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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Category Archives: What This Is

Flights of Fancy

December 31, 2013

Supposing dependence on the financial economy is also freedom from the coercive momentum of capitalist production; and supposing there is an affinity between the distinctive patterns of London’s non-productive City-type activity and contemporary cultural activity, such that the position of the subject in contemporary London culture reproduces the subject position found in the financial economy, then Singing The News is an attempt to exploit the peculiarity of this position. As the financial economy plays on the ‘real economy’ (it is both sequel and prequel), so Singing The News is a fanciful remake of ‘reality’ as reported in primary news sources.

With two provisos:

1) Attention to form is the means of reconnecting flights of fancy with the cultural corollary of abstract labour, i.e. that aspect of labour, the concrete abstraction only fully realised in capitalist production, which is truly universal, common to all. Thus form – working on a piece of writing in order to formulate it – is what makes it and the experience rendered in it, common to all (even if the further realisation of this property requires additional work on the part of readers). This in marked contrast to the formlessness characteristic of the digital conversation between ‘journalists’ and ‘the people formerly known as readers’. This kind of conversation amounts to mimicry of the financial economy; instead of answering back.

2) Whereas the spontaneously fanciful character of the financial economy tends to negate the human –  this negation is widely experienced as an ‘unbearable lightness of being’, in Singing The News similarly fanciful characteristics are semi-consciously (as conscious as I can make it!) induced with the aim of adding weight to our common humanity. read more

What Is Singing The News?

December 30, 2013

Poem. Prayer. Riff. Second take. Re-make.

Unstinting criticism and infinite tenderness.

Whereas the inverted pyramid (standard format of 20th century American-led journalism) begins with the end and is structured as if to confirm that the result was always predetermined, i.e. each prior segment of the story is already locked in to the final outcome, i.e. cause and effect are hermetically sealed;

Whereas 1960s New Journalism changed the running order of journalism and its modus operandi (from event analysis to personal narrative) but maintained the assumption that the characters caught up in the narrative were always going to do what they eventually did;

In contrast to each of the above, Singing The News tries both to capture the essence of the eventual outcome and release the possibility of different eventualities. This on the basis that:

What’s done was not done until someone went ahead and did it. And even after having done it, that personmight still have behaved differently. 

You and I

December 23, 2013

It’s often early morning when we meet, you and I. Before anyone else – or even the possibility of anyone else – is there to see us. Though there’s nothing much for anyone to see. Only that in one glance of shared recognition, we see each other entirely. You and I. I and You. Workers on their way to work; father, mother, son, daughter – it doesn’t matter what homes we have come from or where we are going.

In a nondescript place owned by neither of us and common to both, we look each other in the eye, hold it for a moment (that look: comprehending, comprehensive). Then move on, never to meet again.

This journalism – if that’s what it is – aims to perform that look. The look between strangers who are not estranged. It is not a look of innocence or naivety; neither is it dismissive or destructive.

I want to hold you in my eyes, to see you for who you are. It’s only fair, then, that I should make myself open to the same kind of scrutiny – unstinting but also sympathetic.

Two Cheers for Singing The News

December 16, 2013

Here are two reasons why you should support Singing The News.

  • Journalism must find something else to do.
    Imagine you’re an architect witnessing the birth of a new technology which allows untrained individuals to design their own houses and offices, providing they follow a pre-existing template. In such circumstances, architecture, which had been both functional and aesthetic, would be bereft of much of its everyday, functional aspect. Which leaves the aesthetic. That is, if there is less demand for architects to perform the merely functional, so they would need to pay more attention to the aesthetic in order to maintain their usefulness to society. Ditto journalism. As more information now comes directly to one individual from another – neither of them journalists, journalism can no longer rely on its merely functional aspect. Like architecture, journalism has lived until now on the cusp of the functional and the aesthetic. Moreover, as in the hypothetical case of architecture, journalism’s real predicament means it must now look more towards its other aspect – the aesthetic – in order to continue to play a social role.
  • The aesthetic is a public place – perhaps the only place left for the reconstitution of the public.
    Historically, besides containing information and referring to the aesthetic, journalism has also covered two other spheres: politics and ethics; and, in turn, these spheres have been constituent elements in the formation of journalism. But now there is no politics to speak of; only the shadow play of the Westminster village. And ethics, having been asked to take the social weight which politics used to carry, has itself become a casualty of the death of politics. That is, the inter-personalisation of the political, which is itself antithetical to politics, has been carried over into the adjoining sphere of ethics, where it has had a similarly corrosive effect. A parallel process of inter-personalisation has also been at work upon the aesthetic; yet in this sphere especially, there seems to be wider recognition that the kind of culture which ensues, is grossly inadequate. Perhaps ‘recognition’ is putting it too strongly, since it is hardly articulated in these terms. Nonetheless there is a widespread sense that what is, is not enough. This is expressed in a variety of ways, ranging from the restless quest for the next Bling thing, to the young woman taking the veil in search of something bigger than the strictly personal. But this is where the aesthetic – tending towards the sublime but also rooted in the secular – should be able to intervene on a daily basis. It has the capacity – indeed, it only realises itself in the actualisation of this capacity – to represent the trajectory between what is particular and what we have in common. Thus the spine of the aesthetic is also the backbone of the public. Moreover, in its particular rendition of the commons, the aesthetic can hold up a new prospect of the public; but it has to be seen to do this in regard to what’s happening to human beings every day. And this is the point where the aesthetic turn in journalism – for the sake of journalism, also turns into a public role, i.e. the role in the re-constitution of the public, which only journalism can play; but even journalism will only be in a position to play this role if it looks more towards its own aesthetic aspect.
  • read more

    Heightened Speech

    August 31, 2013

    This is the August issue in the Last Post of the Month series, commenting on my blog and what it is trying to achieve.

    What did Martin Luther King Jnr achieve when he gave his I Have a Dream speech 50 years ago this week? The speech contained no new demands. It was not strong on analysis. Instead, for thousands of civil rights marchers in Washington on the 28th August 1963, and on behalf of millions of people who have watched and listened to it since that day, his speech gave them back their own experience and the aspirations arising from their own experience, now in a heightened form.

    You could say that the speech distilled this experience – except that the listener’s experience has been mobilised rather than stilled. You could say that it captured this experience – except that the speech emancipates its listeners, releasing them from their particulars (‘free at last’) and entering them into a wider communion of autonomous human beings.

    With Dr King as their mediator, e pluribus unum.

    In the rhythms of his carefully chosen words and in the cadences of his sing song voice, Dr King provided the point of entry into a world which already exceeded the particular status quo, as it also transcended thestatus quo of particulars. Thus he found the form of expression most suited to the democratic content of the civil rights movement.

    In its own small way, Singing The News similarly seeks to release particular experiences from the confines of what we are supposed to be and how we are meant to react in order to hold down our allotted role in the status quo. Instead, this is news for and about people in the fullness of their human being.

    To this end, the heightened form of Singing The News is intended to heighten us – to give us more stature as human beings, to give more stature to being human. But whereas the heightened form of Dr King’s speech came about in response to a substantial political movement, today there is no such movement for me to respond to. Heightened form is all I have with which to call our common humanity into existence. read more

    New Month, Change of Title

    July 4, 2013

    Illness has again interfered with my work schedule. So this first entry for July should have been my last word in June. In line with other last words at the end of previous months, it is a comment on what I’m doing here rather than a further example of me doing it.

    There have been some changes. A couple of weeks ago I changed the title of my blog from Take 2: composing the news to Singing The News: digital ballads for the common reader. This because the fact that my pieces are re-writes or second takes – Take 2 – on information which has already entered the public domain, is not the most important thing about them; and since it is of secondary importance, I finally realised that this aspect ought not to occupy the top line. Duh!

    In the change of title, my efforts to lift news out of its traditional register are now accorded top priority. I have also added a second deck: ‘reaching for the universal in today’s top stories’. In this additional line I declare my intention to re-constitute news events as part of the general or universal experience of being human, instead of constructing them largely as aberrations – odd things happening to peculiar people, as in the Shock! Horror! School of Traditional Journalism.

    These two new lines are themselves aligned to the distinction between form and content. Taken together, however, they also suggest the essential relation between the two. Thus, it is suggested that striving to realise universal content requires a different register or form, in which news is not so much straight talking but more of a hymn sung to humanity.

    Both form and content come together in the idea of the ‘common reader’ – ‘common’ as in the content of our lives which we have in common; which in turn identifies human beings/being human as the universal. This expressed in a particular form of words and arrived at, hopefully, on the part of the reader. read more

    Advertorial

    January 31, 2013

    This is the first in an ongoing series of last-posts-of-the-month. Each of these monthly occasions will be used (A) to reflect on recent entries, and (B) to say something about Take 2 in relation to contemporary developments in journalism.

    (A) Why aren’t there any hyperlinks from my posts back to the source material which I have drawn on in order to compose them? Because the aim of the exercise is to use digitisation as the opportunity to address a problem which also arises along with it, namely, the lightness of being prompted by an unending sequence of associated media packages in which one leads to another, and another and another (the ‘computer game’ war in Iraq in 1991 was an early example of this ontology-lite). The sequence is so indefinitely long that both origination and finalisation are all but defined out of existence. However, I am using freely available, online media content produced as part of this sequence, not to extend it but rather in the attempt to bring it to an end or at least slow it down. I am well aware of the widespread assumption that the people-formerly-known-as-readers are emancipated by opening up the media concertina so that each little packet of content, and the user who generated it, act together as mediators between the last person to have done this and the next person who will go on to do it. But in current conditions such a mediating sequence (one mediator leading to another), can only have the effect of containing our existence: it projects its own characteristics onto its subject matter, tending to prescribe all human activity as mediating activity, thus effectively proscribing activity of any other kind (just as fictitious capital broadcasts its serial character and militates against social production). In contrast, in my work the associations are not part of a series but contained within each, single post, so that, being all-of-apiece, each piece is the formal, literary equivalent of an associated world. Moreover, my formulation of these associations constitutes an effort to close the concertina; to make the mediated, immediate – not in the naïve sense of simply being there, nor in accordance with the faux naïve goal of authenticity. Instead I am seeking to arrive at the concrete, where ‘concrete’ is a return journey from the abstract. On this basis, January’s pieces are meant to take the people featured in them out of the mediating sequence which thins out their existence, making them fully human again in a thick description which gets the measure of their humanity. read more

    Year We Go: Take 2’s 2012 Alphabet Annual

    December 23, 2012

    Art into article – a new way of doing journalism? Barack Obama is Dorian Gray (debauchery of power surely shows up somewhere). Crisis of Authority: Doubtful performance by Georgy Porgy, Pudding-Pie Chancellor. Eyeless in Rimless Glasses (Lord Leveson and Nick Pollard). F-word Mitchell. George Ent, whistling up half a million. Hillsborough – like pigs not plebs. Iphone therefore I am. Jay walking across press freedom. Kim Kardashian’s chiselled booty. Lathicharge on the road to Lutyens’ Indian mansion. Miliband more Wallace than Wolverine. ‘No Surrender’: the Orange Heritage Experience. Qaedamonium in New York, wrought by Superstorm Sandy. Rueful Rupert, King Lear in Leveson’s High Court. Santa-in-reverse – death scene in Newtown, Tucitcennoc. Tunis, Tripoli, Benghazi to Chennai, the Anti-American Soul Train. USA Unemployment at 23 million? Victory for sheer athleticism, winning out against London’s Olympic Legacy-Logorrhea. Winsome from Wisconsin, GOP’s Wannabe V-P Paul Ryan – who he? Xi Jinping’s Elvis Hair. YTake2? For brief compositions of our common humanity, from source material already published on major news platforms. Zzzzzzzzz.

    Why Take 2?

    December 20, 2012

    They can hardly be called ‘aims and objectives’, having only emerged during the course of writing these entries; rather, these observations have come to the fore while proceeding with the writing. Even so, they may provide some insight into what this writing is for.

    (1) How lyrical is the language of advertising, especially compared to matter-of-fact journalism in its long established forms. Advertising handles its characters with humour, affection, even tenderness. Whereas journalism has tended to dismiss the people featured in it: its peremptory tone has often served as their dismissal notice. Perhaps lyricism is permissible in advertising because the characters who appear in the adverts come with the authority of the commodities they are there to represent. This would mean that the discrepancy between peremptory journalism and lyrical advertising is a further example of the fetishism of commodities; yet another example of things taking precedence over people, with the latter only recognised as such insofar as they are also recognisably bearers of the former. High time, then, for journalists to write lyrics about the people in their stories, i.e. to write about them in a lyrical way; and, by this means, to address the absurdity of things-before-people, which is also how things really are.

    (2) The New Journalism of the 1960s was just such an attempt – the lyrical austerity of In Cold Blood; the poetic violence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It arose in reaction to the reification inherent in mainstream journalism, and took its place in the contemporary counter-culture. Subsequently re-titled ‘the journalism of attachment’, the same kind of long form journalism became part of the advocacy culture of the 1990s, calling for more intervention by Western elites rather than less. Aside from its political trajectory, however, the length of this long form journalism has always been problematic. Given the length of time it takes to write, it cannot keep up with the new: it can’t do the news. What’s needed is something which reaches similar levels of descriptive power, but in short form. read more

    Painting The News: notes towards the redefinition of reporting

    August 25, 2012

    What defines the reporter? It used to be that reporters went out to look at events, and came back with answers to four or five questions: who, what, where, when, and, sometimes, why? They covered events by capturing basic information, writing it up in the form of a ‘story’. But the basics are now readily available – more easily and at lower cost to the reader than ever before. It does not take a reporter to answer the first four of these questions when we can gather as much from open access, user-generated platforms such as Twitter; and these platforms have all but dispensed with the form of the ‘story’. From the traditional list, that leaves only one question for the reporter to answer; and just the one answer to be formulated. True, the outstanding question – why? – is also the most difficult, but this still amounts to a reduction in the reporter’s role; especially since separating the fifth question from the other four Ws means that the last remaining answer often comes better from analysts, commentators and leader writers rather than reporters.

    So what is the reporter for? Now that basic information is often provided not by reporters but by people-formerly-known-as-readers, it is surely time to reconsider what the people-formerly-known-as-reporters should be doing instead of supplying the basics. Consideration of this question is especially timely since, unless we make a point of addressing it directly, chances are that the Leveson Inquiry and its legacy will redefine the reporter in terms of how well he behaves and what codes of practice he has been seen to follow. Although this process may demonstrate who is and who is not considered fit to be a reporter, it cannot show what purpose reporting is fit for. British journalism will have wasted a good crisis if it checks in for moral rehab instead of seizing the opportunity to reformulate itself. Whereas Leveson et al pose the current situation as a moral crisis, what the reporter really faces is a fundamental question of purpose – what am I here to do?; and a supplementary question – if I am to fulfil a modified purpose, now that the basics are covered by non-reporters, what form should this fulfilment take? read more

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