Misplacing the Question
Probably Nietzsche noticed it first. He suggested that the death of God would have very many curious consequences. Humans would not be able to realize what it meant to live without a Creator for long millennia. Leaving behind God is surprisingly easy, it is leaving behind the Soul, and all the notions of identity which that God had grounded, that Nietzsche suggests is the real the stumbling block. Humans will then show the shadow of the murdered God and worship God in his absence, just as truly as they worshipped him alive. And in doing so, they hoped that they could salvage from the wreck of souls, which God’s death leaves, a little speck of being to call their own. This tragi-comedy has being going on for a century or more, in which numerous pretenders, from the Unconscious, though people’s republics, and Genes to cognitive therapies, have been styled as God’s replacement (and so the guarantor of personal identity). And still the quest goes on, and new images, new shadows are found.
It is then in this vein that one needs to understand the strange death of the question in British ‘public life’. All one has to do is to watch or listen to a political interview, or read a newspaper to see that journalists have replaced questions with a strange sliding nexus of solutions. A journalist therefore does not question, so much as state a number of possible interlinked solutions. Each ‘solution’ is then spring loaded. If a politician chooses it, another set of solutions is offered. It is at this point of course, that the journalist starts to smuggle in ‘impossible solutions’. You know the one, the solution which the politician either should have known (and did not), or could have found out (and did not), or perhaps did know (and yet did nothing). The politician faced with this treacherous ground of seeming answers can only retreat to the relatively safe ground of the known solution. They therefore repeat their ‘answer’ and hope for the best. Of course the worst part of this exchange (which by itself is at best hilarious and at worst merely cretinous and boring, is that the politician feels bullied into acting according to the nexus of solutions offered within an interview, and therefore doesn’t end up actually engaging with the real world.
Perhaps if one was incautious at this point, one might conclude that the death of God has lead to the death of the question. But it is certain that Nietzsche did not of think it in this way. On the contrary, he argues that God’s death should have made only questions real, and never the solutions. Has slack journalism disproved him? It seems really rather unlikely. Far better I suspect to understand this quest for solutions, as merely another attempt to restage God’s life. Or better still, it is a beautiful and innocently cynical explication of one of the deep effects of the tumble out of easy meanings, which the death of God induces. Or to put it more succinctly, if simple meanings have collapsed out of the world, one is left with two slightly different options. On the one hand, perhaps one can return to the problem of the Question, and ask whether one can frame questions worthy of replacing God (this is by and large the path of post-war French Philosophy). The alternative is that one can turn oneself into a ‘certainty-wallah’, who is guaranteed to match a solution or a raft of solutions to each and every problem. The modern media of course abounds with such experts. Their fundamental battle cry is always the same: ‘Everything would be better if only we… and here is the evidence to prove it!’ The game here, is of course in filling in those dots, and ensuring that the evidence, and the questions support the ‘known solutions’. However, one needs to grasp the real problem here. It is not simply that these certainty-wallahs ‘know’ the solutions before they start. On the contrary I think sometimes (although this probably the exception rather than the rule) they are performing genuine research to which they do not already know the ‘answer’. What matters, however is something rather different. What matters is that any question is necessarily buried within a wall of certainty. Questions, which in the absence of God might have become beautiful, undisciplined affairs, are thereby forced to mind their P’s and Q’s and not irritate the relatives. God’s death, is thereby made almost reassuring. Nothing has changed, as long as the questions remain well behaved.
However this is not quite how the journalists, and the politicians who feed with and off them, operate. They are at once both a little closer, and yet much further from the death of God, than the humble certainty-wallah could ever envisage. Each journalist is closer to the problem of the question in the most practical of senses, namely their methodology. The Nexus of solutions, each leading to another apparent solution, criss-crosses not only time but also conflicting possibilities. In the constant exchange, and re-exchange of opinions and aborted thoughts, of course something very deep about questions, and their ability to confuse solutions (while seemingly hanging together in spite of apparent contradictions) is revealed. As an example in a philosophical ethnography, this type of journalism is no doubt perfect, and yet as a serious attempt to tackle a problem, it remains both inept and highly problematic. The real problem being of course, that such journalists/politicians themselves are blissfully unaware of the stormy vortex in which they are caught, let alone capable of exploring some of its stranger paradoxes.
This last point comes down to that deep problem which I started with, the problem of solutions. Perhaps, in a sense this is the most difficult aspect of the loss of meaning that occurred with the removal of God. Or at least, it seems so for the moment (one needs never to be categorical about such things). I mean that once the supreme guarantee of a divine stamp on meaning has been lost, then one is caught always in a surfeit of meaning, or better a surfeit of solutions. Everyone can be a forger of their own particular solutions, and be so regardless of any consequences or whether there were any integral value in the solutions so wrought... A solution is therefore the cheapest of all currency; something the poor old certainty-wallahs with their single set of solutions never quite realize (which is why they so often are bought on, like performing monkeys, by the journalists and the politicians). Nor of course is this cheapness accidental. Most journalists are caught up in the storm of meaning, which surely is left by an absence of divinity. Each solution which they uncover might then feel like it really is ‘IT’. It is the one (be it performance targets, or clean hospitals, phonics or early learning centres). They are all, for a while ‘The Solution’ (to a problem whose exact nature is never allowed for or even divined). Each solution, even as one reaches for it, or even worse, as one attains it, becomes then merely yet another mirage, on the paths to find other solutions.
The problem of course is that this a replacing of all debate, not with so much with tragedy, as with farce. Or better, it enwraps small scale tragedies within large scale farces. There are then myriad personal tragedies of individuals (in this case politicians) whom we claim have ‘lost the plot’. By which one means not that they have somehow lost or even mislaid, the thread of what is happening, so much as they have vanished from the current plotline altogether. That is, they were either, committed to a set of solutions, and unable to jump ship in time, and so became lost in the past, when newer solutions come to the fore. Alternatively, because the debate is and remains always about the solutions (and never the questions), politicians have a natural life expectancy. Once a politician is associated with too many shifts between solutions, then their very presence is troubling to the debate. They remind the listener/viewer of the paradox of shifting realities that lies at the heart of the debate, and therefore must themselves be removed. Politicians will then only escape this trap by moving very quickly from solution to solution (this is the task of the modern Prime Minister). Each such leader thereby effects a perpetual ’fight back’, in which it becomes impossible to pin them (the PM) down at all. The point then of this strategy is no doubt to keep journalists and their public perpetually on the go, and therefore they do not have time to meditate on the problem of the central paradox involved in these moves. It is then the task of the rival leaders of parties, not only to attempt the impossible. That is to brand their opponent an opportunist, and themselves an idealist (whose solutions therefore have a peculiar value). But also, they thereby allow that same opponent the very possibility of fighting back, and therefore re-creating themselves. The ‘rivals’ very attacks of each other, keep the entire system possible. Personal tragedies are then caught up in an overall farce (much as they are in ‘reality television’), which constantly negates the potential sorrow.
A ‘Bad’ Journalist may be caught up in such a ruination. And yet most are more cunning than that. They realize that their role is very much that of high priest to the mirage of solutions. That is, it is their role to coordinate the ‘heroic politician’ (whom they pull apart across shifting solutions) and the certainty-wallahs, who perform their solutions. The listener/viewer is then initiated or better induced, by the clever journalist into a world of mirage, and both partiality and partialness. A world where the death of god is made untroubling as long as it is allowed to produce the constant stream of solutions to undefined questions. It is then, to return to Nietzsche, the journalists who lead the gawping crowds before the shadow of a murdered God, and do so by mitigating that loss within a nexus of answers, without real questions.
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