Siah
14-11-04, 01:00
extract vanuit het boek Ground Zero;
Every system of information — whatever it may be — is dangerous in the extreme. Even if it is used for something trivial, it can Sequently be used for a matter of vital importance ; ISAAC AISMOV
Paul Virilio
After the American Beat generation of the l950s, there would, as the Vietnam war was raging, be Woodstock, the rediscovered innocence of the hippies, the youthful dream of a return to an Edenic state finding embodiment in that utopian moral revolution of the I960s, when ‘the limits of the forbidden would shatter, together with bourgeois morality’s dilemma between what was permitted and what was not’ (Alain Ehrenberg).
Providing the opportunity, above all, for the virtual multimedia worlds to edge out the factual world of political propaganda.
It was indeed in 1968 that that underrated engine of destruction, television advertising, began in France on the first national channel. And it was in 1966 that the British music stations, such as Radio Caroline, tirst hoisted the Jolly Roger in the free waters off England’s shores.40
We know the history of this pseudo-liberation of the waves by music, which was to end with the systematic stifling of hundreds of neighbourhood and community radio stations —not, in this case, through state monopoly, but largely as an effect of the monopolies of the commercial media.
Having become, in a few short decades, the cultural agents of ‘social modernization’, the advertisers would soon be able to announce: ‘We do not promote products, we create behaviour.’
They will in fact create campaigns aimed at parents of both sexes , and it will be they who will impose on anyone and everyone the new tablets of the law — the tablets of the ‘beyond good and evil ’ of techno-scientific depopulation, leading, as it did, to the immense misery of a mass ego-sexuality and, particularly, to that shortage on the matrimonial market announced in 2001 by the researchers of the French national demographic institute (INED) who point out, for illustrative purposes, that in the United States, thirty million American women are single. 33 per cent more than fifteen years ago.41
From the 1960s onwards, while the traditional political parties and trade unions were endlessly splitting and collapsing, movements like American ‘Women’s Lib’ (which, from the outset, stood shoulder to shoulder with the civil rights struggle) or the MLF in France were gaining legitimate emancipation and equal rights, thanks to theatrical actions given extensive coverage by the new mass media.
The feminist slogans of the 1970s, such as ‘The womb is ours’ or ‘The production of life belongs to us’, gave way in the 1980s to the debasement of these watchwords for purposes of advertising. Unisex . United Colors .. . a mix and match of sexes, generations, races and religions. The child would become the father of the adult; women, now equipped with penises. would cease to be the future of man:42 men would marry men, and brothers would impregnate their sisters….43
‘Is the press a messenger? No, it is the event itself. A speech? No, life itself!’ wrote Karl Kraus propheticaily.44
When advertising in all its forms aspires to provide the entire terrain of social reality, one can understand why the judiciary, in its turn, distances itself from the political sphere, and from a democracy presumed to be the guardian of the old moral order — to seek out, as we have seen it doing, a new popuiar legitimacy based on its tacit alliance with the mass media.45
It will then be under twofold — judicial and multimedia — pressure that the Republican legislators will see themselves forced to undertake the biopolitical conditioning of populations more disarmed than consenting — with the emancipation, in particular, of the child-citizen here copying the well-known emancipation of the child-consumer of merchandising.
From 2001 onwards, children will, for example, be able to reject their patronymic and choose their ‘family’ name for themselves. There is talk of further reducing the age of majority, which has already happened in practice for those who pursue the profession of fashion model, while underage girls no longer need their parents’ agreement to have abortions, and the government advises parliamentarians to avoid passing liberticidal laws which would run the risk ‘of making deputies unpopular with young people’.
The legendary times when, as Joseph Roth put it, ‘we still believed a republic was a republic’ are coming to an end.
In this regard, the election of Silvio Berlusconi as head of the Italian government in 2001 has opened up a transpolitical era of a new kind. After his failed try-out of 1994, ‘Ii Cavaliero’ has in fact just carried out a coup d’etat , and Italy has just toppled over into a two-party system of the third kind in which the alternative is no longer between classical Left and Right, but between politics and the media.
No longer content with occupying the stage of daily life with its great (‘Big Brother’-style) game-shows, telereality is now invading the sets of the Res publica . And for the first time in Europe we are looking on, mesmerized, at the unprecedented victory of the champion of telecracy over representative democracy’s man, the triumph of audience ratings over universal suffrage.
After the era of the standardization of the products and mannersof the industrial consumer society comes the era of the synchronization of opinion — the age of an information revotion in which parliamentary geopolitics suddenly gives way to a chronopolitics of instantaneity, that ‘live’ coverage of which television possesses the knack, with the rise of a genuine virtual democracy — that is to say, a ludic democracy for infantilized tele-citizens — still to come.
At that point, the political imagination would find itself outstripped once and for all or, more exactly, outpaced (in real time) by the public image of a system of conditioning in which the optically correct would succeed the politically correct — the vestiges of the ancient deliberative democracy of assemblies of citizens disappearing at the same time as script gives way to the screen.
In fact, this decline of the republican ritual of election in favour of a mere emission/reception of more or less subliminal messages will be further aggravated by all those who are now doing their utmost to proclaim the merits of future online electronic democracy using the Internet. After the television screen, it is the computer screen which is now drumming out this slogan: ‘E-democracy is on the way, have your say and help to shape the public debate .’
And to justify this, the new cyberculture enthusiasts assert that ‘we are moving from an intermittent democracy, with periodic elections, to a continuous democracy’, in which citizenship would be boiled down, all in all, to its simplest expression: that of making a forecast.
An anecdote to illustrate this diversion: for a while now, Johann has been presenting the stock-market results on a German Internet site. But Johnn does not exist. He is the first virtual presenter of the electronic era, which is one way of bringing sacrificial pawns into the electro-economic fiction of the global casino, that great planetary deregulation in which those who have most success are those who do the least thinking (Abby Cohen).
But let us not forget the tied result of the American elections of November 2000, when some of the media offered to resort to the live broadcasting of a hand of poker as a way of settling the contest between the presidential candidates. In this way, the contradictory calculations of a defective electoral system would give way to the mathematics of chance, and wearisome political broadcasts would be shifted into the — eminently more profitable — category of light entertainment and game-shows.
And why not, since — as Norman Mailer explained at the time — ‘Since the Watergate affair, the media think they can get away with anything’. And American politicians seem to have forgotten Asimov’s precious recommendation, that old classic of intelligence-gathering: ‘Every system of the transmission of information, whatever it may be, is dangerous in the extreme.... The government is not keen for a transmission system to remain infallible, unless it is put under its control.’
Might democracy be perishing from the breakdown of its own information systems, the bug in the instrument of governmental transmission?
Eight months after the dubious American ballot of 2000, a report by the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology reveald that between four and six million votes had gone uncounted, while George W. Bush had ultimately been elected with a lead of 537 votes over the Democrat Al Gore.
Like the Internet’s Johann , between four and six million American voters had virtually ceased to exist, and the of the report concluded that they would continue to ‘have legitimate concerns about embarking on another presidential election’.46
And, to make the point even better, at the moment when, with much use of high-tech advertising, they were exhuming Nietzsche’s superman, the world’s most powerful head of state was turned into a kind of endangered political mutant in that series of films shot shortly before the presidential elections of 2000 in which Bill Clinton appeared washing his car, cooking or taking a snooze in the famous Oval Office — thereby demonstrating that the tenant of the White House was no longer thought to serve much of a purpose. 47
And why tire yourself when everything runs without human intervention, when it has even been suggested that strikes against rogue states hostile to American interests might be automated, and when missiles are quite capable of finding their destinations by themselves?
But this was nothing as yet. Invulnerable America was subsequently to get a part-time president , George Jnr. Seven months into his term, he had spent half that time in the country, on his Texas ranch or at Camp David, the presidential holiday residence, or at his parents’ home. . . just before the Pentagon and the World Trade Center exploded.
‘Intelligence which relies on high technology, on electronic eavesdropping and satellites is all very well, but we cannot hit the terrorists if we don’t have human information,’ concluded General Norman Schwartzkopf at the time.
Echoing the comments of the father of cybernetics: ‘No, the future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking.’48
........................
40 Radio Caroline was located on board an old cargo vessel. More an offshore than a ‘pirate’ radio-station, it established the use of zones outside national jurisdiction in international waters.
41 ‘Overthrow virtue... . . The consumer society will simply reinvent another ‘Ship of fools’ with its ‘new values’, which are merely the old ones turned upside down , a staging of the transgression of the deadly sins _ greed, hatred, violence, envy, gluttony, sex, murder_gradually becoming the rules of conduct of a period unaware of the dangers it harbours within itself.
42 A reference to Louis .Xragon’s line, ‘Lavenir do laomme ost a femme (Le Fou d’EIsa ) [Trans.J.
43 Between 1982 and 2000, Oliviero Toscani, a man who claimed that his campaigns were ‘manitestos which would change mentalities, was one of the undisputed masters of advertising terrorism.
44 Kraus, In These Great Times , pp. 75—6.
45 Marie-Anne Frison-Roche and Hubert Haenel, Les juges et politique (Paris: PUF, 2001).
[It must be remembered here that the juge dínstruction, who is responsible for overseeing the investigation of crime, is in the French system a member of the judiciary (Trans.).]
46 The report was written by David Baltimore and Charles Vest, president respectively of Caltech and MIT [Trans.].
47 The videos in question were shot for the white House Correspondents’ Association Dinner of April 29 2000 [Trans.].
48 Wiener, God & Golem, Inc., p.69.
Every system of information — whatever it may be — is dangerous in the extreme. Even if it is used for something trivial, it can Sequently be used for a matter of vital importance ; ISAAC AISMOV
Paul Virilio
After the American Beat generation of the l950s, there would, as the Vietnam war was raging, be Woodstock, the rediscovered innocence of the hippies, the youthful dream of a return to an Edenic state finding embodiment in that utopian moral revolution of the I960s, when ‘the limits of the forbidden would shatter, together with bourgeois morality’s dilemma between what was permitted and what was not’ (Alain Ehrenberg).
Providing the opportunity, above all, for the virtual multimedia worlds to edge out the factual world of political propaganda.
It was indeed in 1968 that that underrated engine of destruction, television advertising, began in France on the first national channel. And it was in 1966 that the British music stations, such as Radio Caroline, tirst hoisted the Jolly Roger in the free waters off England’s shores.40
We know the history of this pseudo-liberation of the waves by music, which was to end with the systematic stifling of hundreds of neighbourhood and community radio stations —not, in this case, through state monopoly, but largely as an effect of the monopolies of the commercial media.
Having become, in a few short decades, the cultural agents of ‘social modernization’, the advertisers would soon be able to announce: ‘We do not promote products, we create behaviour.’
They will in fact create campaigns aimed at parents of both sexes , and it will be they who will impose on anyone and everyone the new tablets of the law — the tablets of the ‘beyond good and evil ’ of techno-scientific depopulation, leading, as it did, to the immense misery of a mass ego-sexuality and, particularly, to that shortage on the matrimonial market announced in 2001 by the researchers of the French national demographic institute (INED) who point out, for illustrative purposes, that in the United States, thirty million American women are single. 33 per cent more than fifteen years ago.41
From the 1960s onwards, while the traditional political parties and trade unions were endlessly splitting and collapsing, movements like American ‘Women’s Lib’ (which, from the outset, stood shoulder to shoulder with the civil rights struggle) or the MLF in France were gaining legitimate emancipation and equal rights, thanks to theatrical actions given extensive coverage by the new mass media.
The feminist slogans of the 1970s, such as ‘The womb is ours’ or ‘The production of life belongs to us’, gave way in the 1980s to the debasement of these watchwords for purposes of advertising. Unisex . United Colors .. . a mix and match of sexes, generations, races and religions. The child would become the father of the adult; women, now equipped with penises. would cease to be the future of man:42 men would marry men, and brothers would impregnate their sisters….43
‘Is the press a messenger? No, it is the event itself. A speech? No, life itself!’ wrote Karl Kraus propheticaily.44
When advertising in all its forms aspires to provide the entire terrain of social reality, one can understand why the judiciary, in its turn, distances itself from the political sphere, and from a democracy presumed to be the guardian of the old moral order — to seek out, as we have seen it doing, a new popuiar legitimacy based on its tacit alliance with the mass media.45
It will then be under twofold — judicial and multimedia — pressure that the Republican legislators will see themselves forced to undertake the biopolitical conditioning of populations more disarmed than consenting — with the emancipation, in particular, of the child-citizen here copying the well-known emancipation of the child-consumer of merchandising.
From 2001 onwards, children will, for example, be able to reject their patronymic and choose their ‘family’ name for themselves. There is talk of further reducing the age of majority, which has already happened in practice for those who pursue the profession of fashion model, while underage girls no longer need their parents’ agreement to have abortions, and the government advises parliamentarians to avoid passing liberticidal laws which would run the risk ‘of making deputies unpopular with young people’.
The legendary times when, as Joseph Roth put it, ‘we still believed a republic was a republic’ are coming to an end.
In this regard, the election of Silvio Berlusconi as head of the Italian government in 2001 has opened up a transpolitical era of a new kind. After his failed try-out of 1994, ‘Ii Cavaliero’ has in fact just carried out a coup d’etat , and Italy has just toppled over into a two-party system of the third kind in which the alternative is no longer between classical Left and Right, but between politics and the media.
No longer content with occupying the stage of daily life with its great (‘Big Brother’-style) game-shows, telereality is now invading the sets of the Res publica . And for the first time in Europe we are looking on, mesmerized, at the unprecedented victory of the champion of telecracy over representative democracy’s man, the triumph of audience ratings over universal suffrage.
After the era of the standardization of the products and mannersof the industrial consumer society comes the era of the synchronization of opinion — the age of an information revotion in which parliamentary geopolitics suddenly gives way to a chronopolitics of instantaneity, that ‘live’ coverage of which television possesses the knack, with the rise of a genuine virtual democracy — that is to say, a ludic democracy for infantilized tele-citizens — still to come.
At that point, the political imagination would find itself outstripped once and for all or, more exactly, outpaced (in real time) by the public image of a system of conditioning in which the optically correct would succeed the politically correct — the vestiges of the ancient deliberative democracy of assemblies of citizens disappearing at the same time as script gives way to the screen.
In fact, this decline of the republican ritual of election in favour of a mere emission/reception of more or less subliminal messages will be further aggravated by all those who are now doing their utmost to proclaim the merits of future online electronic democracy using the Internet. After the television screen, it is the computer screen which is now drumming out this slogan: ‘E-democracy is on the way, have your say and help to shape the public debate .’
And to justify this, the new cyberculture enthusiasts assert that ‘we are moving from an intermittent democracy, with periodic elections, to a continuous democracy’, in which citizenship would be boiled down, all in all, to its simplest expression: that of making a forecast.
An anecdote to illustrate this diversion: for a while now, Johann has been presenting the stock-market results on a German Internet site. But Johnn does not exist. He is the first virtual presenter of the electronic era, which is one way of bringing sacrificial pawns into the electro-economic fiction of the global casino, that great planetary deregulation in which those who have most success are those who do the least thinking (Abby Cohen).
But let us not forget the tied result of the American elections of November 2000, when some of the media offered to resort to the live broadcasting of a hand of poker as a way of settling the contest between the presidential candidates. In this way, the contradictory calculations of a defective electoral system would give way to the mathematics of chance, and wearisome political broadcasts would be shifted into the — eminently more profitable — category of light entertainment and game-shows.
And why not, since — as Norman Mailer explained at the time — ‘Since the Watergate affair, the media think they can get away with anything’. And American politicians seem to have forgotten Asimov’s precious recommendation, that old classic of intelligence-gathering: ‘Every system of the transmission of information, whatever it may be, is dangerous in the extreme.... The government is not keen for a transmission system to remain infallible, unless it is put under its control.’
Might democracy be perishing from the breakdown of its own information systems, the bug in the instrument of governmental transmission?
Eight months after the dubious American ballot of 2000, a report by the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology reveald that between four and six million votes had gone uncounted, while George W. Bush had ultimately been elected with a lead of 537 votes over the Democrat Al Gore.
Like the Internet’s Johann , between four and six million American voters had virtually ceased to exist, and the of the report concluded that they would continue to ‘have legitimate concerns about embarking on another presidential election’.46
And, to make the point even better, at the moment when, with much use of high-tech advertising, they were exhuming Nietzsche’s superman, the world’s most powerful head of state was turned into a kind of endangered political mutant in that series of films shot shortly before the presidential elections of 2000 in which Bill Clinton appeared washing his car, cooking or taking a snooze in the famous Oval Office — thereby demonstrating that the tenant of the White House was no longer thought to serve much of a purpose. 47
And why tire yourself when everything runs without human intervention, when it has even been suggested that strikes against rogue states hostile to American interests might be automated, and when missiles are quite capable of finding their destinations by themselves?
But this was nothing as yet. Invulnerable America was subsequently to get a part-time president , George Jnr. Seven months into his term, he had spent half that time in the country, on his Texas ranch or at Camp David, the presidential holiday residence, or at his parents’ home. . . just before the Pentagon and the World Trade Center exploded.
‘Intelligence which relies on high technology, on electronic eavesdropping and satellites is all very well, but we cannot hit the terrorists if we don’t have human information,’ concluded General Norman Schwartzkopf at the time.
Echoing the comments of the father of cybernetics: ‘No, the future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking.’48
........................
40 Radio Caroline was located on board an old cargo vessel. More an offshore than a ‘pirate’ radio-station, it established the use of zones outside national jurisdiction in international waters.
41 ‘Overthrow virtue... . . The consumer society will simply reinvent another ‘Ship of fools’ with its ‘new values’, which are merely the old ones turned upside down , a staging of the transgression of the deadly sins _ greed, hatred, violence, envy, gluttony, sex, murder_gradually becoming the rules of conduct of a period unaware of the dangers it harbours within itself.
42 A reference to Louis .Xragon’s line, ‘Lavenir do laomme ost a femme (Le Fou d’EIsa ) [Trans.J.
43 Between 1982 and 2000, Oliviero Toscani, a man who claimed that his campaigns were ‘manitestos which would change mentalities, was one of the undisputed masters of advertising terrorism.
44 Kraus, In These Great Times , pp. 75—6.
45 Marie-Anne Frison-Roche and Hubert Haenel, Les juges et politique (Paris: PUF, 2001).
[It must be remembered here that the juge dínstruction, who is responsible for overseeing the investigation of crime, is in the French system a member of the judiciary (Trans.).]
46 The report was written by David Baltimore and Charles Vest, president respectively of Caltech and MIT [Trans.].
47 The videos in question were shot for the white House Correspondents’ Association Dinner of April 29 2000 [Trans.].
48 Wiener, God & Golem, Inc., p.69.