Matteo Pasquinelli on Sat, 14 Aug 2004 05:43:32 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> WARPORN WARPUNK! Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime |
[rough version, still to be edited. /m] WARPORN WARPUNK! Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime Grinning monkeys How do you think to stop the war disarmed? No-war public opinion that fills squares worldwide and cosmetic democracies behind International Courts stand powerless in front of US military raging. Against the instincts of a superpower there is nothing to do: a homicide force can be arrested by another stronger force only. Everyday we witness such a Darwinian show: history is repeating through a cruel confrontation of forces, and what rests is freedom of speech exercised in drawing-rooms. Pacifists as well are accomplice of instinctive forces, because animal aggressiveness belongs to everybody. But, when and how do we express that bestiality we condemn in the armies? Digging the coat of the self-censorship belonging to the radical left (not only to the conformist majority), we should admit publicly that watching Abu Ghraib pictures of pornographic tortures doesn't scandalized us, on the contrary, it excite us, exactly as the obsessive voyeurism of NY911 videos still excite us. Through such images we feel the expression of repressed instincts, the pleasure rising again after narcotized by consumerism, technologies, goods, images. We show our teeth as monkeys do, when their aggressive grin looks dreadfully like the human smile. Contemporary thinkers like Baudrillard and Zizek push forward the acknowledgment of a dark side inside the western culture. If NY911 has been a shock for the western awareness, Baudrillard puts forward a more shocking thesis: we western people are to have desired NY911, as death instinct of a superpower that reaches its biological limit and doesn't want but its self-destruction and war. Indignation is always false, there is always an animal talking behind a video screen. On the videowar chessboard Before pulling the monkey out of the TV set, we have to focus the chessboard the media match is played on. The more reality is an augmented reality of mass, personal, networked devices, the more wars become media war, even if they take place in a desert. The First Global War starts live�broadcasting NY911 air catastrophe and goes on with video-guerrilla episodes: everyday from the Iraqi front we received videos shot by invaders, militiamen, journalists. In such a media war each action is designed before to fit its spectacular consequences. Terrorists learnt all the rules of a spectacular conflict, while the imperial propaganda, much more expert, has no problems to play with fakes and hoaxes (see dossiers about weapons of mass destructions). It is no more the burocratic propaganda war of the past. New media turned traditional media war into a media guerrilla, opening a bottom-up resistance front, a molecular front. Video cameras among civilians, weblogs updated by independent journalists, smart-phones used by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison: each one represents an uncontrollable variable that can subvert propaganda apparatus. Video imagery produced by television is now interlaced with the anarchic self-organized infrastructure of digital networked media, that become dreadful distribution means (see the capillary spreading on the net of the Nick Berg's beheading video). Today's propaganda is used to deal with a connective imagery rather than a collective spectacle, and the intelligence sets up simulacra of the truth based on networking technologies. The videoclash of civilizations Beside the techno-conflict between horizontal and vertical media, on the international mediascape two secular cultures of image face each other. United States embodies the last stage of videocracy, an oligarchic technocracy based on hypertrophic advertising and infotainment and the colonization of worldwide imagery through Hollywood and CNN. XIX century's ideologies, such as Nazism and Stalinism, were intimately linked to the fetishism of the idea-image (and all the western thought is heir of the Platonic idealism). Islamic culture on the contrary is traditionally iconoclast: representing images of God and of the Prophet is forbidden, and usually of any living creature as well. Allah only is Al Mussawir, who gives rise to forms: imitating his gesture of creation is a sin (even if this precept never appears in the Koran). Islam, unlike Christianity, has no sacred iconographic center. In the mosques the Kibla is an empty niche. Its power comes not from the refusal of the image but from the refusal of its centralizing role, developing in this way a material, anti-spectacular, horizontal cult. On Doomsday, painters are meant to suffer more than other sinners. Even if westernization go forward through television and cinema (paradoxically they didn't have the same treatment of painting), iconoclastic ground keeps in stand-by and breaks out against western symbols, as it happened with the World Trade Center. To hit western idolatry, pseudo-Islamic terrorism becomes videoclasm, prepares attacks designed for the live broadcasting and uses satellite channels as a resonance mean of its propaganda. Al-Jazeera broadcasts images of shot-dead Iraqi civilians, while western mass media remove these bodies in favor of the military show. An asymmetrical imagery is developing between East and West, and afterwards an asymmetrical rage also, that will break out backlashes in the generations to come. In such a clash between videocracy and videoclasm, a third actor � that is the global movement � tries to open a breach and develop an autonomous videopoiesis. The making of an alternative imagery is not based only on self-organizing independent media, but also on winning back the dimension of the myth and of the body. Videopoiesis should talk � at the same time � to the belly and to the brain of the monkeys. Global video-brain Not the news about tortures at the Abu Ghraib prison or about Nick Berg's beheading woken up western media and awareness, but the physical force of live-broadcasted images did. Television is the medium that learnt the masses a Pavlov reaction to images. Television as well is the medium that produced the globalization of the collective mind (something more complex than the idea of public opinion). The feelings of the masses have been always reptilian: what media proliferation established is a video mutation of feelings, a becoming-video of the collective brain and of the collective narration. The global video-brain works out of images like our brain thinks out of images. Diving in the electronic and economic acceleration, the collective mind has no time to communicate and elaborate messages but reacts to visual stimuli only. A collective imagery is rising when a media infrastructure casts and repeats the same images in a million copies, producing a common space, a consensual hallucination around the same object (that afterwards becomes word-mouth or movie industry). In the case of the TV medium such a serial communication of a million images is much more lethal, because instantaneous. On the other hand, the networked imagery works in an interactive way, the reason why we call it connective imagery. Imagery is a collective serial broadcasting of the same image across different media. Quoting Goebbels, it is a lie repeated a million times that becomes public discourse, everyday conversations, and then truth. Collective imagery is the place where media and desire meet each other, where the same image repetition modifies millions of bodies, inscribes leisure, hope, scare. Communication and desire, mediasphere and psychosphere, are the two axis through which the war reaches our bodies far from the real conflict, the way image inscribes itself into the flesh. Animal narrations Why does reality exist only when shot by a TV network? Collective imagery is not made by the video evolution of mass technologies only, but also by natural instincts of human kind. As a political animal, the human being is inclined to set up collective narrations, that represent the belonging instinct to its own kind. Let's call them animal narrations. For this reason television is a "natural" medium, because it reflects the need of an only narration for millions people, as once other narrative genres did and still do, like the epic, the myth, the Bible, the Koran. Television represents the ancestral feeling to belong to one Kind, that is the meta-organism we all belong to. Each geopolitical area has its own video macro-attractor (CNN, BBC), which all the other media relate to. Beside macro-attractor, there are meta-attractors, featuring the role of critical consciousness against them, a function often held by press and web media (the Guardian, for instance). Of course the model is much more complex: we can keep on till blogs, that we can define micro-attractors, the smallest attractors in scale. It is curious to describe mass media in such a way: they are no more push media (one-to-many), but pull media (many-to-one), attracting and aggregating media which we invest desire into. Quoting Reich's remark on fascism, we can say that masses are not brainwashed by media, but it's the perversion of herds to desire and support media establishment. Digital anarchy vs. the Empire Traditional media war meets the internet and the interconnected imagery (among television, internet, mobile phones, digital camera) becomes the new battle ground: personal media such as digital cameras let cruelty appear directly in the dining room, as fast as an internet download and out of any governmental control. Such a networked imagery can't be stopped, as well as technology evolution can't be. Ubiquitous transparency is a destiny no one can avoid. Video phones era is compromising seriously privacy, but on the other hand any kind of secrecy as well, state secrecy included. Rumsfeld's vent in front of US Committee on Armed Services about Abu Ghraib scandal is something very grotesque: "We're functioning... with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had - they had not even arrived in the Pentagon". After few days Rumsfeld prevented American soldiers from using any kind of video device. Rumsfeld himself was shot shacking hands with Saddam Hussein on an official visit in 1983 and that video is today well distributed on the net. New media seem to found an unforeseeable digital anarchy, where a video phone can combat the Empire. Abu Ghraib tortures pictures are the intestine nemesis of the machine civilization, running out of control of its demiurges. There is a machine nemesis but also an image nemesis: the Spectacle Empire has been defeated by the hypertrophy of the Spectacle itself, by an auto-erotic pornography, a greed for images. Video phones has established a networked mega-camera, a super-light panopticon, an horizontal Big Brother. In this net the White House happened to be trapped. It is no more the weak thought of postmodernism � the world as an illusion of simulacra. We live in an interconnected universe where videopoiesis can link the farthest points and breaks out fatal short circuits. War porn Indeed, what happened on the media surface with the Abu Ghraib scandal is not a casual event, but it is the implosion into a vortex of war, media, technology, body, desire. Philosophers, journalists and DIY opinion leaders crowded to frame the new nodal point from different perspectives. What is novelty about? Abu Ghraib pictures and Nick Berg's video (fiction or not doesn't matter) forged a new narrative genre for the collective imagery. For the first time they projected a snuff movie on the screen of the global imagery and liberate internet subcultures used to feed on that kind of images: rotten.com reaches the masses. What is going on worldwide media is not the elaboration of a shock, but of the political, cultural, social, aesthetic consequences of a new genre of Image that forces us to upgrade our immunising system. As Seymour Hersh noted, Rumsfeld give the world a good alibi to ignore the Geneva Convention from now on. But he lowed the tolerance bar of visible as well, forcing us to live together with the Horror. English-speaking journalism calls war porn popular tabloids and talk-shows fetishism for super-sized weapons and well-polished uniforms, hi-tech tanks and infrared-controlled bombs. War hardcore is a film such as Ridley Scott�s Black Hawk Down. Adbusters called it pure war porn, when Time chose the American Soldiers as Person of the Year and put on the cover "three American Soldiers standing proudly, hald-smiles playing on their faces, rifles cradled in their arms". War porn is also a trash sub-genre - from the dark side of the net - that reproduces sex between soldiers or civilians rape (fake movies in uniforms shot usually in east Europe). War porn is liberated as a net subculture and its morbid interest in war imagery is turned into political weapons, voyeurism and mass nightmare. Is it casual that war porn blows up right now from the Iraqi marsh? Digital-body rejection The matching of war and sex in the American journalism is a sign of something deeper never expressed, of an libido alienated from affluence that can break out its ancestral instincts into the war only. War is as old as the human kind: natural aggressiveness embodies into collective and institutional forms, but today's war has been separated by several layers of technology from its animal substratum. We needed Abu Ghraib pictures to dig up the obscene ground of animal energy hidden behind the democratic make-up. Do repressed desires reappear by chance today only thanks to the mass spreading of digital devices or is there a fatal linkage between body and technology that breaks out sooner or later? From the beginning digital media seem to be orphan of something � they exiled the passion of the real (Alain Badiou) onto their screen, but they did temporary. New personal media are connected with everyday life psychopathology � they have a relation with the body that television had not. War porn seems to be the rejection of technology by unconscious forces that express themselves through the same medium repressing them. Proliferation of digital prosthesis is not so rational, aseptic, immaterial as it appears. If it seemed that electronic media had introduced a technological rationality and a coolness into human relations, indeed the shadows of the digital re-emerge. At some degree technology expresses its opposite. The internet is the best example: the immaterial technology of the net hides behind its surface a traffic of porn content that is worth half its daily band-width. At the same time Orwellian proliferation of video cameras does not produce a sparkling imagery but violence, blood, sex. We considered technology as a prosthesis of human reason, as a new incarnation of the logos, indeed new media bring also with them the dark side of western world. In the war porn we found such a Siamese body composed by libido and media. Two radical movements that are the same movement: war expresses the repressed libido, media are filled by the libido they alienated. Unconscious can not lie. Imagery reset War is the inability to dream, after depleting all the libidinal energy in a outflow of prosthesis, goods, images. War violence force us back to believe again the images of everyday life, as well as the images of advertising. War is an imagery reset. War bring the attention excitement for advertising to a zero degree, where advertising can start again from. War saves advertising from its final orgasm. War has the "positive" effect to bring us back to a radical thought, to a political responsibility of representation, after the interpretative flights of "weak thought" and postmodernism. In wartime we see images re-emerge with a new autonomous and autopoietic force. There are different kinds of image: war porn images are not representations, they speak directly to the body, they are a cruel, lucid, affirmative force like Artaud's theater. Radical images bring us back the body, radical images are bodies not simulacra. Their effect is first physical then cognitive. Fiction is a branch of neurology (Ballard). War porn liberates western society animal energies as a libidinal bomb. Such energies can starts fascist reactions as well as liberating revolts. Radical images are images still able to be political, in the strong sense of the word. Videopoiesis. The body-image How can we use television in an intelligent way? The first intelligent reaction is to switch it off. Activists collective such as Adbusters.org (Canada) and Esterni.org (Italy) organize every year a TV strike, a day or a week without watching television. Can western society think without television? It can't. Even if we stop watching TV because of a worldwide black-out or a nuclear war, imagery, hopes and fears keep on thinking within a television brainframe. It is not addiction, video is simply our main collective language: once upon a time it was religion, mythology, epic and literature. We can repress the rite but not the myth. We can switch television off, but not imagery. For this reason an autonomous videopoiesis is not a practice about alternative information but about new mythical devices for the collective imagery. Looking for the perfect image, that is the image able to stop the War, subvert the Empire and start the Revolution, the global movement has been dealing with video activism (from Indymedia to street TVs) and mythopoiesis (from Luther Blissett to San Precario), but it never tried to merge those strategies into a videopoiesis able to challenge Bin Laden, Bush, Hollywood and CNN on the mythical level of mediascape: a videopoiesis for new myths, icons, formats, like for instance the video sequences spreading across the net in William Gibson's Patter recognition. Videopoiesis means not a proliferation of cameras in the hands of activists, but a creation of video narrations, a new design of genres and formats rather than an alternative information. The challenge is the body-image. Within the videopoiesis we have to welcome the repressed desires of the global movement, buried under a pseudo-catholic third-world rhetoric. While western imagery has been filling up with the dismembered bodies of heroes, the global movement is still uneasy with its desires. War porn challenges the movement not to equal the horror but to produce images awaking and targeting the body. Television historically had always produced macro-bodies, mythical bodies magnified from media power, cumbersome bodies like gods in ancient times. Television regime makes monsters, hypertrophic bodies such as the image of the President of Unites States, Al-Qaeda brand or movie stars, while the net and personal media try to dismember them and to produce new ones assembling their rests. Videopoiesis is to eliminate unconscious self-censorship that we found also in the most liberal and radical parts of the society. Once such a crypto-religious self-censorship have been eliminated, videopoiesis can begin its cut-up with dismembered bodies. Warpunk. I like to watch! Watching cruel images is healthy. What western world need is gazing at its own shadows. In Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition war news and violence scenes improve adults sexual activity and psychotic kids condition. War lords are occupying collective imagery brute force. Why let them do peacefully? If in the real world we are always victim of the blackmail of non-violence, in the realm of imagery and imagination we can finally feed up our wet dreams. If American imagery is allowing a Nazi drift, justifying any kind of violence, the answer can be but an apology of resistance and action, that is warpunk. Warpunk is not a deviant subculture dealing with weapons as an aesthetical gesture. On the contrary it uses radical images as weapons of legitimate defense. Warpunk uses warporn in a tragic way, overcoming western culture and counter-culture self-censorship. Above all we are afraid of the hubris of American war lords, of the way they face any obstacle trampling written and unwritten rules. How can you stop such a threat opposing a victim imagery, holding up white-painted hands or organising Abu Ghraib-like piles in any demonstration? Victimism is a bad adviser, is the definitive validation of Nazism, is the sheep baa making the wolf more and more indifferent. The global movement is quite a good example of "weak thought" and reactive culture. Perhaps because it has never developed a thought about tragic, a thought about war, violence and death, on the contrary of what war lords and terrorists did. A tragic thought is the gaze able to dance on any image of the abyss. In the I like to watch video by Chris Korda (download available on www.churchofeuthanasia.org) porn scenes of oral sex and masturbation are mixed with football and baseball matches and with well-known NY911 images. The phallic imagery is brought to the climax: the Pentagon is hit by an ejaculation, multiple erections are turned into the NY911 skyline, the Twin Towers themselves become the object of an architectural fellatio. Such a video is the projection of the lowest instincts of the American society, of the common ground that bind spectacle, war, pornography, sport. It's an orgy of images that shows the real western background. Warpunk is a squadron of B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the earth of western world imagery. Matteo Pasquinelli matATrekombinantD0Torg # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]