BOMB Magazine – Adam Phillips by Sameer Padania
Originally published with an introduction at http://bombsite.com/issues/113/articles/3623

Sameer Padania Let’s start with how your new book, On Balance, has come together.

Adam Phillips I prefer writing essays rather than books. Over a period of time I’m invited to give various nonspecific talks and lectures. Nobody says to me, Will you talk about X? That tends to crystallize things that I’ve been preoccupied by, and a piece fairly quickly writes itself once that happens.

I don’t think too much about whether it all hangs together. I just write things that engage me, and then, when they get collected into a book like this, I trust that certain preoccupations will work themselves through. Otherwise, it becomes too tendentious and too focused and I don’t want that to be the case. When I read through the essays, I’ll keep the ones that I do still think are good and then I’ll think of what sort of order they might go in. The writing of the book, in a way, is putting them in an order.

In reading the book over, different things emerge at different times, but clearly one of the themes of the book is excess—that seemed to turn up in lots of different places. The idea for the title of On Balance, I don’t know how it came to me. I had read the Auden piece again, “Forms of Inattention,” where there’s that bit at the end about the tightrope walker. Ideas of composure or equanimity or balance or integration—all those words that have something to do with a kind of harmony—are at the heart of psychoanalysis in what it sets itself against, and also relate to what I seem to be preoccupied by.

I rely on the unconscious work of these things. When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don’t. I’m not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think.

SP How much revision is there as you go along?

AP Very little. I admire people who struggle to articulate things, but I’m not one of those people—for me it’s more like automatic writing.

SP You’ve contrasted your writing with your psychoanalytic practice. What is the relationship between the two?

AP I really don’t know. All I do know is that I do psychoanalysis four days a week and I write one day a week, in the middle. I know that the conversations I have with people have a very powerful effect on me. Psychoanalysis is really difficult; writing is not, for me.

In psychoanalysis, I’m dealing with resistances, often with very intractable things. In a way, the connection between the two things works by being indiscernible, by not being articulated or thought about very much. As you may have noticed, I don’t use clinical vignettes, because I think psychoanalysis is private. So when I do use them, either they’re minimal, anonymous, or I make them up. And I don’t find myself interested in topics, exactly. I’m more interested in the sentences, as they unfold, that are nominally about something.

I was very wary of the way in which the psychoanalytic profession secluded itself, made itself rather mandarin and elitist. So I wanted to be seen to be part of the cultural conversation, something not mysterious—I mean, life is mysterious—that in and of itself is a social practice that can be talked about.

SP Over time your writing has become more political, more pointed. Do you have hope for an impact in the cultural conversation or even public policy? Is there something that you’d like your books to do or change?

AP I’ve always been embarrassed by the self-importance of psychoanalysts talking about the world as if they were going to have some major influence on it. Back when I was trained, my supervisor said to me, completely seriously, “If only they had child psychotherapy in Northern Ireland, their troubles would have been over years ago.” Now, for me, this represents the absurdity and grandiosity of psychoanalysis. The people who actually have some effect on public opinion are business people and journalists, with politicians somewhere in the middle of those. I can only seriously ironize myself in relation to this. I think of the books as more like dream work than propaganda.

I don’t write for psychoanalysts but for people who are interested in a whole range of things. My wish, if I could design it, is that my books would in some indiscernible way evoke something in those who come across them. People wouldn’t come away thinking, Oh, Phillips’s theory of X_ is _X. The reading experience would have a nonprogrammatic effect, but an effect.

SP Paul Holdengräber’s interview with you at the New York Public Library began with his observation that he could never actually remember anything that you write. Maybe it was a deliberate provocation, but that’s how I experience a lot of your work.

AP That’s the reading experience I’ve always loved. Certainly, when people say to me, as they often have done, “I can’t remember anything afterward,” I think, Great, that’s the point! The work is not there to be repeated or identified with, but something works on you.

SP The only analogy that I can think of to describe your most dense writing is “On Exactitude in Science,” the Jorge Luis Borges short story of the map that matches in size the territory it depicts. It can’t be practically reduced or summarized, only replicated or reworked . . .

AP I often feel that I’m reinventing the wheel. A lot of my writing is obvious; I don’t feel when I read it that it’s amazingly original. My writing is very reiterative, and it feels like that because things are being worked out, not resolved. They are going on being thought about, and I often don’t know what they are at the time. All I know is that when I read the writing back to myself, it has to sound good to me, like a song may sound good to you.

SP Can you describe the process of putting things in an order that builds it as a book rather than a collection of essays?

AP The dilemma is that it is a miscellany, on the one hand, but it also has things running through it. I don’t want it to be contrived in the way it is ordered, but I want it to be at least possible for somebody to perceive there is some structure in it. I want there to be a sufficient variety of tones, so people don’t get locked into a certain density of text. So it opens with “Five Short Talks on Excess,” the radio pieces. And then some of the pieces on fundamentalism are accessible and some are not. Then two-thirds into the book there’s something very difficult, and by that I simply mean more psychoanalytic. When you read it did you feel like there was some kind of structure to it?

SP Yeah, the radio pieces were a great tonal opening, but I may be a prejudiced reader. I’ve heard you on the radio, so I already had your voice in my head, quite literally.

There was one piece that I couldn’t see how it fit in: “Sleeping It Off,” the very short, sharp piece on sleep that appeared originally in the Threepenny Review. It felt like a speed bump in the book. It comes after the essay “On What Is Fundamental.” I found that shift jarring; I still haven’t quite worked out why.

AP Well, that was the one piece I didn’t know where to put. I couldn’t find a place where it seemed to work, so I just thought I’d stick it in there.

SP That’s reassuring. (laughter) I’d like to delve into the idea of excess in terms of information, and its contrast with scarcity or a kind of privation. We live in a world where, for example, 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. If that’s not excess and superabundance, I don’t know what is. To what extent do you react to that world, or pull yourself away from it?

AP I’m not on the Internet. I don’t have an email address. My partner does, though, so it’s not like there’s none of it. And I’ve got children who are really within the culture. Inevitably it’s a generational thing; I’ve increasingly wanted less communication rather than more, partly because of my job.

Your question made me think this: if you’ve had a mother, or parents, who have been extremely overstimulating in their demands of you, then this trauma of the available media is precisely your medium. It’s like returning to the scene of the crime. Consciously the thought is, This is all very exciting, which it is, but unconsciously the thought is, Will I be able to survive it? There is this massive demand on you and the question is whether you can do anything with it. I feel, very powerfully, that demand. This might be a slightly mad idea but there is a risk that we’ll have our sensibilities blurred, not simply by compassion fatigue, and so on, but by an overload of stimuli that doesn’t give anybody enough space to develop their own sensibility or discrimination. It’s as though there is a real terror around of people having their own thoughts about things, and so people are being assaulted with simulation. It’s like pornography preempting sexuality.

SP Do you think there is something qualitatively, cognitively different between the way people previously reacted to information and the way people react to newer, more immediate and fluid streams of information?

AP There is a strange, magical idea that you can consume without digesting, that you could eat without swallowing, as though there were no process. Again, a psychoanalytic analogy comes to mind: it’s the difference between a mother who needs to feed her child, and the mother who waits for the child to have an appetite and then feeds it. It’s an absurd cartoon, I agree, but capitalist culture is force-feeding us whether we’re hungry or not. What this means is that we never know when we’re hungry, and we don’t have the space to figure out what it is we want. It’s driving us all mad.

To read this conversation in its entirety, check out Issue 113 on newsstands September 15 or SUBSCRIBE.

The remaining two posts in the series will offer first a practical run-through of how to create and share human rights video safely and effectively in the online environment, and then a piece looking at some of the ethical issues raised by presenting human rights videos online. Please do take a look at the outlet of your choice, and let us know what you think.

Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…

Video / Audio / Photos:

The only source providing genuine street-level citizen reporting that I can find is AfricaNews’ Voices Of Africa, which equips local reporters with cellphones, and dubs them “camjos”. It’s a general news site, using traditional media reporters, and the range of post-election reports includes police turning back protesters, and an interview with a Somali refugee, as well as an interview with a tourist industry representative and signs of daily life returning to normal in Nairobi. The reports are of varying quality and interest, but they provide a much more street-level view, and point to the potential video-enabled cellphones might bring to human rights reporting.

It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.

Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:

As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.

Kenya Indymedia is beginning to upload some brief audio interviews, including one with a Somali man considering returning to Somalia (mp3) after the recent violence. Slum-TV is blogging, but yet to upload video.

As for photographs, there’s some extraordinary photojournalism online – Reuters and Panos Pictures (click through to the News section for their latest pictures from Kenya), for example – and a quick scan of Flickr reveals a handful of users such as Kenyan photojournalist DEMOSH, blogger Afromusing, and other individuals who witnessed events while in Kenya, but as with video, the lack thusfar of citizen or activist images online has been striking. Blogger Joseph Karoki has been pulling together images from a variety of news sources to provide visual updates.

Mapping:
The UN provided some striking images via satellite, showing the worst concentration of violence by looking at the number of fires burning, available in lo-res (1, 2) and hi-res (1, 2) (via IRIN).

Perhaps the most promising and practical initiative to date is Ushahidi (via White African), a Google Maps mashup enabling individuals to report incidents of post-election violence, including some video already (taken by Afromusing). What’s particularly interesting about this is that the incident reports are being verified with local civil society before being posted, but individuals visiting the site can also submit further information related to particular incidents.

It also demonstrates how rapidly these new tools can be adapted and updated. One commenter asks that “rape” be added to the list of incidents, and lo, there it is. As a basic template for tracking this kind of crisis, it’s a very good start. Inclusion of some kind of timeline, a la Oakland Crimespotting, would be a useful addition, but for 2 days’ work, kudos goes to the team (Kenyan Pundit, Mental Acrobatics, and White African).

Ways to act:
Pambazuka has been active in coordinating with a wide cross-section of civil society, calling for assistance in establishing Rape Crisis Centres, setting up an international petition, and posting regular updates on its Action Alert Blog, including a planned March for Peace, Truth and Justice today.

Avaaz has a tool to help individuals to write to their Foreign Minister to call for a transparent inquiry into the disputed election.

I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas…

disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!!

This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture…

Wael’s channel is, at the time of writing, still suspended. Clicking on any of the videos he uploaded results in the following message:

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Whether it’s only Wael’s account, or others too, now several videos showing police brutality embedded on the Hub from YouTube are no longer playing – including this one, this one, and this one, and more here, here, here, and here. Most of these clips have been propagated far beyond Wael’s own YouTube account, so it’s not really a question of stopping these videos from circulating. Only last week, Wael received an award from the International Center for Journalists in honour of his work to promote and advance human rights in Egypt.

Whatever the reason – a misunderstanding, a systematic campaign, something else entirely – it shows how vulnerable human rights-related media content can be in the online environment, and that the minimal extra work of uploading human rights media to dedicated sites like the Hub, or the Internet Archive, rather than just embedding it from other sites, is clearly worth it.

UPDATE on 27 November 2007:

Since this happened, I’ve been in contact with YouTube to find out why Wael’s account was suspended, and will post an update when I receive one. The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker also reported the story (one commenter mentions the Hub) and now Reuters has covered the story too:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger and activist in Egypt, said he thought it was unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure, and was more likely reacting to the graphic nature of the videos.

“I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government but rather because it made American viewers squeamish,” he said. “But to shut them down because some people might find the truth disturbing is unconscionable.”

UPDATE on 29 November 2007:

Nothing to report from YouTube yet, but increasing speculation/coverage in the blogosphere: Amira Al-Hussaini at GV (pt/ar/de), Kevin Anderson at The Guardian (my comment here), and Stan Schroeder at Mashable.

I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas…

disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!!

This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture…

Wael’s channel is, at the time of writing, still suspended. Clicking on any of the videos he uploaded results in the following message:

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Whether it’s only Wael’s account, or others too, now several videos showing police brutality embedded on the Hub from YouTube are no longer playing – including this one, this one, and this one, and more here, here, here, and here. Most of these clips have been propagated far beyond Wael’s own YouTube account, so it’s not really a question of stopping these videos from circulating. Only last week, Wael received an award from the International Center for Journalists in honour of his work to promote and advance human rights in Egypt.

Whatever the reason – a misunderstanding, a systematic campaign, something else entirely – it shows how vulnerable human rights-related media content can be in the online environment, and that the minimal extra work of uploading human rights media to dedicated sites like the Hub, or the Internet Archive, rather than just embedding it from other sites, is clearly worth it.

UPDATE on 27 November 2007:

Since this happened, I’ve been in contact with YouTube to find out why Wael’s account was suspended, and will post an update when I receive one. The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker also reported the story (one commenter mentions the Hub) and now Reuters has covered the story too:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger and activist in Egypt, said he thought it was unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure, and was more likely reacting to the graphic nature of the videos.

“I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government but rather because it made American viewers squeamish,” he said. “But to shut them down because some people might find the truth disturbing is unconscionable.”

UPDATE on 29 November 2007:

Nothing to report from YouTube yet, but increasing speculation/coverage in the blogosphere: Amira Al-Hussaini at GV (pt/ar/de), Kevin Anderson at The Guardian (my comment here), and Stan Schroeder at Mashable.

For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on.

Now, the World Service is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a season of programmes, debates and chunks of participation related to freedom of speech, in an upcoming season called Free To Speak [thanks, Solana].

As usual, no one does global broadcasting quite like the World Service, with Roy Greenslade fronting a four-part radio series on the freedom of the press, for example, but the online experience feels pretty disjointed by comparison. There are elements in the online parts of the season that hold useful nuggets, however:

- A timeline of the history of broadcasting, including “media minutes” for each year, and which at the time of writing stretches up to the 1970s. There’s a lot of conflict, a lot of politics, and perhaps a bit too much of the presenter, and not enough of the actual audio, but it’s still of value, as this audio clip from 1965 shows, attesting to the power of the televised image in galvanizing the civil rights struggle in the USA…

- A selection of six conflict-related images from Magnum Photos (a Hub participant) from an exhibition at Bush House, the central London building where BBC World Service is housed…

- Photographs sent in by people holding their favourite political protest slogans… [all seemingly outside Bush House..]

- And a request for people to contribute their stories of freedom of speech to the MemoryShare timeline…

Care to point us to any current (and more effective) examples of this kind of online initiative from local media around the world?

Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net is talking about some of the lessons learned from their first networked journalism experiment with Wired News, which focused on trends in crowdsourcing. He said there were six lessons, but he threw in a seventh for good measure.

1. Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects. You need to think about what task, and what size of task, you expect people to do.

2. You have to get the motivations right. If you don’t understand participants’ motivations, you can’t figure out how to define the work.

3. Watch for rising coordination costs. More users=more costs, ie answering questions, giving out instructions, etc. You can get your project run into the ground by succeeding with lots of people.

4. If I go off and do something for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. When this happens, people need to see how their contribution fits into the puzzle.

5. Share background knowledge. The more background they have, the easier it’ll be to find data that’s significant.

6. Existing communities already know how to interact and work. They’re better than starting from scratch.

7. The one percent rule – only about one percent of users will actively get involved in creating content, while 10 percent might be involved in peripheral activities like commenting.

Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net is talking about some of the lessons learned from their first networked journalism experiment with Wired News, which focused on trends in crowdsourcing. He said there were six lessons, but he threw in a seventh for good measure.

1. Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects. You need to think about what task, and what size of task, you expect people to do.

2. You have to get the motivations right. If you don’t understand participants’ motivations, you can’t figure out how to define the work.

3. Watch for rising coordination costs. More users=more costs, ie answering questions, giving out instructions, etc. You can get your project run into the ground by succeeding with lots of people.

4. If I go off and do something for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. When this happens, people need to see how their contribution fits into the puzzle.

5. Share background knowledge. The more background they have, the easier it’ll be to find data that’s significant.

6. Existing communities already know how to interact and work. They’re better than starting from scratch.

7. The one percent rule – only about one percent of users will actively get involved in creating content, while 10 percent might be involved in peripheral activities like commenting.

I’m waiting for an advance copy of this (hint, hint), but in the meantime, read more here, listen to an extract here, and order it here.

It has been a bumper few weeks on GV for human rights video, so let’s get straight into it…

Bandh of brothers… [via Neha]

This footage, filmed by Dinesh Wagle, of United We Blog!, shows motorcycle riders being turned backed by members of the National Federation of Nepal Transport Entrepreneurs in Kathmandu. The NFNTE had called a bandh (strike) prohibiting vehicles from running on the streets, after public buses were torched in an earlier protest during the instability in Terai.

I’d love to know what’s actually said in the exchange between the two sides – any offers to post a transcript or to subtitle via dotsub or elsewhere?

Wagle offers a worrying perspective on the unpredictability of life in Nepal at the moment:

“[...] it’s indeed hard to predict the political and other developments in today’s Nepal. The trend of creating anarchy and take advantage of such situation has increased over the past several months. There is a kind of planned competition to exploit the situation. You never know what’s going to happen when. Anyone can call a Nepal banda any time. General public has to face the difficulties caused by such prompt and unnecessary decisions. Public have always become the victim of such bandas in the past. What can they do other than quietly suffer?”

FarsiTube, Alexander Litvinenko, strikes in Lebanon, maids protesting at the beach in Peru, vlogging from UAE, and clashes in Bolivia after the jump…

FarsiTube shows a different side to life in Iran [via Hamid]

Iranian YouTube hommage FarsiTube holds reasonable quality footage of the 2006 Women’s Day march in Tehran that was broken up violently by police.

The site holds a variety of material, including a documentary about the execution of 16-year-old girl Attafeh Sahaaleh.

It’s one of a rash of sites like DocuTube using the “+tube” format – if you’ve come across another one, share it below, or mail me.

The half-life of Litvinenko [via Veronica]

If this video story from Polish newspaper Dziennik is true, the discovery of Alexander Litvinenko’s face on a special forces shooting-range target is pretty embarrassing for the Russian authorities, even if the original video does date from 2002:

[Originally from Dziennik]

Russo-phobic blog The Russophobe takes up the story and AP adds more.

Beirut burns as strike leads to clashes [via Moussa]

In late January the Lebanese opposition called a general strike in protest against the government, and finkployd of Blogging Beirut took several videos of the resulting clashes between “Christians of Hazmieh, Beirut, Lebanon and the Demonstrating (with rock throwing and tire burning) Muslims of West Beirut, on January 23, 2007 [...]” – the longest of which is below:

[Revver=http://one.revver.com/watch/150083/flv]

Video by finkployd of Blogging Beirut

After these pictures were taken, Sunni-Shia fighting broke out in Beirut, and a fight in a student cafeteria spilled over into wider violence. A curfew was imposed across Beirut in an attempt to restore order. According to Al-Ahram, tensions remained high over the weekend, and neither the government nor the opposition looks likely to back down. An estimated 300,000 citizens demonstrated in support of the government on Wednesday on the second anniversary of Rafik Hariri‘s assassination.

Cleaners take protest littorally [via Juan and David]

Hundreds marched onto the beaches of Asia, a Peruvian resort south of Lima, under the banner “Basta de Racismo” (Stop Racism), after domestic workers were banned from swimming at the beaches before sunset – despite a law which prohibits restricting access to the sea.

There are several videos of the protest – a brief taster of Operativo de la Empleada Audaz (Operation Bold Employee), as the action was called, below:

There’s a longer version here.

David also sent me a video purporting to show two young men in Lima harassing and abusing their family’s domestic worker. In a post at Peruanista, Carlos A Quiroz appealed for any information as to the identity of the domestic worker or the family, and asked readers to visit YouTube, and to flag the video for “graphic and violent content”. The video has now been taken down (“due to terms of use violation”), and Peruanista has posted an update, and a host of videos on the broader issue of violence against women in Peru, at “If you beat your wife, watch these”.

This is the first concrete example I have seen of users being mobilised to flag content of this kind, but I am sure there are others – let me know below, or by email.

UAE students vlog on bloggers [via Amira]

This comes out of, I am guessing, a journalism program in the UAE, as the site is entitled “Broadcasters of Tomorrow”. Please send me more links of this kind, as I’d love to see more examples of local perspectives on human rights stories from around the world.

Cochabamba clashes [via Eduardo]

Finally, Eduardo Avila’s superb overview of Bolivia’s Black January clashes in Cochabamba, which is required reading and viewing (see videos from YouTubers nenamade and estotaweno), ends with these words:

“A witness in the story stated that the cocaleros (coca growers) had filmed the entire incident [of the death of 17-year-old Cristian Urresti] on a camera. That video could provide clues as to who was ultimately responsible for the brutal death, but it is very unlikely that video will ever find its way to sites like YouTube.”

As this tour of recent videos on GV shows, there’s precious little that won’t be on YouTube, Ikbis, DailyMotion and MetaCafe before long…