/ 30 September 2011

Media needs more punk, less Idols

I’m a little peeved, to be honest. I staged a Situationist intervention last week, way before Talk Radio 702 newsreader Mark Esterhuysen. I should be the famous one!

Unfortunately, the oppressive Mail & Guardian newspaper sub-editors made some stylistic changes to my column. So, instead of my lyrical “fuck racism, fuck the AWB, fuck wage slavery, fuck Malema”, it became “interrogate racism, analyse the AWB, seriously question the capitalist agenda, and read our in-depth report on Julius Malema at mg.co.za/malema“.

Alas, it’s a lot easier to be spontaneously rebellious on live radio. If you don’t know what we’re talking about here, Esterhuysen is/was (my, how quickly Andy Warhol’s 15 nanoseconds of fame shoot by nowadays) famous for an on-air rant on Talk Radio 702 this week.

The Situationists, as older readers will remember, were a revolutionary movement founded in the 1950s. Their modus operandi was to set up situations that would force people to critically analyse the monotonous round of their lives. The most famous example is probably the Notre Dame Affair in 1950, when a Situationist infiltrated the Easter high mass at the cathedral. Dressed as a monk, he stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet announcing God was dead.

Stirring stuff. We need more of these types of interventions in a media world characterised and ruined by equal parts of preciousness and fear. Preciousness, because without an unironic sense of worth, media platforms become enervated and purposeless. And fear, because late capitalism has become a no-show and audiences and governments are becoming the enemy.

We need people like Esterhuysen to do crazy things that show how compromised media products in South Africa have become. We need more punk rock, less Idols. Our spectacle has become almost entirely co-opted into the service of political and cultural homogenisation. Individuals need to take spectacle back.

A drawback to this philosophical manifesto, of course, is the quality of revolutionaries we’re getting nowadays. Situationist theorist Guy Debord writes, in The Society of the Spectacle: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Esterhuysen, our own accidental Situationist, opens his blog with these words: “Since I’ve realised that I’m an anarchist, I’ve become less of a fan of professional sport.” Life-altering stuff, man!

But let’s not mock. What have you done today to wake up the people around you? When you sink into that fluffy, safe cocoon of media consumption, what do you ever push out? A letter to the press complaining about our grammar isn’t really going to change the world, neither is calling in to talk radio to whine about bad advertising. Do something. Buy a can of spray paint, even if it’s a virtual can.

Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisRoperZA