Radicalizing the Co-opted? Cracks of Light in a Structural Critique of Development by nemani chandrasekharnemani

Taveeshi Singh

Published By Revitalizing Rainfed Agriculture Network (RRAN) N-199, Greater Kailash Part-I, New Delhi-110048

Citation: Singh, Taveeshi (2016), Radicalizing the Co-opted? Cracks of Light in a Structural Critique of Development. Working Paper 2 : Revitalizing Rainfed Agriculture Network (RRAN), India. 1

Radicalizing the Co-opted? Cracks of Light in a Structural Critique of Development RRAN Working Paper

Taveeshi Singh

Abstract: In this paper I lay out a brief overview of the salient critiques of participatory development, followed by a description of the community media program that gave me the opportunity me to be a part of some of its daily activities over a period of eight weeks in 2015. It presents a necessarily brief overview of the origins of participatory filmmaking and some preliminary connections with the form this kind of filmmaking has taken in contemporary India. I refer to conversations I had with co-founders, co-directors and employees of the organization to elicit social and historical connections with a strain of filmmaking particular to the participatory process, complicit in propagandist, anthropological and development activities through the course of a century. These conversations are at the heart of the paper, various strands of which I will situate in literature, broadly conceived, from media studies, documentary studies and development studies.

Part 1:

Introduction (to a Film Experiment)

On a hot afternoon in the midst of an erratic monsoon, a village gathers in the home of a farmer. A young man balances on wooden beams as he covers with dark cloth cracks of light entering the room through the roof. Mothers find space on the cool mud floor, seated with their children, who did not go to school on this day because they heard about a film being screened in someone’s home. It is likely that most of the viewers gathered in this single room, rectangular home do not know what the film is about. The ones who do know are seated closest to the screen. They are the subjects of the film, six users of a commons who fell into a dispute over a dried-up reservoir. The reason: one member’s overuse of water. The violator of the commons terms of reference is a man who wields power in the village. He was once the head of the village and was one of local Non-governmental Organization (NGO) SPS’s first employees in the region. He decided to pump out water from the reservoir for his personal use in spite of an agreement restricting for one season the use of water to irrigate crops so that livestock in the village would have enough to drink. The film—Malipura Dam—that has been made so far showcases the individual perspectives of each commons user. This gives the viewer a rounded picture of the conflict over the reservoir, but the users never actually speak to each other in the footage. They have not spoken to each other in two years. Filmmakers in the NGOSPS’s Community Media (CM) program decided to intervene in the standoff—a contentious choice from a filmmaker’s perspective, I am told— by making a film on the significance of the reservoir in the lives of the people dependent on it and screening the film to all of Malipura Village with the hope of generating a dialogue between the commons users. This is a delicate situation. Things could easily go wrong. The commons users could feel insulted, angry and indignant. The filmmakers are prepared for an argument to break out. If this happens, the film will 2

end with a scene in which thirsty cattle by the dried-up pond gaze with curiosity (or perhaps alarm) at the camera in the distance. The viewer will experience this as the cattle forlornly gazing at her. A farmerfilmmaker-teacher who, in my opinion, is absolutely indispensable to the CM program, facilitates the dialogue. He is the anchor to the program’s claims of participation and he is under pressure from the directors of the program to conduct this conversation with meticulous care. All of this is to be captured on digital film, appended to the end of the film being screened. The cameras are placed across the room, angled on the key actors. In the absence of narration in the film, their facial expressions and nonverbal gestures during the conversation are key to telling this story. There is a lot at stake: the film experiment, the commons agreement, the dignities of the individual users and the community’s autonomy. The filmmakers are sensitive to these concerns. I am told that their approach to this is singularly unlike that of an independent filmmaker, who would likely be on location for two weeks, going to any length for the shot they want, eventually leaving behind a potentially conflict-ridden situation without facing any repercussions. The employees of the CM program, ostensibly a part of the extended community of marginal farmers in this semi-arid belt of India, are attuned to upsetting social hierarchies. Living and working in the region with the very subjects of their film—the commons users and film viewers—they are conscious about carrying on their shoulders a responsibility towards them. The conversation is difficult to navigate, fraught with restrained accusations and defensive reactions. Tension fills the room, as if the thinly veiled decorum could rupture any second. Eventually though, the conversation is successfully executed, filmed on a professional digital camcorder and two (full-frame) digital SLR cameras. Perhaps the presence of three cameras has something to do with how the conversation holds up. The ex-headman of the village unexpectedly agrees he is at fault, albeit not without defending his actions. He would look a fool, he says with candor, if his crop was dying and he did not use the water source adjacent to his fields. The users collectively agree upon an amendment to the original user agreement: they will not let the water level fall below two meters. This small victory marks the end of the film, but more importantly, this is the beginning of a renewed sense of hope that cooperation will be restored. ** I witnessed the scene described above during preliminary field research in central India earlier this year. Over the course of the preceding year I had been researching the relationship between knowledge production and visuality in international development, tracking down orientalist and imperialist discourses perpetuated through development photography circulated in global aid circles. I embarked on my summer research hopingto find examples of potentially transformative visual media work in development. This is because I am concerned with offering to the reader alternative visions of the very thing I tear down in any critical analysis. One way I envisioned writing up a working paper on my summer research was to stage a critique of poorly-made, usually state-funded, documentary films—of which I am told there is no dearth—with the intention to spotlight radicalizing possibilities for the use of visual media in development. Indeed, such a possibility found me when I was seated in a dark room watching Malipura Dam with the men, women and children of Malipura Village. But I am ill at ease with such formulaic presentations of one’s work that obscure the unresolved; in other words, those paths which would lead to other, less resolute conclusions1. In the hopes of eventually arriving at a partial

I take inspiration here from Avery Gordon’s (1997) essay Distractions, in which she deploys an analytic staging of a haunting to recover “ghosts” repressed in the making of Western sociological and psychoanalytic histories. 1

theory2 of the radical potential of participatory media in development, I lay out in the rest of this paper a brief overview of the salient critiques of participatory development, followed by a description of the community media program that gave me the opportunity to be a part of some of its daily activities over a period of eight weeks in 2015. I refer to conversations I had with co-founders, co-directors and employees of the organization to elicit social and historical connections with a strain of filmmaking particular to the participatory process, complicit in propagandist, anthropological and development activities through the course of a century. The conversations are at the heart of the paper, various strands of which I will situate in literature, broadly conceived, from media studies, documentary studies and development studies. I do not expect I will arrive by the end of twenty-something pages at even a fraction of the afore-proposed partial theory, but I consider this my first step in that direction.

Part 2:

Participatory Development and its Community Media Comrade(s)

In the second half of the 20th century, development practitioners and theoreticians began to recognize top-down, non-participatory approaches to development often did not work as planned. Participatory development approaches materialized partly in response to this recognition and partly in response to scathing criticism from activists and academics alike, of international development as colonial ideology and technocratic enterprise. Through the decades, claims of empowerment and transformation remained central to participatory approaches, which, ironically, often involved co-optation and silencing. Despite a growing backlash over the past fifteen years against superficial attempts at fostering participation, participatory development approaches continue to be popular strategies for governments and NGOs. Participatory development has received criticism as both theory and practice. Arturo Escobar (1995) and Robert Chambers (1997), both advocates of a participatory development model of development, have leveled charges of Eurocentrism, positivism and top-down-ism against development. There is a general tendency to equate development with the idea of modernity associated with Western societies (Schuurman, 1993). In Participation: The New Tyranny? Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari (2001) identify three tyrannies of participation. The first tyranny addresses the decision-making control exerted by multinational agencies and funders that underlies thinly veiled participatory rhetoric and practice. The second tyranny emphasizes the obfuscation of local power differentials and its resulting constraints. The third tyranny addresses the uncritical co-optation of participation as a method of development, to the extent that it has become too dominant to allow for consideration of other methods of development. ** SPS Community Media for Development in Tribal Central India describes its role as supporting the NGO in building an alternative model of development with the objective to â&#x20AC;&#x153;foster inclusive growth and strengthen democracy at the grassrootsâ&#x20AC;?3. In other words, SPS CM aims to improve marginal farmer livelihoods through the production of instructional films, documentary films and agricultural extension videos4 that deal with issues of recruitment to NGO programs, socio-economic hardship and how to use 2In

the vein of Donna Haraway (1991) who advocates for a partial theory (as opposed to a totalizing theory) of the political.I resist clubbing SPS CMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s efforts with pre-established forms of community media and documentary film. Instead, I opt for a genealogical approach that extends beyond the scope of one paper alone. 3 Referenced from official SPS document. 4 The use of video in agricultural extension is by no means unique to India. Broadcast television programs and mobile cinemas in particular are used for agricultural extension the world over. An example of organizations doing this kind of work at the global scale is Developing Countries Farm Radio Network that has built a bank of scripts can be used for community media radio programs. Worth noting is that while some farmers might

agricultural and related technologies. Described below is a self-assessment of the quality of SPS Community Media films, as found in a proposal seeking funds from United Nations Development Program (UNDP): SPS Community Media films are stories of people who have been left out from mainstream development. These films document the complex processes of interventions of grassroots organizations. Rich in sociological description of the times, situation and place, these films reflect lives of the most deprived and neglected, posing questions as well as evolving solutions to issues that pertain to rural, tribal India. The primary objectives of SPS Community Media are to (i) build information and knowledge content on rural concerns, its problems and solutions; (ii) to bring forth multiple authentic voices from rural India that will contribute towards better perception of situations and predicaments of rural livelihoods and living conditions, (iii) develop a cadre of local youth who are capable of identifying themes, developing scripts and producing films on rural livelihood issues as well as disseminating these films to a wide range of audience; and (iv) to create dissemination facilities and possibilities for video films for the rural audience not only for knowledge and information sharing but also to experience the joy of cinema. The key element of the SPS strategy is to build local institutions led by women. Most SPS livelihood initiatives are founded on its Self Help Group (SHG) program.   The humanist ethos underlying present day development visual imagery translates ‘empowerment’ ‘dignity’, exhibited through the activities with which people engage. In Nandita Dogra’s study of international NGOs (INGO) and representations of global poverty, one INGO informant characterizes empowerment as “people doing things for themselves” (2011:133). Elsewhere I have argued that from a human rights perspective, visibility in the public sphere is significant in terms of symbolic gains for women’s rights5. However, taken up as an index of empowerment, this visibility serves to make invisible other spheres of marginalization, resistance and empowerment. Moreover, visibility as an index of empowerment feeds into a politics of inclusion. When we think of empowerment as associated with upliftment and improvement it is easy to gloss over the power relations hidden in notions of empowerment. The rhetoric of “people doing things for themselves” is dangerous not only for its obfuscation of chronic dependency created by foreign aid but also for its erasure of state-NGO relations that are peculiar to global neoliberal trends. During a conversation about the government’s food entitlement schemes6, a SPS co-founder—also in charge of the corresponding the NGO’s Right to Food (RTF)7—described an editing dilemma with respect to a film on child nutrition: whether or not to include footage that shows an adult’s hand feeding milk and bananas to an infant. The shot follows a scene that shows an NGO employee in action. The co-founder fears this visual could easily be misinterpreted to mean that child nutrition is an individual’s or the NGO’s responsibility. have access to such sources, the programs tend to be typically produced by professionals or experts of a different socioeconomic position. 5 I make this argument in a paper titled Gender, Visibility and Development Interventions: The Production of Visual Narratives of Women’s Empowerment in South Asia. 6 These include Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS), the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the Public Distribution System (PDS) 7 From the SPS website:“Our Right to Food (RTF) programme is working in 154 villages of 75 Gram Panchayats and 3 Nagar Panchayats of Dewas district to generate awareness, greater local participation and build pressure on the government to reform the way these schemes are run and increase the resources allotted to them.”

US-led structural adjustment policies spawned by the rise of the neoliberal economy in the 1970s cleared the way for NGOs to enter into the space previously occupied by the state, which, while retaining certain financial obligations for development extension services, prefers this work to be carried out by NGOs. This strategic stance is sometimes compounded by simple negligence to produce extremely poor outreach even in services directly provided by the state. Virtually no one was aware of the nutrition center serving the immediate region before the SPSRTF program came into existence with the intention to bridge the gap between state services and citizens. Consequently, SPS is wary of projecting any message that might be read to mean the state does not have a responsibility towards its citizens8.

Part 3:

Agitation Propaganda, Captive Viewers and an Anthropologist

Some aspects of SPS CM’s filmmaking style are continually evolving while other aspects—such as taking the film to viewers, obtaining viewer feedback and tailoring films according to this feedback—are constant. This “participatory” lineage of filmmaking dates to the Soviet Union’s propaganda efforts in the early decades of the 20th century. SPS CM’s methods bear a remarkable resemblance to early Soviet efforts at spreading education, the term for which is “agitprop”9. An agitprop train with cinema cars, schoolrooms and projection facilities carrying film, filmmakers, actors and political workers traversed the Soviet Union in the period following the revolution in 1917. Agitprop trains have received considerable attention for the part they played in Soviet propaganda, however historians have for the most part overlooked the use of other vehicles such as river steamers, barges, wagons and automobiles in carrying out similar activities: The Bolshevik program included a concern to address non-political basic human needs, by overcoming mass literacy which was crippling all progress, by diffusing scientific and technical knowledge which would raise standards of living and production, and by educating the masses on matters of hygiene, sanitation and health care. (James 1996:2) Nearly a century later, in the era of empirical social change qua behavior change approaches to the improvement of social conditions and United Nations-esque development biopolitics10, SPS community media does similar work in central India. Their films target livelihood improvement amongst marginal farmers, tackling issues ranging from agricultural technologies to sanitation and health care. The dissemination activities of the program, too, are in many ways similar to agitprop. The program has two platforms for film dissemination, both serving different purposes. The first is the mobile van model, wherein a van equipped with an in-built rechargeable power supply, an LCD projector, a ten feet by nine feet portable screen and 200 Watt speakers (with amplifiers) travels from village to remote village during the dry seasons for outdoor screenings. This model is primarily a mode of entertainment, screening mostly classic Hindi cinema, contemporary Hindi films and Charlie Chaplin films. SPS produced films are usually screened to the captive viewers before the feature film is screened.

NGOs that disagree with state withdrawal are faced with a paradox: “if they engage in those new relationships, they are effectively (if not intentionally) endorsing a policy with which they disagree” (Bebbington and Farrington 1993). 9Abbreviation for agitation propaganda (in Russian: agitatsiya propaganda) 10 Michel Foucault’s ideas have been influential in the examination of governmental rationalities related to the emergence of the development apparatus in the postcolonial era (Mezzadra, et al. 2013) 8

The second model also makes use of captive viewers. SPS productions are screened at monthly womenonly self-help group (SHG) meetings attended by marginal farmers, most of whom are tribal and landless. For these women, SHG meetings are primarily a platform for taking on credit at subsidized rates. SPS productions are typically screened at the end of the meeting, but SHG members are usually restless to leave as soon as the credits begin to roll to attend to other, more important tasks. In response, some facilitators screen the film at the beginning of the meeting, coercing women into participating in the post-screening discussion. Such coercive tactics call into question the very act of participation. In a summary historicizing the relationship of the screen to the viewer, Lev Manovich writes about film theorists such as Charles Musser (1990) and Anne Friedberg (2006) as having taken up immobility as a defining characteristic of the institution of cinema, somelike Jean-Louis Baudry (1986) going so far as to declare it to be the foundation of cinematic illusion. Friedberg argues that “the cinema provided a virtual mobility—the illusion of transport to other places and times for its spectators” but that “movement was captured but at the same time confined” (2006: 160). Here Friedberg is referring to the screen as architecture, “as an expression of material built space” and not to the “use of architecture within the filmic or televisual image” (2006: 151). However, the SHG spectators are rendered “captive” by design, not just to the material context but also to the architecture of the SHG program, thereby adding another dimension to (the admittedly hyperbolic) notion of the spectator’s imprisonment within a physical setting. Screening short documentaries and educational films before a feature film was common practice with state-owned Films Division of India (FDI). In her analysis of the role of the Films Division of India in preand post-independence nation-making, political scientist Srirupa Roy11 (2002:237) notes: “Until 1996, under the terms of a compulsory exhibition and licensing policy, owners of commercial movie theatres throughout India were required to screen a ‘state-approved’ documentary film or newsreel before the commencement of the commercial feature film” (Roy 2002: 237). “Further, rural distribution of and viewership was secured by the FDI through its association with several ‘rural oriented’ ministries and government departments…with this framework of distribution in place, the FDI could claim an average audience strength of 80 million every week”. Such an extensive audience-base is more akin to the agitprop era than the activities of SPS CM. James traces Vertov’s filmmaking activities back to 1920, when he was on the Lenin train, traveling with thenPresident Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin. During this period, Vertov added to the train “a specially designed editing carriage so that he would no longer need to return to Moscow to complete his films” (1996: 12).With the editing carriage in place, Vertov was able to adapt his films to the constantly changing audiences as the train moved through different regions of the country. He also put in place a method to test new films on varied audiences, sometimes inserting into a film footage of the audience’s reaction to their surroundings before the next screening. Through these methods Vertov was able to reach large swaths of viewers across the country. In contrast, SPS CM makes a concerted effort to keep the dissemination of their films contained within the two districts in the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), where the NGO works. This is owing to a few reasons. First and foremost, the organization works with marginalized farmers, largely female, tribal and landless; a segment of society that is ignored by the state as well as the market. Films and video are For an historical examination of the social utility of nonfiction film, particularly the documentary genre, to the Indian state, see Roy’s (2007) Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. 11

specifically conceived to reach this audience and this audience alone (other viewers, such as men and children, are incidental). Another potential reason influencing the relatively limited reach of SPS films might be the filmmakers’ goals—in the tradition of early visual anthropology—to preserve a way of life that they believe will become obsolete two decades from now. In the words of a co-director of the program, they try to “valorize the mundane” in their films. Meetings are held in the courtyard of the home of a SHG member and for the screening, all attending members move indoors. Films are projected using a Chinese-made handheld (pico) projector onto the wall or on a white sheet tied to a cot turned on its side. The battery life of the projector in current use is about two hours, however, previous models of the pico projector would last only up to thirty minutes on a full charge. This is crucial because electricity is unreliable in the homes that have it. Communication media infrastructure in general remains precarious across rural India. Narula and Pearce (1986) describe the communication media infrastructure of a village in north India where ninety per cent of the inhabitants own radio sets and which has a community television set installed in the house of the headman. The government field publicity van responsible for screening documentaries and feature films rarely passes through the village and the nearest cinema is in a town about five kilometers away. Twenty years later in another part of rural India, community television sets are not the norm—although watching television is often a communal activity—mobile phones have replaced radios for their audio playback function and no government field publicity van has ever screened a film. Instead, an NGO has stepped in to carry out in self-proclaimed sociological style what two decades ago would have been considered a function of the state.

Part 4:

Methods of a Medium

That Vertov’s name never came up in any discussion of where the filmmakers draw their inspiration from, almost a century since he invented his process, is not surprising. As Enzensberger (1972) wrote, “unfortunately, even in the twenties, many of (Vertov’s) ideas spread without his name being attached to them”. Vertov’s youngest brother, Boris Kaufman, carried Vertov’s techniques with him to the West, first to Paris in 1924 and then Montreal12 in 1942, participating in the creation of a new generation of Vertovian filmmakers in Canada. It was around this time the French Anthropologist Jean Rouch began to use film to study African natives. From 1946, Rouch made short documentaries in Africa 13, “using an old hand-held, hand cranked Bell & Howell 16 mm camera which did not allow for synchronized sound, not for shots of longer than 20 seconds’ duration” (James 1992:7). Rouch, like Vertov and Medvedkin14, considered film to be a social tool rather than an end in itself. He regarded the camera “as more than an objective observer of events, but as an invaluable catalytic agent” (James 1992:7). Under Rouch, the Vertov Process came to be known as cinémavérité, considered by some a genre of documentary known as direct cinema and by others not so much a sub-category as a genus of documentary similar to direct cinema. Widely known as the father of cinémavérité, anthropologist Jean Rouch used film as an ethnographic tool, but unlike other ethnographers, he never Boris Kaufman was invited by John Grierson to Montreal to make and teach documentary film in Montreal by way of New York. Grierson was the first person to use the term “documentary” to describe a film –Robert Flaherty’s film, Moana(1926)—and he was also influential in shaping early efforts at documentary filmmaking in India (Roy 2007) 13 Mainly Nigeria. 14Filmmaker who took the reins from Vertov in the Soviet Union post revolution era. 12

claimed to be a partial observer. In this very vein, a co-director of the CM program averred that the camera is not a neutral object and that it inextricably alters any situation where its presence is felt. Rouch’s name came up repeatedly in conversations about SPS’s filmmaking style. The co-directors of the program have adopted Rouch’s practices of ensuring participants in the film are involved in the filming process and becoming well acquainted with the subjects with the eye to building trust and ensuring their comfort in front of the camera. For both Vertov and Rouch, an essential part of the process was to “show footage to the participants, recording their comments for use in the editing process” (James 1992: 7). Feedback15 of actors and viewers has been historically essential to this process: “after seeing themselves on the screen, they commented on the proceedings, reshaping or reorienting them” (Fieschi 1979). To get sense of the contours of the SPS filmmaking style, it is useful to attempt to situate SPS films in Bill Nichols’ (2001) categories of documentary film. It is obvious Malipura Dam does not fit what Nichols’ calls the expository mode. There is no verbal commentary, it lacks the God-voice and the visuals certainly do not take a back seat to the narration. However, another film, made at the request of a sister organization, makes use of voice-over narration to describe the exigencies of seasonal out-migration in the state of Odisha. Elements of Nichols’ poetic mode are evidenced in this film (and others by SPS Community Media). The images are lyrical, rhythmic and emotive, however the situation depicted is very much grounded in materiality, a situated time and space. The second part of the film, the one being filmed as the discussion takes place, could count for what Nichols calls the observational mode and both parts fit neatly into the category of participatory mode, wherein the filmmaker addressed the viewer through interviews with social actors. The fifth category, the reflexive mode, implies an awareness of the filmmaking process. In the case of SPS CM case, the co-directors and some of the other employees seemed hyper-reflexive. Unlike what Nichols’ suggests, the film does not make use of the God-voice or voice-over. It does, however, open up questions about the production of knowledge. Finally, the performative mode category, in which the filmmaker is a participant, captures the filmmakers’ expectations for viewers of the film, that is, an emotional responsiveness that acknowledges an understanding of the event as opposed to gaining knowledge from it. By no means are these categories comprehensive. In fact, this exercise underscores just how inadequate discrete categories can be. But it also serves to exhibit the diversity of SPS productions. If one must situate Malipura Dam within a category of nonfiction filmmaking, it lies somewhere in the space between direct cinema, observational cinema and cinémavérité, where the filmmaker is alternatingly “fly on the wall”, artistic editor and on-screen participant. These categories are further complicated by different modes of community development approaches. Scott (2014) culls from the work of Bailey et al. (2007) and Carpentier et al. (2008) a fourfold typology of the role that different forms of community media can play in development: conventional CM programs designed to serve a community; alternative media that produce counter-hegemonic discourses in opposition to mainstream media; media that

Feedback is an integral component of any socialist use of media. Marxist cultural worker Bertolt Brecht wrote of the radio being the finest instrument for communication if it could transmit as well as receive. For him the problem was “how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him” (Brecht 1986: 53). Alexander Galloway writes that this comment has “laid the foundation for a Marxist theory of the media based on form” (2004: 83). 15

serve as a ‘third voice’ between state media and private commercial media; and ‘rhizomatic’16 media that play a catalyzing role in connecting multiple social issues with each other. SPS CM can hardly be neatly compartmentalized into any one of these approaches; the program clearly reflects three of these four elements, that is, community-orientation, alternative media and rhizomatic media. But categories of any kind can only take us so far. Any filmic legacy is developed through a confluence of factors and in the case of direct documentary technical, aesthetic and authorial considerations together make up what the order looks like today (Longfield 2007). Having explored to some degree both aesthetic and authorial considerations in the case of SPS CM, I now turn to a discussion of new technologies and participatory communication. ** Assertions abound about the inherent participatory characteristics in the discourse surrounding new media technologies, the premise of which is that there is something distinctive about these technologies that lends them to a potentially transformative egalitarian society. Scholars like Manuel Castells (2010) and Clay Shirky (2011) argue that new digital technologies are driving transformation through their ability to surpass traditional limitations of networking organizations, making group interaction seem effortless. Martin Scott (2014: 67) reflects critically on these arguments, asking if “focusing only on the potential of new technologies to promote participatory communication amounts to ‘cyber-utopianism’”. Of course, certain media are more appropriate to generating critical dialogue, or just dialogue itself. One-way modes of media dissemination such as television and newspapers are severely limited in their ability to foster a transmitter-receiver type communication. Widely accessible media that does not require specific kinds of expertise, resources or media literacy is more suitable to promoting community engagement. Because radio is relatively inexpensive and less resource-intensive than other media it most commonly used in media-centric participatory development efforts in the global South, followed by certain forms of video, film, photography and interactive visual aids. In Africa, for example, community radio growth shot up by 1386 per cent between 2000 and 2006 (Kaplan 2012:117) fueled by policy-makers and donors prioritizing support for community-based media. Despite the apparent benefits of using radio to foster participatory processes initiated by the organization, SPS CM has been unable to enter into this hallowed space of community media programming due to political constrains. A co-director of the CM program disclosed: “It has been my dream to start community radio here but we’ve been so busy with film and it’s also very hard to get a license. We met the guy who makes transmitters for the entire country’s community radio units and he said it took him up to four years to get his. And you know the current government is clamping down on these [community] kinds of things. But we’re trying to do this thing with audio, where we’re taking the audio from a lot of our films or recording new audio and we’ll send them through people’s mobile phones. How? People get their cards loaded with songs from the traders. We’re going to provide the audio file to the trader for free and ask them to load it along with the other songs.” The very foundation of entertaining the use of new media technologies rests on access to the capabilities and resources required to make use of them, making these forms of communication exclusive to those who are “technologically privileged” (Fenton and Barassi 2011: 79). Those who are

16In

other words, “non-linear, anarchic and nomadic” (Scott 2014: 134).

able to connect to networks17, such as the Internet, may not “find locally relevant content in an appropriate language” (Scott 2014: 68).As demonstrated earlier in my paper, this last concern is high in priority for SPS CM. Technology surely is enabling of the program’s tasks and digital media certainly contribute to the efficiency of task execution, but the radical change spoken of by new media pundits is not evident in this case study. Still, it is worth considering for a moment what kind of emancipation, if any at all, is afforded by SPS productions.

Part 5:

Towards a Partial Conclusion of a Partial Theory-in-the-Making

In the essay Constituents of a Theory for Media, Enzensberger (1970)—who believes in the inherent emancipatory potential of electronic media—argues that many-to-many radio networks are prohibited for political reasons entrenched in the very structure of capital. The productive power of electronic media is that they are “dirty” and hold the potential for allowing mass participation in social movements. “The new media are egalitarian in structure,” writes Enzensberger, proselytizing to the reluctant Left, giddy with the prospect of transforming a “medium of distribution” (1974: 168) into a horizontal plane of communication open to all. How the media are used is dependent upon the identity of the user, but in all cases they are subservient tools, prone to manipulation by the user. Enzensberger’s overtly optimistic views are challenged by Jean Baudrillard in his essay titled Requiem for the Media, who argues that the media are an undeniable political force owing to the power they wield in the distribution of information, but the manner of presenting this information cannot be monopolized by any class, ruling or otherwise. Baudrillard has a more nuanced take on McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message, believing instead in the medium’s capacity to influence the message—thereby stripping information of its original context—but not to subsume it. Baudrillard’s sobering arguments seem the closest in practicality to the working of participatory development models of media, yet they remain inadequate because he, like so many Western-centric theorists of media old and new, ignores the various deployments of media in what was then known as the “Third World” and is today more commonly called the global South. Moreover, both Baudrillard and Enzensberger’s theories account for state control as it existed before the state world over receded in favor of the market, that is, before the NGOization of the global South.

SPS CM is cautious not to produce didactic, lecture-style content to stand in for community media. The program’s most recent film productions carry complex, implicit messages about on-going social problems that appears to put the imperative of solution-generation on viewers. Initial screenings revealed that viewers, in turn, are dissatisfied with this style of communicating issues because they expect the NGO to either “teach” them how to resolve the issue or to step in and take of it. While many forms of community media are “institutionalized by reproduction” (Baudrillard 1981: 177), SPS films for the most part have been resistant to this fate. Admittedly, at eight years old, SPS CM is still a young production house and not all its films are equally sophisticated, but the program takes pains to prioritize

For a thorough investigation of how the Internet works, following in the tradition of Western (European) critical thought, see Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Galloway, like other well-known thinkers in the field, does not delve into issues regarding the global distribution of the Internet and the global South’s relationship to the state of current technologies. 17

aesthetic quality over numbers. A co-director had the following to say about SPS CM’s relationship with Digital Green, an NGO that facilitates the production of hundreds of films per year: “We are trained as filmmakers so for us [Digital Green] films are not good aesthetically. Digital Green’s game is numbers—when they told to us make 200 films in a year we countered we’ll make 50. Now, we make not even 20. Our collaboration with DG was from 2009-2012. We still have a relationship with them—and the head of DG is a good friend of mine—but that was the period when they funded us. This is their model…they fund an organization for two to three years and then move on to another organization. But they generate a lot of content. However, we don’t believe just because you’re showing films to a rural audience you don’t have to be mindful of the intricacies of filmmaking. During the DG funding period, we got local youth to join us. They were looking for employment, not to be filmmakers. We took them on and trained them. We hired professionals only last year so that we could do less training and start making films again. “ By way of the realist-NGO artistic license alluded to above, SPS films are shot to compete with the technological aesthetics of mainstream media. With this form in place, delivery of content becomes, in some ways, easier as the form does not disrupt the “flow”18 of the viewing experience. While this means there is potential for ‘manipulating’ the medium, restraint is exercised in the tone of messages delivered. This is owing to two factors: firstly, owing to a sensitivity to community needs and relationships, and secondly, owing to a recognition of the intentionality that these films are made do more than just deliver messages19, regardless of how they may be interpreted. This kind of ideology is congruent with the organization’s broader goals, however, it is important to recognize that the degree to which any ideology is upheld is largely dependent on the individuals that comprise an organization. When I asked Farhana Sultana20, Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, whether she thought a truly participatory model of development is viable, she said: “It’s possible, but challenging. Who is doing it? Why is it participatory? Under what conditions is it being done? What are the inclusions and the exclusions? Participatory development scholarship came out of a radical place before the backlash. A lot of the work being done on participation now is about how to transform what’s been sanitized and co-opted and return it to its original purpose, that is how to re-radicalize it?” While questions of resource-mediated access (to new media amongst other, more essential, things) still remain unanswered, it is clear that the methods adopted by SPS CM remain similar to those designed by Vertov and Rouch. Even so, neither Vertov nor Rouch worked within the NGO framework. Both made films that had the potential to be powerfully subversive and democratizing, therefore prone to acts of suppression by threatened governments. It is rare for domestic NGOs working on issues of development to take an anti-state stance, even if their funding is not tied to the state.21Moreover, to suggest that it is “Flow”, according to Raymond Williams, is "the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form" (1974: 86, 93) 19 In a conversation with one of the head filmmakers, it came up that an auxiliary purpose of the documentary films that SPS makes is to preserve a way of life that is likely to become obsolete two decades from today. 20 I interviewed Prof. Sultana as part of an assignment for the History department course, Oral History Workshop. 21 Under the current right-wing political leadership in India, NGOs and activists affiliated with certain strains of international funding have been put on a government black list following the suspension of Greenpeace India’s Foreign (Contribution) Registration Act (FCRA) registration in April 2015. 18

technology alone that can drive change is to submit to technological determinism22. Other factors—such as forms of interpersonal communication—play equally, if not more, weighty roles in influencing radical participatory outcomes23. The facilitator, in particular, is crucial to the participatory process and heavily influences its attendant power dynamics24. These factors are often mediated by local social dynamics like political affiliations, kinship hierarchies and intersections of caste, class, education and gender, to state a few amongst the many factors that are beyond the scope of this paper. SPS CM’s work takes place in dialogue with both India’s development agenda for big dams, big roads, big industry and big agriculture (a la Green Revolution) and marginal farmers’ struggle to maintain their autonomy through sustained and substantial livelihoods. SPS films are mirrors of the daily lives of the people that live in the region: a “channel” that reflects their everyday realities, that is readily available, that can be accessed relatively easily and that allows for (human-mediated) feedback to the organization. The CM team’s endeavor to valorize on screen what to the naked eye might appear mundane could so easily slip into colonial and orientalist discourses in which the development enterprise is entrenched. Instead, it creates a cultural space in media scape for the ways of a small population of tribes in a semi-arid belt in central India. Amongst the organization’s imperialistic complicities—indeed any NGO could stand in for SPS on this account—some possibilities do shine through the cracks in a structural critique of development: not only do SPS filmmakers’ efforts generate new spaces for identification within and between communities, but they also create, at the very least, a space with radical participatory potential.

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