Over at Opendemocracy (and on his own site) K-punk (aka Mark Fisher) has done a brilliant job of picking apart some of the absurdities of the Hari/NOTW crises of journalism. The key insight that he makes is that this is a crisis of truth or rather, a truth.
The killer moment comes when he makes the bold speculation that:
“It’s like Hari’s “interviewing” career is one long postmodern prank, and, really, this episode ought to be liberal empiricism’s equivalent of the Sokal scandal.”
This is a critical point. However, it is also possible to take this a lot further. Watching recent footage of shambling tabloid-journo-stereotype Paul McMullan on Newsnight and the other chat shows he seems to have found his way onto, it becomes noticeable his consistent defence was to revert to the obsession with ‘the truth’. In the hilarious footage of McMullan being dressed down by Steve Coogan, his opening gambit is one of truth;
“what better way to get at the truth than to hack someone’s phone?”.
An element central in the ideology of liberal empiricism is the notion that truth is just there to be ‘got at’. A quick overview of Hari’s articles reveals a number of titles in which the intrepid journalist claims to know the ‘secret truth’ behind the actions of politician x or y. One reposte to Niall Ferguson on the British Empire is so blunt as to seem frankly crass and uncaring -the empire killed millions. Truth got. A few ‘serious historians’ and the job is done nicely. The problem is that, if you read Ferguson’s book, Empire, it becomes quite apparent early on that, although he is gentle on the figures, Ferguson never denies that the Empire was a brutal and nasty affair- his point, like many conservatives, is one of necessity, not morality. Elsewhere we find the ‘hidden truth’ behind Tory Policies, Libya, Drugs Companies, Donald Trump, and the Queen Mother all being uncovered. Of course, he can’t be blamed to harshly for writing in these terms- the point here is not that Hari is a particular failed type of liberal journalist, but rather that a naïve empircism pervades in journalistic ethics. McMullan clearly shared the same ethos when he chose to defend phone hacking in the name of “the truth”.
In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novella, Roadside Picnic,a dangerous ‘zone’ of alien contact on earth contains a strange set of scientific anomalies that cannot be explained by standard earth science. Alongside theses zones two communities have developed- the first is an official scientific-military-industrial community monitored by the UN. The second is a black market of corporate spies and mobsters who trade in stolen artefacts- these people employ ‘stalkers’ to cross into the zone and retrieve anomalies that might be useful to human beings. Journalists like McMullan and Hari almost see themselves as these stalkers or scientists, traversing dangerous anomalies called ‘lies’ to find the ‘truth’ lying hidden in the political or social zone. Of course, one interpretation of what the stalkers and scientists do is quite different- they carry the market and military-industrial forces into the zone in a discursive manner, selecting and choosing those items that make most sense according to their own paradigms. In Tarkovsky’s film based on the story, Stalker, the concept is taken even further: the anomalies are apparently imperceptible, and the stalker serves the function of maintaining the truth of the zone itself by being faithful to its idea.
Hari, for his part, is closest in behaviour to the stalker of Tarkovsky’s version of events- building his zone by repeating old patterns and ‘remembering’ past incidents. When Hari was caught fabricating apparently whole interviews from previously conducted ones, his defence was revealing;
“My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.”
As K-Punk points out, this is a neo-Hobbesian market rationality- you want it, therefore you cannot complain. Hari’s understanding of a thinker or writer has an oddly juridical tone- its basis, like the law, is in the notion of precedent- Negri or Gideon Levy said this before (albeit supposedly recently), therefore it is more faithful to the ‘truth’ of Gideon Levy or Negri, than they are themselves- Hari has seen the devil in the marble. One can then understand why, in both Coogan’s debate with McMullan, but also more broadly in journalism, law is repeatedly substituted for ‘truth’ or validity. This has been seen most recently in the case of Charlie Gilmour, and the way the notion that his sentence is ‘within the law’ is used to silence debate about political repression of dissent. This is Carl Schmitt’s wet dream.
In liberal empiricism, the greatest crime is to have been wrong- it invalidates all past experiences, and destroys the possibility of induction. But society is not a basic scientific experiment, where the concept of induction could be (at best) reliable. For induction to have significant use in this context it demands the self-interested rational actors of Hobbes’ world. The very foreign policy which the likes of Hari often rail against has been run on the same principles for at least half a century if not much much longer. By buying into this concept, the journalistic ethics that sees basic accuracy of fact as its sine qua non serves a dominant understanding of the human being, and cannot escape the confines of law- hence such panic when journalism does-for better or worse- do exactly that.
At this point its worthwhile going back to K-Punk’s original point. The Sokal Scandal did not, despite some of Alan Sokal’s wishes, destroy continental theory or poststructuralism as a political and social force or tool of analysis outside of science. But, amongst other things, it did curb some of the excesses of a certain kind of mindless deconstructionism in which the simple rearrangement and fiddling of language was used to avoid an engagement with actual challenges posed in political and social thought and action. It is ironic then that this is precisely what Hari did in his ‘interview’ with Antonio Negri- by fiddling with the words that he used, he delayed and prevented an engagement with Negri’s ideas and the social struggle that informed them. Far from it being the case that these incidents show that we should abandon any hope for ‘the truth’ or the possibility of empiricism, it should instead be used to remind us that ‘truth’ has always been a major philosophical problem, and is not some trophy to be waved about for cash or prizes.
Hi there, as author of the Charlie Gilmour piece I’d be interested to learn how an acceptance of due process (from charge to sentencing) as being fair in law rather than some kind of conspiracy theorists wet dream of governmental political gerrymandering, stops any kind of debate in to the question of the appropriateness of the use of the Violent Disorder charge, and indeed the public interest of the CPS bringing such charges in the first place, or the question of whether the sentencing guidelines and limits are even appropriate in the modern day?
It seems you missed some of the nuance in this debate, a “truth” unto itself perhaps?
I dont think I did. I think that your article actually had a moralising tone and framing to it that served, frankly to confuse these categories.