At least since Kant, it has become customary to question the work of concepts in linguistic use. Concepts are not names for things; rather they are ideas, whose origins and provenance have often receded from public memory. Hence concepts when unexamined, can provoke a civil war in thought.
The modern world posits a sharp break with so much that came before it, but “civil wars” continue, and are monotonously repetitive in their themes. What is new today is the sense of a global simultaneity of counter-revolutionary movements.
A time-honored belief in the U.S. and in many other countries, namely that “it can’t happen here,” is now harder to sustain. What is noticeable is not simply the alleged popular proclivity for strong men, but more importantly the flipping of “the people” from a potentially progressive to a potentially reactionary force, upending modern terms for understanding politics and society.
“Media” are implicated in this process, but the propaganda of their modernizing effect has deterred from inquiry into contra-indicated outcomes. “Media” moreover are a profane topic of inquiry; the word is more a notion than a concept. Much of the scholarship under its sign takes the United States as its locus and horizon, leading to concerns that can be parochial, or hampered by disciplinary boundaries.
“Show me a plague and I’ll show you the world,” the late Larry Kramer said. For all to see, the pandemic has formed a lens on the world. The horrors that some of us saw and that others refused to see, presented a mediatic effect demanding to be understood. Perhaps it helped to pull away from the propaganda of the term, and towards the idea, one that could encompass scandal, spectacle, incontrovertible evidence, aggravation and exculpation all in one class of objects, often understood as a single entity (“media”). The racism that came on display was unbelievable, but more so was the fact that it had not gone away, and that seemingly, little had changed. Could it be that an African-American life still counted as semi-human?
We put out a call for de-parochializing strategies to address what we saw as the univocal, often unilinear logics of media form and effect that even critics tended to assume. The call became a statement and a petition, that circulated, and drew support for ongoing engagement.
We were often asked: Who is the addressee of the petition?
The petition is addressed to those who responded affirmatively to our statement – academics from across the disciplines, but also artists, activists, policy makers and bureaucrats. This is a self-constituted and hopefully expanding collective with minimal common purpose— to rethink received ideas of media, and to deparochialize the ways in which the term is understood.