Babchenko case

nerve man

When he was "killed", many of Babchenko's friends and comrades wrote sincere obituaries, not all of which were published, including me. For this, he is not offended: firstly, it turned out funny. Secondly, the resurrection in the style of the show gave rise to the question in social networks: is Babchenko a journalist? It is very important for our era of the declared “post-truth”, but first we must then answer other questions: who is a journalist today in general, and to what extent do we, all who discuss the “Babchenko incident”, have the right to attribute ourselves to this high profession? In such a discussion, we will leave the story of the “animated corpse” behind the scenes for the time being - especially since it is being discussed in the spirit of: “What if he was carrying cartridges? “What if it was pasta?” ...

And here I partially use the text of the obituary, which turned out to be unnecessary, fortunately: the rule to speak well only about the dead is not from the journalistic type, although journalism is most often protest. The correct course of things does not cause a spontaneous desire to speak out, which is why it is discussed not by journalism, but by PR - for money. A normal journalist opposes the authorities from the positions of civil society, and this is also the case of Babchenko. We will even agree with him, probably, with the classification of us as representatives of the “second oldest profession”, if the “first” is propaganda. Where there is power, its lured singer and herald immediately appear, and only at the second step - another person who says: no, stop, something is wrong here, you're lying. This is what a journalist is, although this is not all about him.

The point of journalism is to expose the simulacra of propaganda. Here we simplify somewhat, but do not misinterpret Jean Baudrillard: a simulacrum is not just a fiction, like in the movies, it is such a fictional reality that produces consequences in the real one. Strelkov-Girkin, unlike documentarian Babchenko, is also a science fiction writer. The war between Russia and Ukraine was fantastically described a few years before the events in the Donbass. They came up with it, and then real people went to war, and from there - a load of 200. Unlike Ukraine, on this side of the front, the dead are hard to see through the media, and the majority still prefer to have fun, for which the same modern media provide unprecedented opportunities. But on the next page, Babchenko suddenly appears, poking us with his nose at these corpses - why love him?

In a situation of information warfare, a journalist still opposes his own state, because in a hostile one he must have his own. Although the war, of course, immediately limits the capabilities of its opponents. But exposing the "enemies" is the lot of the propagandist, who thereby praises his own power. In such a situation, the stupid state declares war on its journalists, and its propaganda accuses us of "betrayal of the motherland." But we just do not want to betray our profession - or we have to part with it and do something else, but this is not the case of Babchenko.

Thinking a lot about journalism and rummaging through all sorts of abstruse books in search of an answer, I deducted from Michel Foucault the right word: parresia. It turns out that the understanding of the phenomenon denoted by this word is at least 2.5 thousand years old - this was discussed back in Ancient Greece, including Plato: as you know, his tyrant Dionysius, whom he tried to instruct, sold into slavery.

And precisely for parresia, which literally translates as "free speech" or, in Foucault's interpretation, speaking the truth before a tyrant or people.

Always with elements of risk and tearing the shirt on the chest - but this is a consequence, not a goal.

“Telling the truth is easy and pleasant” (M. Bulgakov) in front of a narrow (by definition, it is always sufficiently defined) circle of like-minded people, and “tearing the shirt” and screaming are connected with the fact that the truth must be shouted out to those who have it “of their own.” ". And even the ancients understood that parrhesia in front of a tyrant is still so and so, but in front of the people it is much more dangerous: they will simply tear or demand that the tyrant execute the parrhesiaste, as happened more than once. And this is also the case of Babchenko.

However, postmodernity with its “post-truth” (I would even translate this newest term as a certain state: “post-truth”) actualizes the question of Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?”

To this Jesus, according to the Gospels, did not answer. Because the question was crafty: Pilate was asking not about the truth (which, perhaps, is incomprehensible), but about a lie. After all, he perfectly understood that, sending the person under investigation to the cross, he was lying. We always understand this at the very moment when we are in time, but Pilate (according to Bulgakov) is a rare case of courageous and conscious cognitive dissonance, and less fearless people simply force him out with all their might. This is important for our forthcoming issue of propaganda, but for now we just fix it: you are lying, there is truth - in the sense in which it is simply not a lie. The truth is not only there, but (I am quoting here my own novel about something else) “wants to be expressed”—this is parresia.

But the impulse of parresia is in conflict with the obligation of a journalist to work accurately and accurately with facts, and we are constantly in this “fork”. After all, we are talking about a statement, and not about vegetarian “information”, which is found in its pure form only in a railway timetable (although it can also be published in a newspaper). The very choice of a topic or the focus of attention is already a statement that is never neutral. Meanwhile, the journalist is always inside the event. Gilles Deleuze believes that the event itself is possible only when an observer has appeared, otherwise it is "nowhere". And a journalist is not only an observer, he also needs to describe the event of which he has become a part.

At the same time, a journalist (like a propagandist) is always somehow biased - at least by his past statements, behind which some even have strong convictions. As, however, with propagandists, but the journalist differs from them in that, realizing this vulnerability of his, he hobbles himself in advance within the framework of professional standards. But a propagandist cannot do this: then he simply will not get any product. And in order for the product to turn out well, you must first lie to yourself - otherwise the variety will not be the same. What kind of standards are there - there are “Benderites”, one continuous inspiration.

This is the first point in which the parrhesiast in Babchenko often and clearly wins over the journalist: an indiscriminate attitude to facts. However, having escaped from the editorial offices, where he was poured with a cold shower, he recently spoke out as a publicist - there facts are more often borrowed, and not obtained by sweat and blood - just as he himself did in his past wars, and alone, and the possibilities of such he is not enough. But propagandists should not reproach him for this. And not for those who comfortably describe bike rides, or fill strips with recipes for salting cabbage (which is also useful, but it is hardly journalism), or rewrite press releases, which are absolutely no use: no one reads them, and it's just a budget cut.

Journalism (“bad” as it was called in the old Komsomolskaya Pravda, but not in the current one) and the forced secondary texture bring what Babchenko does closer to propaganda, but still I do not agree with the definition of him as a “liberal propagandist”. After all, a propagandist is not the one who lies (and he doesn’t lie in the literal sense of the word, it’s more difficult there), but the one who adjusts the veils (including in his own picture of the world) to ready-made ideological blocks - myths.

Roland Barthes, king of the deconstruction of modern mythology, has an essay about a poster that showed a black man saluting the French flag (roughly during the colonial conflicts). Bart, exploring something that doesn't really exist, is forced to invent new words for it. Thus, the myth that this poster generates, Barthes refers to as "French imperialism." And then he makes an important and precise remark: myth steals history from things and turns it into nature. There is such and such a Negro, his name is so-and-so, he was born somewhere, he probably has a wife and children (or not) - all this is “stolen” from him, and he is turned “into nature”: It's always been like that, but it can't be any other way. If we compare this with the “crucified boy” (where is he from and what is his name? - it’s all “stolen”), then this myth generates, perhaps, “Ukrainian fascistness” as “nature”: it has always been like that ... This, of course, is nonsense , and there was no boy, which even the authors of the plot admitted, but "the sediment remained."

This is how propaganda works. But Babchenko never worked like that. All his untied banter about entering Tverskaya in the hatch of the first NATO tank is, on the contrary, the destruction of the myth with the help of sarcasm (maybe inappropriate - after all, it brings). The myth is afraid and cannot stand two things: the return of history (as in the story of the 28 Panfilov soldiers who stopped the tanks, and no one disputes this, but there were not so many of them and, perhaps, not those) and irony.

Therefore, attempts to return to the facts always cause such furious resistance, and irony is attributed (as in the case of Pussy Riot) with the properties of a criminal offense, mortal sin and sedition.

Persecuted in various ways, including physically, driven into some kind of ghetto, the parrhesiasts break from irony into a cry, which, of course, is no longer journalism in the strict sense of the word - and this is also the case of Babchenko. It becomes difficult for such - and with such - to work in professional (institutionalized) media: this is not a problem of beliefs, but of tone. In the end, such a Babchenko remains, as it were, a warrior alone in the field and understands himself as such (although in the sense of moral support, he, of course, is not alone).

Such a figure is still described as a “blogger” – rather inaccurately, and not even because blogs are becoming a thing of the past, but because the mossy past is already the “media” themselves – a Soviet term that originally had a more explicit formula: “mass media and propaganda ". And in the era of the Internet and social networks, only the generators of semantic flows in these same networks matter, and here the lone author often gives odds to other “media”, which often do not generate them at all. The newspaper is what the herring is wrapped in, and journalism begins there and then, when someone’s statement (whether on TV or in a “blog”) generated a lively response, even if it is indignation and rejection. Journalism is communication. We all, including readers, work for journalism, the boundary between journalism and propaganda is determined only by the attitude to facts, and from this point of view, it is not so important who is called here.

It can also be described as follows: having ceased to be a journalist in the strict sense of the word, Babchenko remains an important figure in journalism (as this discussion also proves). And in terms of communication, such a figure - for all its "hybridity" - turns out to be indispensable.

After all, the Internet, which was once counted on as an ideal conductor, turned out to be, on the contrary, an insulator. By "banning" those who say things that are unpleasant to us, we find ourselves in closed semantic circuits or "bubbles". Different topics are discussed here, a different language is formed, things of different nature circulate in different circuits - and this is the biggest ambush - things of different nature: in one it is a critical thought, and in the other, solid blocks of mythologemes. They almost never mix like oil and water. And how to understand each other without it?

After all, war disfigures everything, and first of all, communication between those who suffer from it and those who oppose it. On these sides of the front, passing over the state borders, but in the field of meanings, we have ceased to hear each other. The war has brought the obstruction of the semantic bubbles, in which the notorious 86 and 14 percent (of course, not only Russians) are closed, to the stage of blockage, and this threatens the death of a nation (or two) - no more and no less.

Jurgen Habermas proposed the important concept of "communicative mind". This is not at all like the fiction of the “collective mind”, which assumes that decisions are made by the majority: history shows that the majority is usually wrong. The communicative mind is not even a state, but a process that has neither beginning nor end in developing agreement on the most important issues for society. The role of journalism in this can hardly be overestimated, especially when parliament is a "simulacrum". And decisions made without speaking out blow the roof off the “communicative mind” – such was the decision to annex Crimea that was not discussed in any way (although from some, say, military-strategic point of view, it could be correct).

Habermas also describes the rules for the functioning of the communicative mind, the most important of which is that no interested subject can be excluded from discourse. And power "governs society through violence and discourse" (Manuel Castells). Losing their minds, the authorities simply threw Babchenko out of the discourse, thereby rousing him, and now they have to eliminate the consequences of this mistake of theirs, take a new sin into their soul, determining some measure of violence against him. And he is innocent, because his “warfare is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against authorities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spirits of wickedness in high places” (Ap. Paul).

Overcoming the tragic split of the nation will still require brains that have cooled down from hysterics. But first, a cry of pain is needed so that the “communicative mind” gathers the brains into a pile and, finally, turns around. A moderate statement is inaudible, impassable in closed "bubbles" - so, and these thoughts of mine will be discussed on Facebook, but not on VKontakte.

It is also important here who shouted, how he deserved the right to speak. After all, the people of the war cannot but recognize Babchenko, who went through two Chechen campaigns, as one of their own, they cannot dismiss him as they do us, the pacifists who did not sniff gunpowder.

He is a medium - the only one of his kind, heard equally loudly in both closed circuits.

Attempts to write not about the war Arkasha fail: it occupies all of his anti-war nature. He is a man-pain, a man-nerve, conducting general pain from the brain to the arms and legs and back. And the war bitch, like a sniper, knows what she is doing: she wants to shoot the medium himself, and in this sense, the foreman of the reserve Babchenko is always at gunpoint.

What kind of intelligence can be demanded from danger and pain? This is already about why Babchenko so easily got into a muddy story with the development of the SBU. After all, a journalist does not cease to be also just a person - vulnerable, like all living things. You never know what they told him or promised him - what does journalism have to do with it? What does the statement that Babchenko is a liar have to do with it (I believe, because from reliable sources)? Suppose (“And if he was carrying cartridges?”), He would have lied to his wife that he was in the hospital, and he himself had fled to his mistress. Would that also discredit him as a journalist? Who among us has never lied outside the profession, let him be the first to throw a stone at him.

In life, Arkash, of course, is a fool - in the sense in which "blessed are the poor in spirit." He is simple-hearted and at the same time also a crazy adventurer, but without the formation of a legal entity and without the goal of making a profit.

In conclusion, I confess that I, of course, am also strongly engaged here. I love Arkasha - he is a very honest, very good and kind person. This, of course, is already from the “obituary”, but it’s not ashamed to admit it to the face - especially when so many hunters came to pour slop on him.