“The other Algerians present in the room would receive the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would then be asked of this incarnated voice. Those present wanted to know about a particular battle mentioned by the French press in the last twenty-four hours, and the interpreter, embarrassed, feeling guilty, would sometimes have to admit that the Voice had not mentioned it.”

Frantz Fanon, This is Voice of Algeria, from A Dying Colonialism (1959)

Since reading Frantz Fanon’s This is the Voice of Algeria, I’ve been obsessed with this passage. In it he describes how people would listen to the revolutionary broadcasting conducted by The Voice Of Fighting Algeria, during the Algerian Revolution of the 1950’s. It brings out a yearning in me that is difficult to articulate, something I feel I’m missing and struggling to find a space for. It’s not just the community or the hope present in the image it paints - one where everyone is listening and waiting for their world to change - it’s something deeper, something that feels rarer in our current moment. A moment in which objective realism and social constructivism feel like two totalising oppositions to one another, rather than responses to each other, useful structures that together, help to give our world some meaning.

I want to focus on Fanon’s text here as his work is the origin point for everything contained in the performance (Micro-Publics) this essay is attached to. It’s a companion piece rather than a summary. This image carries into the piece, it haunts it, but is something I won’t be discussing too much in the performance, which is more focused on the ideas and infrastructure that was built on top of these images. Consider this the prelude to an action, or hopefully something more.

During the broadcast the interpreter becomes akin to a hunter in pursuit of The Voice. With the French Colonial Government enacting what Fanon describes as “sound-wave warfare” (an attempt to jam wave lengths by broadcasting over them, thereby making them inaudible) the interpreter, using precise wrist movements, must follow the path of the broadcast, around and in avoidance of the French signals, in hope of reaching The Voice. Even once audible to them, the signal is fugitive, on the run from the occupations counter broadcast, forever finding and slipping through the cracks. Sometimes the signal wouldn’t speak directly, but through proxies, other channels that could hear The Voice and were tasked with relaying its messages. The interpreter must be plugged in and switched on, listening, open to multiple channels.

In its fugitivity, The Voice also escapes its need for credibility or qualification. In direct conflict with the colonial engines that produce and authenticate ‘objective truth’, it sees the hypocrisy and decides not to participate. ‘Objectivity’ as a qualification to be held against meaning¹, stands oppositional to truth, rather than in pursuit of it. The declaration of ‘objective truth’ is like the counter broadcast of the occupation, an act of pursuit, something that forces meaning underground, tries to make it inaudible. The Voice refuses the structures presented by the French occupation, seeing them for what they are; infrastructures of oppression, only upheld by attempts to engage with or critique them.

The information received by the interpreter represents a fissure, where parts of it remain but others are only present in their absence. That absence opens up space, allowing gaps that social knowledge can then fill. When data is incomplete we are built to make assumptions, form connections and build meaning. Those gaps only become visible when someone has the space to invest time and labour into the question, creating a subjectivity that helps in reading the absences. Intelligent critique doesn’t just come from a familiarity with the topic but with an investment, an emotional relationship. As described by philosopher Byung Chul-Han, prior to the internet, getting access to a piece of information would be a labour, but one important for the cultivation of curiosity and vital to the construction of meaning. First you start with a question, following that with the pursuit of a book or person that might hold the answer and through this a relationship is formed with the question. You have to sit with your question, the gratification is delayed. It takes on a personal dimension, giving space to hold this information against other sources or your own understanding, find it lacking and move forward looking for other answers. Something I’d like to add to this observation is its social dimension. When we attempt a fixed and rigid relationship, both to the delivery of information and that information itself, we leave little room to build curiosity and challenge things as they are present. It all just becomes noise.

“Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice.”

The interpreter acts as a representative of the information that’s being passed on. Through the laborious process of pursuing The Voice, he must now grapple with the parts he managed to hold onto. The people in the room have questions, and in vocalising these questions, allow for the information to interact with meaning. While only the interpreter can hear, the people are waiting, though not passively. Through their questions they are bringing knowledge from outside the group, asking about “particular battles” and events that they’ve heard about elsewhere. In this vignette, it’s the interpreters job to facilitate the community discussion. Translating the information into something useful, something that serves those in the community. From this collective activation, meaning is assembled outside and against structures of control, measured by the people and applied to the world. Information only breathes in its contact with a broader and collective (though not always unanimous) ‘meaning’.

The image Fanon uses, is itself an act of meaning making. It’s not made clear that it comes from a specific moment witnessed by Fanon, instead he is retelling a history but in the aural tradition. Not date stamped and without dressing the information in the guise of ‘objectivity’, but instead looking at the broader situation and considering how best to form and convey meaning from it. Forcing the validation of the ‘objective’ on his retelling, would only limit its impact, its emotional conveyance and the meaning at the core of his writing.

“The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.”

In our present context, we live besieged by the requirements of ‘objectivity’. Verification and authentication are the currencies of modern day information exchange, so much so that ‘objectivity’ is enshrined as something taken for granted in most of our interactions with technology. Large Language Models through their ability to sort through millions of data points, manufacture ‘objectivity’ within their results (despite ChatGPT’s small disclaimer that it is sometimes inaccurate). They construct meaning on your behalf, collating thousands of opinions and fragments of information, they present you with a ‘truth’. They are built to hide the process by which this ‘truth’ emerges, obscuring the role of translation and interpretation, ensuring that you can never truly know a piece of information presented by these models. It lacks a complexity that can only be found in grasping and wrestling with the thing itself. Its base assumption fails at the first hurdle, to assume a singular and total understanding is a fallacy. We live steeped in coincidences and contradictions, but these models don’t engage and can’t account for that. It’s deemed inconvenient for something to be beyond a simplistic or impersonal account.

Fanon gets at something lacking in the contemporary formation of meaning. When meeting reality, multifaceted and community driven forms of meaning making are vital in upending structures of control. While it’s important to believe in some basic principles, one’s own relationship to these structures is vital for the information to be more just context-light facts. We must hold this information to communities and worlds larger than our own. What fascinates me about Fanon’s image is not its lack of the scientific (the technology of the radio) or dissemination of the specialist (the interpreter), it’s how these elements are tested, their direct engagements with the community. The way it focuses on the social, the group on hand to measure these statements, hold them to account and evaluate their value. This community isn’t made up of specialists, Fanon doesn’t paint an image of fighters receiving orders, people whose relationship to the information is formed by action. Instead he focuses on ordinary people, engaged and invested in the revolution and participating through their belief.

The structures of ‘objectivity’ often leave me feeling suffocated, anxious to claim any kind of meaning or understanding worth discussing. When you take meaning and significance, and hold it to the standard of an ‘objective truth’, it becomes both the most important measure of the world and thereby so big that it becomes personally meaningless. Currently, we can have ‘answers’ to everything instantly. No conflict or friction, no need for pursuit or more curiosity than the fleeting and instantaneous. You don’t get time with the information, or space to question or build an emotional relationship to it. So we turn inwards, we seek some form of answer to ourselves. Make ourselves into something unknowable, but we forget that meaning is only truly made in its interaction with the tangible world that exists around us. Without meaning, subjectivity applied to information, it all just becomes rhetoric, emotionally disconnected and abstract, where it’s only important that blue is blue because ‘it is’ rather than because this information means something about our world or our relationship to it. It’s situated in a broader and deeper set of relations and thereby takes the form of a living knowledge.

That’s what’s beautiful about this image, it activates the idea of the passive. It doesn’t just imagine that this information is important, it gives emotional weight to its importance. It puts ‘objectivity’ in its place and treasures the act of meaning making, being in conversation with one’s world and conditions. That information must breathe and be reformulated in our social relationships, encouraged to exist in the parks, in the street, in the home, in the office, in the city, in the countryside, in the revolution, in the day-to-day, the 9-5, on the radio, on the phone, on the loudspeaker, and on, and on, and on.

19.05.2026 - ears to hear, mouth to speak

kat