In Mexico men of power are using and killing people for a variety of reasons, and not all are due to the simple economic equation of drug trafficking. In Mexico the modern state with Felipe Calderon at the helm has declared war on the cartels.
At the core of modern societies, built on brutality and utopias, stands our exchange of story, a narrative of our history, and our fear. We exchange stories to confirm our quest to understand the other as an equal different, our desire to accept difference based on gender, ethnicity, language, religion or lack of religion, modern as opposed to traditional. In the end many may not care for any of this. They are scorned, called bigots.
Beyond the variety of exchanges, of communication, one main historical goal remains: understanding the other.
But communication is not necessarily a path to avoid violence against the other so lets at least entertain the idea that we seek the other only to deny their existence, because they are almost human, or because they are like us but cannot or will not assimilate to us, or because the other might assimilate and threaten our self constructed identity.
This idea goes in strong opposition to our notion of communication as dialog (John Durham Peters) that should lead to understanding the other(s) mind and thoughts. We have come to consider dialog as one of several characteristics of modern societies. But the notion and practice of modern dialog has not stopped violence against the other. To know the other we must communicate and how we communicate, what objectives we pursue are important if we are to understand how we confront/control/assimilate the other.
In The Conquest of America Tzvetan Todorov writes that Aztecs favored exchanges with the world, the Europeans exchanges between men.
Communication with the world is the ritual speech or acts that an individual and the group use to address the group, the gods and nature. According to Todorov it implies an understanding that humans are not at the top but an integral part of the World. Communication with the world is what James Carey, thinking about the 20th Century called communication as culture.
Communication between men is an equivalent of what Carey defined as “communication as transmission”, where marketing and branding create a clear role for information as a tool in the construction of an active relationship with the other.
These different models of communication played themselves out in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec. For Todorov Montezuma speaks in the name of the sacrifice society while Cortes speaks for the massacre society.
“As in sacrifice societies, a state religion is professed; as in massacre societies, behavior is based on the principle of everything is permitted. As in sacrifice, killing is performed first of all on home ground; as in a massacre, the very existence of such killing is dissimulated and denied. As in a sacrifice, the victims are chosen individually; as in a massacre, they are exterminated without any notion of ritual.”
What is to be done when those responsible, politicians, businessmen, rationalize their acts of violence? What is to be done when onlookers, citizens, rationalize acts of violence and at every step reaffirm their decency and innocence? There is dialog, people talk, activists march, books are published, media transmits, there is an ongoing dialog, a vast web of communication, some of it very corporate and foolish, but we use all that to mark territory and differences.
According to John Durham Peters for Emmanuel Levinas communication works as an ethical obligation to the otherness of the other person.
But if we see the other as rhetoric, as message, the other can be redefined, demonized, denied, like the anarchist, the unionized worker, the immigrant on the corner who I have seen in many different possible images but with whom dialog is not desirable or achievable.
Morelli84 