Abstract
As we sail through the hashtags and viral videos that inundate our electronic devices on an everyday basis, Francis Cody attempts to give a socio-historical account of the modalities of such hyper-mediatisation and its manifestations in the variegated enactments of popular sovereignty in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Drawing from both the literature that critiques the formulations of the public sphere as a space for disembodied rationale deliberation and the body of work that attempts to understand people’s actions in a media world marked by an ‘extreme communicability’ (Cody 2023, 150), the author extends the discussions into the specific contemporary media ecology of Tamil Nadu, which has a relatively longer history of mediatised politics compared to other states in the country (Cody 2023, 189). He particularly emphasises how the current technological assemblages not merely make the media represent an event and have an effect on the discourse and the course of action after its representation in the circulatory chain but also enable it to integrally produce the event, thus blurring the distinction between what is being represented and the act of representation itself. However, what actually makes Cody’s work penetrative is that he situates these theories in the political ecology of Tamil Nadu, where the sources of sovereignty often extend beyond the formal politico-legal institutions into the circulating visual and textual representations in the media. He also does not fail to register how the attempts by politicians, judges and even outlaws to manage their image in the public sphere—both by actively pushing their image and story into the media and by imposing restrictions on the same—are tactically utilised by the people in media to expand their own market and publicity. Acknowledging the uncertainties that arise out of the ‘metamorphoses’ (Cody 2023, 186) of the established structures of representation and ‘the short-circuiting’ (Cody 2023, 25) of the same through newer technologies of representation, the author further hints to the readers how the political structures are trying to adapt to the new modes of circulation to shape it to their ends.
The author elucidates his ideas by presenting a series of vignettes that are spread through five chapters. Besides the stories from his observations of the events and from retellings of the same by journalists, lawyers and activists, the book is also replete with historical sketches of Tamil print and visual media and delineations of specific practicalities of the legal procedures in the state. The first chapter talks about the need to conceptualise embodied, passionate and emotional articulations as a fundamental feature of the public sphere rather than seeing them as aberrations from the self-abstracted space for rational deliberation. He achieves this by narrating a couple of events when the utterances in print and visual media are met with aggressive and violent responses from passionate crowds—one by the right-wing Hindu Munnani outfit on a film director in a debate show hosted by a television channel and the other by party members from a faction of Dravida Munntera Kazhagam on the media house close to the party itself. The second chapter discusses the malleable ways in which the notion of defamation is conceived and used by political figures whose sovereignty relies on their image in public. He particularly takes up the cases of former Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party under whose government the defamation cases saw a peak and Nakkeeran Gopal, who gained both wrath and publicity through his gendered media gaze of Jayalalitha. The next chapter extends the discussion of media as an interface between law and the public, particularly when the legal recourse takes into consideration the socio-ethical norms of the society outside rather than merely sticking to abstract legal principles and when the judges are mindful of the image of themselves and that of the judiciary in the popular discourse. From probing the entanglements of the guardians of the law with the public perception, the author moves on to explain how some Tamil outlaws—the most notable one being Veerappan—attain public legitimacy and celebrity status by manifesting the representation of themselves both in traditional media institutions and in new technologies like WhatsApp that enable people-to-people transmission of media contents. The final chapter explains how the latter mode of circulation leads to the creation of a horizontal structure of representation and a decentralised organisation of movements with minimal intervention by established political parties and public personalities—as the state saw during the Jallikkattu and Neduvasal protests in 2017. While the role of social media in movements has already been dealt with extensively in academic literature, the book points out the short-circuiting of sovereignty from the conventional political structures of representation and the latter’s attempt to build tools to channelise the energy that is being generated and spilled out at the streets.
With an expansive ontological understanding of concepts like media, sovereignty and social life, the book manages to make sense of politico-legal processes that are outside the conventional textbook understandings of the same. He also treats these contextual modi operandi of those processes not as anomalies of a non-Western society but as starting points to rethink the existing conceptualisations of the processes themselves. For a person living in the world that the book is set in, and who gets to witness these episodes every day, this book makes them apprehend the patterns—both within the structure and at the outliers of it—and the larger questions of legitimacy and sovereignty that surround those events. However, they, while getting to look through the actions of the people as they are mediated in the fields of circulation, might also wonder how to make sense of the utterances in media leading to inactions pertaining to an issue and strategic diversions of the public eye from it by the ones in political and executive authority. Nevertheless, the book is a must-read for not only those who are interested in emerging academic debates around media and sovereignty but also anyone who seeks a deeper historical understanding of contemporary Tamil Nadu’s political and media processes.