Talking With No Mouth 

When I first became a weekly columnist for The Daily Campus, I was presented with the question of giving my column a special name. The title by which it’s known, the set of words that would follow all my writing thereafter, the pressure to choose something “good” was immeasurable; something that could follow the column as it lives, grows and changes over the years. I was having the veritable crisis of a first-time father. The answer I chose — the title of this piece — is what I reflect on now, for its last official edition. 

The concept of “Talking With No Mouth” came from a twisted mash up of two disparate parts, both deeply important to me. For the first, it is reflective of the mindset and feeling I’ve put towards all my writing here, which has been best put by someone that is not me. That is, for the first year of writing here, I felt viscerally that my writing was not real. I mean, I made it, put it in a Word document, had it published and then it disappeared into the ether. The DC website, the physical newspaper — both were not real. I could not place this feeling until I read a piece from a writer I’ve never met, someone who left this institution before I even arrived. He said, discussing his departure from the University of Connecticut and The Daily Campus: 

“Over the past four years, my naive hope for encouraging radical politics within a business — albeit a student-run one — was curtailed… I say with love that [young writers] should look for outlets beyond Tier III student groups to seriously affect political change.” 

A very cynical message for an 18-year-old to internalize, but that’s exactly what I did with it. When combined with some aesthetic phrasing borrowed from the classic horror story “I have no mouth but I must scream,” the four-word header that would define my time here at UConn was born. Attempting to make radical political change from within The Daily Campus is a bit like trying to talk without a mouth. 

But the issue is not specifically with the DC — as our lovely hate commenters have correctly pointed out over the years, this is quite obviously a left-leaning institution. The crisis is in the modus operandi of journalism within the American political sphere. We live in a post-truth, post-Epstein files society. Incomprehensible amounts of information about the vilest parts of society are available and widely dispersed.People have watched a genocide carried out before their eyes, they have seen mountains of evidence that a pedophilic cabal of billionaires runs the government and the only thing it has led to is complete intake paralysis. We have reached the carrying capacity, the point of diminishing returns when it comes to “informing” as action. A politic focused on exposure is not enough anymore.  

“Shifting discourse” as an end goal of action and writing is insufficient. What matters is changing the material world and the interactions that exist within it; discourse is only the first step toward that. We live in a system of concrete power relations and inequalities, that shift and change in response to attacks against them, that push people to move on and forget with time. As The Occupied Times puts it, “any change in the debate that surrounds this process dissolves into nothingness once the space is gone, the novelty wears off and the news cycle moves on.” 

As we move away from these means and toward a viable alternative, it is not enough to just slow down the news cycle or focus on “solutions journalism” to regain some place for journalism. It is not enough to remove the visual excesses of the industry; the problem goes to the root. In fact, it is that journalism can be conceived of as an ‘industry’ in and of itself which demands that it reinforces capitalist realism. This type of production of storytelling based on market values will only continue isolating the reader and provide for their lack of self-image as a ‘subject’ in the world. 

So, I speak to all my writers in the DC who continue after me — those who hope to make change with their writing and serve as a voice for good — that writing for a newspaper alone will not be enough. The only way forward is to bring your work into the real world, in coming together with people and facilitating collective action. The world we live in is deeply corrupt and the desire to make change is good and necessary. Instead of dimming the spark for those who would want to use the written word to act, I hope they find too that the best remedy is in participating in the lived struggle of the real world.