Seeing and Not Seeing

Seeing and Not Seeing

José Ortega y Gasset, the great Spanish aphorist and journalist who masqueraded for many years in public as a serious philosopher, once said that every act of seeing is also an act of unseeing. That is, when we fix our gaze on one thing, we are deciding (consciously or unconsciously) not to direct our attention to another.

These words came to mind as I read a recent New York Times report on ¨When Spies Don´t Play Well With their Allies¨. Eyeing the story´s portentious length and its broadly constituted title, I expected a more or less complete account of the outstanding acts of disloyalty committed against the US by its supposed allies in recent years and decades, a narrative sure to include, among many other unfortunate events, the Jonathan Pollard case and the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israelis during the 1967 Six Day War. To my surprise, the report focused wholly on the perfidy of the Pakistanis during the so-called War on Terror.

A simple case of a bad match between headline and story content? Perhaps.

While they may not be as important as they were 50, or even 25 years ago, the great national newspapers (New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Corriere de la Sera, Die Welt, and more recently, El País) continue to play an inordinately important role in establishing the parameters of acceptable social and political debate in the countries where they are published. Put another way, what they choose to “see” (a.k.a. the news they see as being “fit to print”) has an uncanny way of becoming confused in the minds of the vast majority of citizens, (including among a distressingly high percentage of the educated elites) with the totality of information available on a given subject. We know, moreover, that readers have an inherent desire (remember that “willing suspension of disbelief” from English class) to internalize and adapt as “real” and complete the logic of the narratives they consume.

So, when, in generating an ostensibly comprehensive account (remember the headline!) of the problem of allies that spy on the US, the NYT foregrounds the role of the Pakistanis and buries similar problems with even more closely aligned foreign powers, it is all but assuring that a large part of the media class, and from there, the general citizenry interested in political and social affairs, will tend to frame the problem in similar terms.

Every act of seeing is also an act unseeing. To analyze social thought in terms of its palpable discursive logic is good. To analyze it terms of this, and whatever one can imagine lying on the editing room floor, is even better.