Tony Kashani

There is a general consensus around the globe that media are integral to our lives. Some contemporary philosophers and cultural critics, like Jean Baudrillard, have gone so far as to argue that most people’s reality is one that is mediated through media—this is particularly a compelling argument with regard to developed societies such as the US. There are numerous perspectives on the role of new media in relation to problems of social justice. In his writings and interviews, Herbert Marcuse warns us of the homogenizing and dominating power of mass media (i.e., corporate media). Back in the 1960s, he argued that at its most advanced stage, domination functions as administration, and in the overdeveloped areas of mass consumption, the administered life becomes the “good life” of the whole. This, in some ways, can be construed as “the pure form of domination.” Other thinkers such as Henry Jenkins and Clay Shirky see things differently. With a phenomenological lens they have examined new media and see possibilities of empowered community and social cooperation, which in some ways stands united (or has the potential to) in opposition to homogenizing and dominating forces of corporate media. The debate rages on, to be sure. Evgeny Morozov argues against technological romanticism and advocates a deeply skeptical approach toward new media. Noam Chomsky sees entities such as social media as perpetuating superficial treatment of complex notions, and therefore a further deepening of anti-intellectualism on a global scale. Then, media scholars such as Bob McChesney, Douglas Kellner, Toby Miller, and Henry Giroux see the picture with a pragmatic lens and advocate critical media literacy with an uncompromising radical approach.

To facilitate social justice we need an ethics of solidarity. On that account, Richard Rorty argues that the process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what unfamiliar people are like. Who is responsible for this redescription? Rorty answered, “This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama [(e.g., cinema and TV)], and, especially, the novel.” As often is the case with such complex conditions, the reality of everyday life and its ethics do not fall in either one camp or the other. The either/or approach never works. Considering the above arguments, perspectives, and your knowledge of other schools of thought (see secondary writings of Kellner, Feenberg, Sandel, Tester, et al.), it is the task of the public intellectuals to offer (in second order) analysis and position of the role of new media in relation to social justice.

It is generally accepted in most Zen schools that in order to go beyond the emptiness of human-made concepts and theoretical musings to experience “reality,” one has to go through consistent meditative practices. This is of course the middle way (the way of the Zen). But this statement begs a philosophical question. And that is, “What constitutes ‘consistent meditation’?”

Many people around the globe are familiar with the image of a Zen practitioner sitting quietly for hours and ridding him or herself from anxieties, convoluted thoughts, and obsessions about desire and material wants. This is known as one technique to help one empty his or her mind. But what about the following activities:

• walking for hours in a forest
• Biking in the mountains or streets of Manhattan
• Washing methodically one’s dishes in the kitchen for an hour or two
• Lifting weights for an hour or two in a gym
• Performing methodically martial arts kata (i.e., form) for an hour or two
• Quietly watching the waves at an ocean beach

Are the above activities not meditative?  I contend they are and can be just as effective as meditation in its technically classical form at a Zen temple.

What can we achieve with the above? That is an irrelevant question, a Zen practitioner might say. To achieve? Zazen is not interested in achieving. What Zazen is for is to reveal the destination we have already arrived at. The past does not cause the future, because there is no future. The ultimate is found in the ordinary and we are all dependent on each other without depending on one another. Is the ultimate part of the ordinary? Indeed, the ultimate cannot be separated from the everyday life. The Daoist teaching along with Zen philosophy teach us that when properly seen, the supreme reality, the one Immanuel Kant called the unreachable can in fact be experienced. That we may call “enlightenment.” And I argue that certain martial arts masters and mystics may have actually experienced this true reality. Did the Buddha?

I should like to go to the 1980s. Let us look at Henry Giroux’s Teachers as Intellectuals (1988), which, I argue, can be used as a handbook for critical pedagogy. In this book Giroux calls for an authentic interdisciplinary approach to teaching. As Michel Foucault identified long ago disciplines were established for social control and organization of a particular knowledge to sustain dominance by the power structure. The very idea of discipline started at the end of the classical age and is in the DNA of the academy. As Giroux points out,

“What is characteristic of disciplinary technologies is their capacity simultaneously to normalize and hierarchize, to homogenize and differentiate. This paradox is explained by the control which discipline asserts over difference. Because norms are carefully established and maintained, deviation can be measured on a scale. The goal of the professional in a discipline is to move up this scale by differing only in the appropriate ways.”      

Giroux teaches the teachers that a “discipline” limits discourse. Needless to say, to go against the normative prescriptions of disciplinary pedagogy is to risk punishment and marginalization. But if we are to follow Socrates example, an educator has a moral obligation to take these risks, as Giroux has taken throughout his academic career, and as all authentic critical educators take in the classroom, in the halls of the academy, and in their books and articles. To do this, one has to practice interdisciplinarity.

There is one caveat here, and that is the danger of interdisciplinary movements working within the confines of the academy and falling back on the logic of reductive/disjunctive disciplinary work and generating new disciplines out of their attempts. We have seen this happen with some cultural studies programs in the US academy. Cultural studies, receiving its spirit from figures like Raymound Williams and Stuart Hall and the kind of pedagogy they produced in Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, initially allowed heretic professors to challenge the academy’s hierarchy by infusing anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, art history, political science, and intertextual media studies to look at cultural phenomena and offer new theories about culture. While we have had some exciting and path breaking scholarship and teaching done under the guise of cultural studies, increasingly, we are seeing a hierarchal model applied to these programs at the universities. This is in part due to the nature of institutional education. Giroux reminds us to foster a pedagogy that counters the disciplinary juggernaut of the academy and to politicize cultural studies. To this end he urges educators to practice toward what he calls, in spirit of Freire, “conception of human praxis.”

There is a fallacious claim made by many a corporate TV journalist that he or she is in the business of seeking the truth to the best of his or her ability. Moreover, we are told that after careful fact checking and deliberation with his or her colleagues, this “best version of truth” is presented objectively to a public eager to know what is happening in the world. It is fallacious because it is simply not true. In the second decade of the 21^st century, corporate TV journalism and by extension much of the rest of the field has become what Chris Hedges once wrote, in his very readable Empire of Illusion, “a farce.” Corporatism is not interested in fostering enlightening citizenry. Corporatism is only interested in transforming the citizen into a docile consumer. In the US the situation is quite peculiar. Given that a handful of conglomerates own all of commercial media and many people still get their news from commercial TV news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, it is reasonable to conclude that most people are targeted to become the ideal docile consumers that corporatism loves so much. In the neoliberal age, corporatism is the main religion, the primary drug of success, and the dominant ideology. Think like your company, act like your company, and do not question the “truth” given to you by your company no matter how unreasonable and incredible this “truth” may sound and look. Do not question the logic of corporatism—that is the main message. And if you do, TV journalists will include you in their sensational stories about bad guys trying to undo freedom and democracy. The power elite of corporatism distrust, and sometimes fear, authentic journalists. Honest sense dictates that a journalist not be comfortable in a relationship with corporate power. In fact, journalistic logic prescribes an adversarial relationship between the journalist and the CEO or a government official. Those so-called journalists—these millionaires– we see appearing on corporate TV are essentially charlatans who are very good at sounding serious, objective, compassionate, and dare I say, journalistic. They are very good actors and in a culture of spectacle, they are its most trusted celebrities. They come in different shades. They vary from semi-demagogue right wing proto-fascists to pseudo-liberal lefties. This is essentially a global phenomenon. However, the United States of America suffers from the worst case of corporate TV journalists who are hand-maidens of their corporate masters. It is because of corporatism permeating every American institution that the most trusted commercial journalist right now is a comedian by the name of John Stewart. To be sure, the alternative TV journalism and to some extent Public Broadcasting Systems are soldiering on and seeking the truth from the margins, but will the populace free itself from the chains of corporate TV journalism? Perhaps the Internet can change the dynamics of journalism toward a major global paradigm shift where corporate TV journalism can go where it belongs; into the oblivion.