Siah
30-10-04, 23:48
extract vanuit het boek Ground Zero ;
History is bunk.
HENRY FORD
Paul Virilio
In 1917, the automobile magnate Henry Ford brought into operation the first industrial vehicle assembly line — that other ‘chain’ offatality which would soon make it possible to do away with human workers and replace them with robots. 35
So, in the very year of the triumph of Lenin, champion of nineteenth-century historical materialism , Ford was becoming one of the precursors of its technical dysfunctioning.
In this same spirit, the most recent opinion polls tell us that three out of four French people now mistrust politics but, on the other hand, trust scientists to ‘oversee the progress of science and respect for ethics’.
And some are even proposing, right now, to organize referendums and a democratization of information to deal with ‘the great social issues, such as biotechnology
To confuse ethics and information transmission systems is to forget that mass information provides everyone with a ‘dystopic vision’ of current events, and poses the well-known problem that accompanies the invention and misuse of any technology: ‘unintended consequences, a well-known problem . . . and one that is clearly related to Murphy’s law —“Anything that can go wrong, will ”.’36
Eluding any precautionary principle, the systems of information transmission have become bombs which keep on exploding in people’s minds, generating ever more complex and extensive accidents, creating that ‘uncanny identity which always makes it seem that actions are reported before they are performed, often the mere possibility of an action.37
‘News isn’t after, it’s before!’, asserted the journalist and novelist Gaston Leroux. Like any strategy, the strategy of news and information is not so much statistical as prophetic and apocalyptic. It derives its power from the chaos it creates
in the ‘worst of all possible worlds’, and in the end it was the isionist Georges Méliès who demonstrated this most clearly when he shot his newsreels in the studio before the real events happened. For the inventor of cinematic special effects, tomorrow was today — if not, indeed, yesterday.
Begun in the Quattrocento, the century of Gutenberg, this parody of the Progress of knowledge could not, then, have been achieved without the formidable continuum of the constant updating of technical Darwinism. Without the replacement of writing by industrial printing, would the vulgarization of techno-scientific progress , so dear to Buffon, have had any kind of future? Doubtless no more than the eighteenth-century gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities, were it not for the curiosities of the black museum of Journalism with which Karl Kraus regaled us in the early part of the twentieth.
For most of its enthusiasts, trusting in Progress would come down to believing in a beyond of good and evil not so much that of a late Nietzscheanism, as the toy and ra of Judaeo-Christian Genesis and its old — more tribal than moral — laws. This would explain the appearance of new popular heroes capable, like the scientific hero, of destroying themselves by spectacularly flouting any prohibition , any limit, any law.
From the eighteenth century onwards, these standards would be offered to the credulity of the public by the young industrial press, and the adulation of the masses would go to the revolutionary abnormality of a new kind of women and men
at the top of the hierarchy, the record-breakers in every eld: sportsmen, explorers, soldiers, adventurers, engineers, ailors — all those who would make the front page of the tabloids showing themselves capable of extreme performances.
Lumped in with these transgression-lovers of all kinds, other outlandish creatures would achieve this ominous fame. Serial killers, ‘rippers’, poisoners, train or bank robbers, gangsters seeking notoriety in bloody deeds.
As witnesses to the teratological production of their time, Fritz Lang with M (1931) and Doctor Mabuse (1922), or Bertolt Brecht with his Threepenny Opera in 1928 and, later, TheResistible Rise of Arturo Ui , informed us of the conflation that was taking place between the anonymous world of organized crime and politics, between the scientist and the terrorist.
From the past exploits of the old Carbonari to the crimes of the Brownshirts, from Kropotkin to Jules Joseph Bonnot, Al Capone, Ernst Röhm or Mengele, the industrial mass media progressively inoculated the world with the disease of excess —the nihilism of the gratuitous criminal act making a smooth transition from the popularity of the news item to the populism of totalitarian propaganda.
The beginnings not so much of the end of history as of a history as bunk — the first fruits of the self-dissolution of a species in which, as Hannah Arendt feared, the exterminator would supplant the predator .
From the celebrated ‘anything goes’ of the old anarchists to that of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, turning to good effect the tried-and-tested methods of the mass media, with coups d’e’tat based more on the news media than on military force, and an investigative, incriminatory journalism transformed into a secret police — ‘How many people know that it is actually the enemy that is marching at their head?’, asked Bertolt Brecht.
But how could they know? In the I 930s, Pierre Mac Orlan had already noted: ‘In principle, Hitler does not exist. He is merely a sentimental creation of the crowds.’
The creation of millions of deluded people, or of Dr Joseph Goebbels alone? A former journalist, a man of radio and cinema become Minister of Propaganda and Information for the Third Reich, but also undeniably the precursor of thosediscreet communications advisers who nowadays keep themselves off-camera, like so many clandestine funeral directors
for humanity.
From the glory of the ancient potentates cast in the bronze of the great battles of the past to death on ‘live’ global TV, the totalitarian systems have thanks to the mass media — acquired a replacement rate considerably more startling than that discerned as early as 1945 by Hannah Arendt.38
From the great military decimations to the secret genocides of the Gulag or the extermination camps, from the mass killers of retro-colonialism — in Latin America, Cambodia and Africa — to the exhibitionism of a total terrorist war, the collective murder and ritual sacrifice of the innocents would no longer be hidden activities but unavoidable daily spectacles.
Has the prohibition to prohibit — the basic law of technoscientific progress — become the only law of a lawless globalism?
When, today, European jurists report a massive increase in civil and international litigation, does this come, as they claim with laughable optimism, from an awakening of the legal awareness of the masses or, rather, from their permanent confrontation with unknown forces whose next victims they fear they may, sooner or later, become?
Not liberation, but global takeover of humanity by totalitarian multimedia powers, applying intensively to populations that age-old strategy which consists in sowing division everywhere — between peoples, regions, towns, countries, races, religions, sexes, generations, and even within families.39
As Bertolt Brecht sensed once again: ‘They send the looted out looting. The undertaking is a superhuman one; the use of violence, rather than concentrating forces, divides them: what was elementarily human, too compressed, explodes. Fragments fly in all directions, and total destruction follows.’
.................................................. ......................................
35_The French term for a production line is ‘une chaine (de fabrication)’ [Trans.].
36_In ‘Why the future does not need us’ (a document which can be consulted on the Internet), Bill Joy speculates also on the perverse effects of information technology in the fields of robotics, genetic engineering, and the nanotechnologies. He focuses, in particular, on the dystopic scenario enunciated in his ‘Manifesto’ by Theodore Kaczinski, alias the Unabomber, the Berkeley mathematics Ph.D. who, between 1978 and 1995, sent bombs and booby-trapped parcels to scientists, academics, laboratories and airlines in the USA . . . killing three people and wounding a large number. ‘In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people’, wrote this scientific serial killer who, according to the criminologist Eric Hickey, had no social skills whatever! [The passage quoted is from the so-called ‘Unabomber Manifesto’, paragraph 96 (Trans.).]
37_Karl Kraus, In These Great Times (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), p. 76.
38_‘Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements .
than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, André Deutsch, 1986), p. 305.
39_Wang Xuanming, The Thirty-Six Stratagems: Secret Art of War (San
Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1992).
History is bunk.
HENRY FORD
Paul Virilio
In 1917, the automobile magnate Henry Ford brought into operation the first industrial vehicle assembly line — that other ‘chain’ offatality which would soon make it possible to do away with human workers and replace them with robots. 35
So, in the very year of the triumph of Lenin, champion of nineteenth-century historical materialism , Ford was becoming one of the precursors of its technical dysfunctioning.
In this same spirit, the most recent opinion polls tell us that three out of four French people now mistrust politics but, on the other hand, trust scientists to ‘oversee the progress of science and respect for ethics’.
And some are even proposing, right now, to organize referendums and a democratization of information to deal with ‘the great social issues, such as biotechnology
To confuse ethics and information transmission systems is to forget that mass information provides everyone with a ‘dystopic vision’ of current events, and poses the well-known problem that accompanies the invention and misuse of any technology: ‘unintended consequences, a well-known problem . . . and one that is clearly related to Murphy’s law —“Anything that can go wrong, will ”.’36
Eluding any precautionary principle, the systems of information transmission have become bombs which keep on exploding in people’s minds, generating ever more complex and extensive accidents, creating that ‘uncanny identity which always makes it seem that actions are reported before they are performed, often the mere possibility of an action.37
‘News isn’t after, it’s before!’, asserted the journalist and novelist Gaston Leroux. Like any strategy, the strategy of news and information is not so much statistical as prophetic and apocalyptic. It derives its power from the chaos it creates
in the ‘worst of all possible worlds’, and in the end it was the isionist Georges Méliès who demonstrated this most clearly when he shot his newsreels in the studio before the real events happened. For the inventor of cinematic special effects, tomorrow was today — if not, indeed, yesterday.
Begun in the Quattrocento, the century of Gutenberg, this parody of the Progress of knowledge could not, then, have been achieved without the formidable continuum of the constant updating of technical Darwinism. Without the replacement of writing by industrial printing, would the vulgarization of techno-scientific progress , so dear to Buffon, have had any kind of future? Doubtless no more than the eighteenth-century gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities, were it not for the curiosities of the black museum of Journalism with which Karl Kraus regaled us in the early part of the twentieth.
For most of its enthusiasts, trusting in Progress would come down to believing in a beyond of good and evil not so much that of a late Nietzscheanism, as the toy and ra of Judaeo-Christian Genesis and its old — more tribal than moral — laws. This would explain the appearance of new popular heroes capable, like the scientific hero, of destroying themselves by spectacularly flouting any prohibition , any limit, any law.
From the eighteenth century onwards, these standards would be offered to the credulity of the public by the young industrial press, and the adulation of the masses would go to the revolutionary abnormality of a new kind of women and men
at the top of the hierarchy, the record-breakers in every eld: sportsmen, explorers, soldiers, adventurers, engineers, ailors — all those who would make the front page of the tabloids showing themselves capable of extreme performances.
Lumped in with these transgression-lovers of all kinds, other outlandish creatures would achieve this ominous fame. Serial killers, ‘rippers’, poisoners, train or bank robbers, gangsters seeking notoriety in bloody deeds.
As witnesses to the teratological production of their time, Fritz Lang with M (1931) and Doctor Mabuse (1922), or Bertolt Brecht with his Threepenny Opera in 1928 and, later, TheResistible Rise of Arturo Ui , informed us of the conflation that was taking place between the anonymous world of organized crime and politics, between the scientist and the terrorist.
From the past exploits of the old Carbonari to the crimes of the Brownshirts, from Kropotkin to Jules Joseph Bonnot, Al Capone, Ernst Röhm or Mengele, the industrial mass media progressively inoculated the world with the disease of excess —the nihilism of the gratuitous criminal act making a smooth transition from the popularity of the news item to the populism of totalitarian propaganda.
The beginnings not so much of the end of history as of a history as bunk — the first fruits of the self-dissolution of a species in which, as Hannah Arendt feared, the exterminator would supplant the predator .
From the celebrated ‘anything goes’ of the old anarchists to that of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, turning to good effect the tried-and-tested methods of the mass media, with coups d’e’tat based more on the news media than on military force, and an investigative, incriminatory journalism transformed into a secret police — ‘How many people know that it is actually the enemy that is marching at their head?’, asked Bertolt Brecht.
But how could they know? In the I 930s, Pierre Mac Orlan had already noted: ‘In principle, Hitler does not exist. He is merely a sentimental creation of the crowds.’
The creation of millions of deluded people, or of Dr Joseph Goebbels alone? A former journalist, a man of radio and cinema become Minister of Propaganda and Information for the Third Reich, but also undeniably the precursor of thosediscreet communications advisers who nowadays keep themselves off-camera, like so many clandestine funeral directors
for humanity.
From the glory of the ancient potentates cast in the bronze of the great battles of the past to death on ‘live’ global TV, the totalitarian systems have thanks to the mass media — acquired a replacement rate considerably more startling than that discerned as early as 1945 by Hannah Arendt.38
From the great military decimations to the secret genocides of the Gulag or the extermination camps, from the mass killers of retro-colonialism — in Latin America, Cambodia and Africa — to the exhibitionism of a total terrorist war, the collective murder and ritual sacrifice of the innocents would no longer be hidden activities but unavoidable daily spectacles.
Has the prohibition to prohibit — the basic law of technoscientific progress — become the only law of a lawless globalism?
When, today, European jurists report a massive increase in civil and international litigation, does this come, as they claim with laughable optimism, from an awakening of the legal awareness of the masses or, rather, from their permanent confrontation with unknown forces whose next victims they fear they may, sooner or later, become?
Not liberation, but global takeover of humanity by totalitarian multimedia powers, applying intensively to populations that age-old strategy which consists in sowing division everywhere — between peoples, regions, towns, countries, races, religions, sexes, generations, and even within families.39
As Bertolt Brecht sensed once again: ‘They send the looted out looting. The undertaking is a superhuman one; the use of violence, rather than concentrating forces, divides them: what was elementarily human, too compressed, explodes. Fragments fly in all directions, and total destruction follows.’
.................................................. ......................................
35_The French term for a production line is ‘une chaine (de fabrication)’ [Trans.].
36_In ‘Why the future does not need us’ (a document which can be consulted on the Internet), Bill Joy speculates also on the perverse effects of information technology in the fields of robotics, genetic engineering, and the nanotechnologies. He focuses, in particular, on the dystopic scenario enunciated in his ‘Manifesto’ by Theodore Kaczinski, alias the Unabomber, the Berkeley mathematics Ph.D. who, between 1978 and 1995, sent bombs and booby-trapped parcels to scientists, academics, laboratories and airlines in the USA . . . killing three people and wounding a large number. ‘In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people’, wrote this scientific serial killer who, according to the criminologist Eric Hickey, had no social skills whatever! [The passage quoted is from the so-called ‘Unabomber Manifesto’, paragraph 96 (Trans.).]
37_Karl Kraus, In These Great Times (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), p. 76.
38_‘Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements .
than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, André Deutsch, 1986), p. 305.
39_Wang Xuanming, The Thirty-Six Stratagems: Secret Art of War (San
Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1992).