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The blacksmith’s doubling is, of course, also unusual insofar as we do not often see, nor indeed do we often allow, others to comment on us on our screens, The continuing dismay with which Al Jazeera is received in western societies, most especially in the United States, is not only because of the graphic horror of some of its images (we provide those on a daily basis) or the ferocity of the political rhetoric (likewise). It is much more fundamental. It is based on the breaking of a mediz taboo and the reversal of the customary taken-for-granted nature of media representation, in which we in the West do the defining, and in which you are, and I am not, the other.
So in the massive inequalities of global media power, the blacksmith’s appearance, and his version of the world, is relatively rare. But it mirrors, however faintly and briefly, the much wider representational culture of
western media, whose gaze, alternately crystalline and cloudy, but always culturally specific, dominates the screens and speakers of the world. And for those in the West, or indeed for those in the UK, he is who he is only on those screens and speakers. He has no existence otherwise. He, in his unfamiliarity and distance as speaker, on the one hand, but in his familiarity and closeness as visible or audible presence, on the other, is a presence that those who hear him can neither touch nor interrogate. They