Photo: Talk Show Studio. VAZHA DESPOTASHVILI. Labeled for reuse on pexels.com
By Daniel Mootz
Al Jazeera’s English News network has a new talk-show program without a host. Studio B, Unscripted, consists of “just two notable individuals from different walks of life and ideas to share,” according to aljazeera.com. The first episode aired Nov. 15, 2019, and featured public intellectuals Marc Lamont Hill and Fatima Bhutto. Their conversation raised critical issues concerning police, and political violence in America, as well as in Pakistan. What emerged was a deep, uninhibited look at actual, living constructs that have stifled free speech and incited hate. For Hill, an academic at Temple University and former CNN contributor, supporting Palestinian independence led him to be publicly denounced and subsequently fired from the news outlet. Bhutto, on the other hand, is part of the Pakistani royal family, and an author whose father, and grandfather, the former Prime Minister, were murdered by anti-communist forces decades ago. The conversation that takes place is, naturally, both defiant and enlightening.
The atmosphere on Studio B’s set is safe, relaxed, and the audience is small and comfortably close to the presenters. In each episode, guests explore concepts of race, privilege, gender, and social class in conjunction with their own life and life’s work. The dyad that forms is astute, reflective, and supportive of the experience of the other. In the opening segment, both Hill and Bhutto evoke a sense of vulnerability, and are, in turn, equally open to leading, listening, and responding to topical, ultimately personal discussions of major world events.
There is an advantage to not having a host, or steady “personality” who strategically vies to manipulate dialogue around what is sensational, rather than what is relational. The supposed arbitration of content by the neutralizing voice of the newsperson is bypassed during the show, to the benefit of intellectual thought, and ideas, often ignored by mainstream punditry.
Hill and Bhutto are able to discuss the hard intersections of marginality and ideology, putting them into cultural perspective, and freely addressing their own experiences of oppression at length. Meaningful conversation is more relevant when there’s natural flow, unobstructed by the usual media pandering found in conventional forms of broadcast journalism.
Leadership in moderation can be useful to help point out reason, or rapport within social discourse, but it must also resign itself to a noble absence so that real connection might be allowed to happen. Throughout the nearly hour-long show, select audience questions prompt, and ground, interaction between guests. In this sense, the reality of “identity politics” is reclaimed from the conceited policing of the right, and comes to be seen not only as an issue of embodiment, but one of self-creation as well.
In late November, 2019, Priyamvada Gopal, a Cambridge University professor, spoke with 28-year-old alumnus, and hip-hop/spoken-word artist George the Poet, about how, as an upper caste—or class—Indian woman, she is, in her country, akin to being a white woman in the West, but when she’s in the West, she’s often confronted by European racism directly. At the same time, George the Poet (last name Mpanga) vividly recalls his own education at King’s College, Cambridge, and the many challenges he encountered within prevailing social and academic narratives. His vital expertise in the art of language, and lyrical reclamation, works well with the show’s commitment to honest, uninterrupted interview and, ultimately, poetry.
In a more recent episode, Ken Loach, a progressive British filmmaker, talks economic frustration with Edouard Louis, a gay writer and working-class young person from France. “The public discourse doesn’t reflect the struggles people have; it’s a propaganda machine,” Loach said. Studio B is anything but, with guests ranging from Alain de Botton and Ayishat Akanbi to Patrisse Cullors and Lowkey.
On Nov. 22, 2019, Elif Shaka, “the most widely read female author in Turkey,” according to Al Jazeera, spoke with Wole Soyinka, the revolutionary Nobel Prize winner in literature from Nigeria, in what Shaka described as an “open conversation: timely, universal, and close to the heart.”
During the segment, Soyinka casually discusses meeting with Studio B’s team of off-air “hosts” before the show, expressing a good-natured comradery between the Qatari news outlet and the forward thinking minds they invite on to speak. The platform’s careful navigation of contemporary ideas, and people, is what is so refreshing about this new, breakthrough model of “unscripted” discussion.
The show’s presentation of contemporary global information offers a radical new approach towards cultivating disciplined exchange on a large news platform. In 1982, electronic music composer Herbert Brün gave a lecture called “On Floating Hierarchies,” which reimagines and reframes the social dimensions of communication. In it, he depicts the different perspectives of group psychology, all situated in their own central point of experience, yet all negotiating a similar object of attention. When that object is systematically imbued with the power of hierarchy, each individual relationship becomes diluted (and submissive to a fault). Therefore, he says, “If I want to prove something … I have to communicate so flawlessly, so objectively, so absently, that what I have said stays in the room even when I leave.” Which is to say, there can be no perpetual, moderating factor, or absolute standard-bearer, in the guidance of critical human truths.
The idea of “a particular field in which the dynamics of society are run by the language spoken, and not necessarily, as one believes, by the facts,” is central to art and argument alike. “The power of a sentence rests actually on its lack of truth,” Brün insists; “So … the proof for a sentence is its social desirability.” Rather than, as it is sometimes assumed, an overarching, grand narrative of subjecthood maintained by very particular personas. Later in the talk Brün goes on to say, “We don’t have to improve mankind, we have to improve society and its rules and its paradigms and its common-places.” In this sense, Studio B, Unscripted, employs basic human law to reveal society, rather than imposed social law to report back on humanity.
Similarly, Brian Eno, acclaimed avant-garde recording artist, has written that technology obliterates the transmission time between composer, performer, and audience. In his work he attempts to re-position the artist within a space of immediate control over electronic sound-creation, expression, and cybernetics. In this way, approaching technology as a means to collaborate, rather than subjugate, parallels human science.
The social mechanics of a supposedly objective curator mediating one, or “more,” sides of a debate, debases the universal recognition afforded political analysis in the digital age. The purported rationality of the newscaster reinforces the authority of the newscast, foregoing actual substance and the lived experiences of its guests, interviewee or expert. This fundamental statist belief is sustained through the corporate performance of veracity, and the simultaneous denial of legitimate consensus—in other words, through cultural sabotage.
Conversely, Studio B Unscripted offers an innovative approach to equitable discourse without the subtle dangers of a middleman, or talking head, always on set. It’s unique, dialogic process is truly and progressively demonstrated through the emphatic, and empathic exchanges generated by each week’s guests—amazing people equally empowered to exercise, and express their authentic voice. The show’s leaderless model is a distinct, and important possibility in mainstream, and independent journalism across the board.
The “discussion series” airs Saturdays at 12 GMT on Al Jazeera English News Network.
