<nettime> The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual 1/4

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual 1/4
McKenzie Wark [version 3.0]


1. Media Times

"The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power
of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us."
Theodor Adorno was writing of the intellectual's
challenge in comprehending Hitler, but perhaps the
same injunction might apply to events of more recent
times. As with Hitler, so with Osama Bin Laden: both
might be, to a psychologist, pathological cases, but
"people thinking in the form of free, detached,
disinterested appraisal" are "unable to accommodate
within those forms the experience of violence which
in reality annuls such thinking."

It is a characteristic of traditional scholarship that it
assumes a certain kind of time within which the
scholarly enterprise can unfold. Scholarship is
knowledge occupying an abstract, homogenous,
formal time. Indeed scholarship might be defined as
the production of precisely this kind of time. A
scholar's primary duty is the patient working through
of the consequences attendant on what one's
predecessors and colleagues deposit for us in the
archive.

As a consequence, scholarship has difficulties with
those images which, as Walter Benjamin said, "flash
up in a moment of danger."  Such images interrupt
the time of scholarship, breaking the thread of its
apparent continuity. There are always parallel times --
the news media ticks over at a faster rate than
scholarship. The time of everyday life takes its
distance and insists on its own rhythms. These times
may occasionally synchronize, but mostly they follow
their own beat.

Every now and then there is an event which
interrupts all such discrete and parallel times, cutting
across them and marking them all with the image of a
moment of danger. We know that September 11
interrupted the time of news media. The evidence is
there in videotapes of CNN and other live news
feeds. The news story suddenly confronted its
opposite, which I would call the event. A routine
news story has a narrative structure, which pre-exists
any given circumstances. Facts, when they emerge,
can be fitted into a story. An event as an irruption of
raw facticity into the news, for which a story is not
ready to hand.

The event, when it occurs in news media, opens up a
certain abyss. One stares at the evidence of an event
for which the story is lacking, or rather, lagging.
News media respond with a range of coping
strategies, with which to paper over the evident fact
that events have violated the narrative control and
management of the news media, at least for a
moment.

One coping strategy is repetition. News feeds
reiterate a cluster of images and sounds over and
over, as if only through repetition could the facticity
of the event be acknowledged. Exploratory attempts
will be made using file footage to construct a
beginning to the event. Events always irrupt into
news as if in the middle. News responds by
speculating on the beginning point for the story. As
the narrative arc of the event is unknown or
unstable, wise old white haired gentlemen are
recruited to provide a speculative trajectory, a
template, which might serve to reduce the event to
some familiar variant on the common stock of stories.

The event now has the capacity to synchronize many
very diverse local times, spilling over into the living
rooms, bars, bazaars and places of worship of many
different kinds of people. Local and communal
rhythms suddenly appear as connected to global
forces and relations. Yet for all that, it proves
remarkably difficult to think back from one's
experience to the causes of the event itself. The New
Yorker put some of the most distinguished writers in
town on the job of recording their experiences of
September 11. The results were remarkably banal.
Star writers from Jonathan Franzen to Adam Gopnik
could all provide richly detailed versions of their
whereabouts on the day, connected to nothing but
trivial remarks about the more abstract forces at
work.

As Fredric Jameson notes, this is an era in which the
forces that determine one's life chances are abstract
and global, yet the means by which one would
usually communicate about one's life chances with
others, one's immediate experience, appears as merely
an effect of unseen forces. "There comes into being,
then, a situation in which we can say that if individual
experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and
that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same
content is true, then it escapes individual
experience."  This is a problem, as Jameson notes, for
art; it is also a problem, as he doesn't note, for critical
theory.

While I agree with Jameson on the disconnect
between appearances and relations, which in art is
the disconnect between naturalism and realism, I
think there is a solution. One needs to displace the
terms a little. The disconnect can be expressed as a
difference between kinds of time. The time of
everyday life not only differs from the time of news
media and the time of scholarship, it differs from the
time of capital flows and global power. The latter
appear in everyday life as images that flash up, not
just in moments of danger, but as moments of
danger. The moment when they flash up is the
moment of the event. The event opens a critical
window onto the disjuncture between different kinds
of time precisely because it is the moment when times
suddenly connect, even if, in connecting, the usual
means of making sense of time within the horizon of a
specific temporal narrative is obliterated.

So if one is not to be stupefied by the power of
others, or one's own powerlessness, one needs to
know something of the time in which power
operates. But this is a temporality to which one
usually does not have access, either in everyday life,
or in scholarship, or in art -- it is even doubtful if the
news media is all that proximate to the most effective
times of power and powers of time. But there are
moments, interruptions in the polyrhythmic flow, in
which a kind of knowledge is possible.

These moments are events. Or to give them the full
specification I have given them elsewhere, "weird
global media events."  They are events because they
interrupt routine time. They are media events
because they happen within a space and time
saturated in media. They are global media events
because they traverse borders and call a world into
being. They are weird global media events because
each is singular and none conform to any
predetermined narrative. They introduce a new
quality of time.

The event not only breaches the separation among
what we might call after Marx superstructural times,
but between them and what we might call
infrastructural times of political and economic power.
As Jameson notes, Marx borrowed this terminology
from the railways. Superstructure and infrastructure
are the rolling stock and the rails. In these terms, the
event might be the juncture at which both the track
and the train change paths.





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