<nettime> Book of the Undead

[McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>]

Book of the Undead
McKenzie Wark
Tuesday, 11th January, 2000


It was a peculiar ritual to perform to bring a personal end to the
twentieth century. A journey through the snow to visit Egypt, at the
Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan. I took two books, the latest New Yorker
and the New York Times to keep me company.

Ancient Egyptian funeral art fascinates me. How unreadable it is. Perhaps
it isn't meant to be read. If it is addressed to anyone, or anything, it
isn't human. It is addressed to otherness itself, to eternity, facing
nothingness. A reminder of how little a decade, or a century matters, even
a millennium, compared to these fragments of monuments that could stare
down handfuls of years in their thousands -- and still not blink. 

As Paul Valery wrote: "We later civilisations... we too now know we are
mortal. We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of
empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their
machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries...". Our ancestors
may have conquered space, spread ourselves thin across the bread of the
earth, but Egypt conquered time. Their empires of the dead will probably
still be living when the last of ours are rat food. 

I sought refuge in Egypt. The "millennium" still bugs me. For no
particularly good reason, New Year's Eve 1999 turned out to be a big
excuse for media networks everywhere to show off their chops. Not content
to merely continue service in the face of the millennium bug, the networks
went all out, prolonging the moment via endless satellite feeds. 

Thanks to universal standard time, everyone could know where they stood in
relation to the planet's movement. Thanks to geopositioning, everyone
could know the coordinates upon the map that corresponded to the patch of
earth under foot. As the world turned, an arc of humans from one latitude
to another could experience the arbitrary yet somehow convincing sensation
of leaving the twentieth century. As the New Yorker reported: "In a daring
act of multiculturalism, the good people of Tonga rose at midnight to sing
the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from Handel's Messiah." 

Even after it's passing, Y2K kept bothering me. I tried to ignore it, to
think about Egypt. I thought that if I closed my eyes to the world's
turning, it would go away. It won't go away. Not any more. There is
nowhere left to hide. At twilight, in the desert, your satellite phone
rings. It's a telemarketer.

Egypt is exhausting, even at the Met. I'd brought a book or two, so I
could pause for coffee and make some notes. The books were be Harold
Innis, that quirky old communication theorist. Innis writes: "A medium of
communication may be better suited to the dissemination of knowledge over
time than space, particularly if the medium is heavy and durable and not
suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledge over space
than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easily
transported." 

A simple observation. Consider what it makes it possible to think:
"Empires must be considered from the standpoint of two dimensions, those
of space and time, and persist by overcoming the bias of media which
over-emphasise either dimension. They have tended to flourish under
conditions in which civilisation reflects the influence of more than one
medium and in which the bias of one medium toward decentralisation is
offset by the bias of another toward centralisation." 

Consider Egypt, where: "A concern with problems of space and time appears
to have marked the beginnings of civilisation... A change from a
pre-dynastic to dynastic society, or a precise recognition of time...
appears to have coincided with writing, monumental architecture and
sculpture." Kings and priests colonised time. "The permanence of death
became a basis of continuity through the development of the idea of
immortality, preservation of the body, and development of writing in the
tombs by which the magical power of the spoken word was perpetuated in
pictorial representation of the funeral ritual." 

"The pyramids were an index to power over time." But, "by escaping from
the heavy medium of stone, thought gained lightness." The papyrus document
became the means for scribes and soldiers to colonise space. These
different media, with their different properties, were the basis of a
flexible continuity and integrity for the empire, but also a source of
conflict within it. "The profound disturbances in Egyptian civilisation
involved in the shift from absolute monarchy to a more democratic
organisation coincides with a shift in emphasis on stone as a medium of
communicating or as a basis of prestige, as shown in the pyramids, to an
emphasis on papyrus. It didn't last. Egypt "failed to establish a stable
compromise between a bias dependent on stone in the pyramids and a bias
dependent on papyrus and hieroglyphics." 

Failed, and yet succeeded, in replicating itself by virtue of the
fascination those of us who, like Valery, see something strikingly
different in the shape of this ancient space and time. There's some irony
in monuments to eternity being themselves preserved at the Met. "The
emphasis of a civilisation on means of extending its duration as in Egypt
accompanied by reliance on permanence gives that civilisation a prominent
position in periods such as the present when time is of little
significance." 

What can you say about a civilisation that gives itself an early mark and
toddles into its second millennia a year early? One in which global
empires grow and merge and collapse each weekon the lone and level sands
of the market. Or where Danny Hillis, Silicon Valley magus, is making a
monument to last out the centuries -- and it's a clock. What is to become
of it all? 

Consider Innis, on what became of Egypt: "We can perhaps assume that the
use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent
determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that
its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilisation in which
life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and
that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the
emergence of a new civilisation." The scribes and the priests, between
them, ran things, and for centuries kept control of the skills to do so.
This very facility became a limit, making the empire vulnerable to
stagnation and conquest from without. 

Consider how this might work out in more recent times, when monopolies
guard their source code and battle against open source technologies. Innis
writes that "a simple flexible system of writing admits of adaptation to
the vernacular but slowness of adaptation facilitates monopoly of
knowledge and hierarchies."  Microsoft write twentieth century
hieroglyphics. It is an empire with an Egyptian approach to source code
intended to perpetuate itself through time, even at the risk of arresting
flexible and adaptive approaches to creating communication tools anywhere
else. 

Or take the lead story that greeted me over coffee in the Met's cafe:
AMERICA ONLINE AGREES TO BUY TIME WARNER FOR $165 BILLION; MEDIA DEAL IS
RICHEST MERGER. This is the way of things now. Vigorous new empires annex
old Egypts in a burst of press release fireworks. Empires that straddle
continents but are not built to last much longer than London's Millennium
Dome, structures held aloft by tensed steel cables, built to be seen on
television by distant cousins by not by any descendants. 

We may have left the twentieth century, but has it left us? Its ruins lie
about us, persisting, insisting. Its miniature monuments lie in the
landfill of memory. So many new ways that were discovered, during the
century, for impressing the century on memory. Perhaps that's why so
little of it's architecture is built to last. The great pyramid of Las
Vegas is an image preserved in a million snapshots.

The monument has become something miniature, even molecular. Exotic
pesticide residues now shop up in Antarctic penguins. Perhaps Innis is
wrong about this civilisation. It looks like its bias is towards the
colonising of space, but in its own way it has colonised time, too. It
communicates its chaos, its blind will to creative destruction, through
the pulverising of every last particle of the earth. The twentieth
century's answer to the pyramids, it's ongoing contributions to
civilisation, are the death factories of the Holocaust and the negative
architecture of the bombing of Hiroshima.

And yet, those memories aside, it was also the century in which for the
first time one glimpses a possible life outside the monopoly of knowledge
by priests and scribes, where no matter how hard they try, empires can no
longer control for millennia the flows information that allow them to
colonise space and time. I'm tempted to say that if Egypt lives on in the
Book of the Dead, our time will live on as a Book of the Undead. It left
its mark by mumifying nothing except change itself. But the book is one of
the things the twentieth century changed too. The scribes and priests and
scholars who monopolised knowledge and prestige through mastery of textual
codes are going the way of their Egyptian precursors, into the museums. 


McKenzie Wark is currently a guest scholar at New York University. He
lectures in media studies at Macquarie University. mw35@is6.nyu.edu

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