placeholder for a galaxy of objects, concepts, and phenomena in the academy. What were some challenges that you faced as an anthropologist while working with a term like media that has come to engender such wide-ranging theoretical possibilities?

Francis Cody: You’ve put your finger on a very important problem, there is a sort of impasse that has arisen between media studies and anthropology.  One the one hand, media as an explicit topic of study has receded into the background of much of anthropology compared to ten or fifteen years ago.  I suspect that the question of alterity, which still drives so much of anthropological research in North America at least, is not as easy to ground in studies of technologies that are increasingly shared across the globe.  This has happened at a time when ethnography is much more highly mediatized than ever before, where a great deal of anthropological research takes place online, for example.  Media studies, on the other hand, has moved from seeing media, like television, digital media, and so on, as a kind of ecology within which culture grows to treating clouds, water, and so other elements of organic and inorganic matter as media in their own right.  But too often, this kind of ecology-as-media approach grounds itself in a rereading of the European philosophical canon that treats the rest of world as having empirical interest but nothing much to offer in the way of theory. There is, furthermore, a sometimes anti-humanist ethos in some corners of media studies that is hostile to questions about the public sphere, or even to questions of meaning and interpretation, questions I have found to be of such central interest to my research.         

So, there’s a fairly large disciplinary divide.  At the same time, some of the hang-ups anthropologists have had about human agency and the problem of technological determinism have receded as well, opening the way for a greater appreciation for the scale-making qualities of media infrastructure and the technologically distributed quality of agency.  So, in that sense, this is a fortuitous time to develop a media anthropology that is more tune with developments happening elsewhere in the world of critical theory.  And doing so from the perspective of concerns arising out of recent transformations in India’s media ecology has the added advantage of avoiding many of the teleological assumptions about techno-social change that continue to undergird a media theory machine that remains incredibly Eurocentric.  You see this in some of the literature on machine learning, for example.  I’m interested in making general claims about media as a fundamental constitutive building block for critical theory in the contemporary, as you put it so elegantly, from an India-based point of view that doesn’t need to argue its importance by claiming that this the future of the global North, another Occidentalist teleology we continue to find in anthropology.  This is precisely about the contemporary!

Shikhar Goel:  Law, both inside and outside the courtroom, emerges as your key ethnographic site in this book. The existing literature across disciplines of history, critical legal studies, and media studies among others in South Asia and elsewhere suggests that law and media share a constitutive relationship, where law emerges as an always already mediatized entity. What is then unique to this equation between law and media in the contemporary moment where digital technology with its robust circulation engines has come to dominate our mediascapes? How do you read the mutating relationship between law and media through time?

Francis Cody: As the scholarship from India and elsewhere shows, this co-constitutive relationship between law and media is old.  It runs through cinematic representations of law and the legal regulation of cinema to our age of live reporting on legal procedure and legal attempts to shield the judiciary from the glare of instant publicity.  Of course, courtroom events form a great deal of news content.  But what I was struck by in my research is how often media are discussed in legal judgements and how much the judiciary is concerned with the influence of news media on the course of legal proceedings. 

             The problem of “trial by media” has become much more acute as the time lag between media reporting and the slow pace of legal procedure appears to stretch further and further.  At the same time, police often play an important role in bypassing legal procedure by feeding evidence to television news channels, maybe because of the public pressures for the speedy delivery of some sort of justice (which is often profoundly unjust).  One of the genres that I’m writing about at the moment is that of the mass forensic event where CCTV camera footage and postmortem reports are endlessly analyzed by news anchors and the news consuming publics.  These kinds of evidence often ground very disturbing media trials where the criminality of certain types of people is decided upon ahead of time, and then seems to be corroborated by these kinds of indexical traces of violence, all before the courts are able to provide a procedural framework for weighing the value of evidence.  At a more general level, if the legal system always played a large role in regulating what could appear on news media, it appears that news media are playing much stronger role now in determining the meanings, and even outcomes of trials.  If we are already concerned with how political influence has hurt the independence of the judiciary, we should extremely worried about how the compulsions of communicative capitalism, coupled with corporate and political influence on news reporting, are driving the ways that the media environment conditions the life of law.