warpunk-dept. writes:
"Warporn Warpunk!
Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime"
Matteo Pasquinelli
Warpunk is a squadron of B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the heart of the Western imagery.
Grinning Monkeys
How do you think you
can stop war without weapons? The anti-war public opinion that fills squares
worldwide and the cosmetic democracy of International Courts stand powerless in
front of the raging US military. Against the animal instincts of a superpower
reason cannot prevail: a homicidal force can be arrested only by another,
stronger force. Everyday we witness such a Darwinian show: history repeating
itself through a cruel confrontation of forces, whilst what rests is freedom of
speech exercised in drawing-rooms. Pacifists too are accomplices of instinctive
forces, because animal aggressiveness is inside us all. How do we express that
bestiality for which we condemn armies? Underneath the surface of the self-censorship belonging to the
radical left (not only to the conformist majority), it should be admitted
publicly that watching Abu Ghraib pictures of pornographic tortures does not
scandalize us, on the contrary, it rather excites us, in exactly the same way
as the obsessive voyeurism that draws us to videos of 9/11 videos. Through such
images we feel the expression of repressed instincts, the pleasure rising again
after narcotized by consumerism, technologies, goods and images. We show our
teeth as monkeys do, when their aggressive grin looks dreadfully like the human
smile. Contemporary thinkers like Baudrillard and Zizek acknowledge the dark
side inside Western culture. If 9/11 has been a shock for Western
consciousness, Baudrillard puts forward a more shocking thesis: we westerners
were to desire 9/11, as the death drive of a superpower that having reached its
natural limits, knows and desires nothing more than self-destruction and war.
The indignation is hypocrisy; there is always an animal talking behind a video
screen.On the Videowar Battleground
Before pulling the monkey out of the TV set, we have to focus on the battleground on which the
media match is played. The more reality is an augmentation of mass, personal,
and networked devices, the more wars become media wars, even if they take place
in a desert. The First Global War started by live–broadcasting the 9/11 air
disaster and continued with video-guerrilla episodes: everyday from the Iraqi
front we received videos shot by invaders, militiamen, and journalists. Every
action in such a media war is designed beforehand to fit its spectacular
consequences. Terrorists have learnt all the rules of spectacular conflict
while imperial propaganda, much more expert, has no qualms about playing with
fakes and hoaxes (for instance the dossiers on weapons of mass destruction).
Bureaucratic propaganda wars are a thing of the past. New media has generated
guerrilla combat, opening up a molecular front of bottom-up resistance. Video
cameras among civilians, weblogs updated by independent journalists,
smart-phones used by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison: each
represents an uncontrollable variable that can subvert the propaganda
apparatus. Video imagery produced by television is now interlaced with the
anarchic self-organized infrastructure of digital networked media that has
become a formidable means of distribution (evidenced by the capillary diffusion
of the video of the beheading of Nick Berg). Today's propaganda is used to
manage a connective imagery rather than a collective spectacle, and the
intelligence services set up simulacra of the truth based on networking
technologies.
The Videoclash of Civilizations
Alongside the
techno-conflict between horizontal and vertical media, two secular cultures of
image face each other on the international mediascape. The United States
embodies the last stage of videocracy, an oligarchic technocracy based on
hypertrophic advertising and infotainment, and the colonization of the
worldwide imagery through Hollywood and CNN. Nineteenth century ideologies such
as Nazism and Stalinism were intimately linked to the fetishism of the
idea-image (as all of western thought is heir to Platonic idealism). Islamic
culture on the contrary is traditionally iconoclast: it is forbidden to
represent images of God and the Prophet, and usually of any living creature
whatsoever. Only Allah is Al Mussawir, he who gives rise to forms:
imitating his gesture of creation is a sin (even if such a precept never
appears in the Koran). Islam, unlike Christianity, has no sacred iconographic
centre. In mosques the Kiblah 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, and horizontal cult. Indeed, on
Doomsday, painters are meant to suffer more than other sinners. Even if
modernization proceeds through television and cinema (that paradoxically did
not have the same treatment of painting), iconoclastic ground remains active
and breaks out against western symbols, as happened in the case of the World
Trade Centre. To strike at western idolatry, pseudo-Islamic terrorism becomes
videoclasm, preparing attacks designed for live broadcasting and using
satellite channels as a resonant means for its propaganda. Al-Jazeera
broadcasts images of shot-dead Iraqi civilians, whilst western mass media
removes these bodies in favour of the military show. An asymmetrical imagery is
developing between East and West, and it will be followed by an asymmetrical
rage, that will break out with backlashes for generations to come. In such a
clash between videocracy and videoclasm, a third actor, the global movement,
tries to open a breach and develop therein an autonomous videopoiesis. The making of an
alternative imagery is not only based on self-organizing independent media, but
also on winning back the dimension of myth and the body. Videopoiesis should
speak – at the same time – to the belly and to the brain of the monkeys.
Global Video-Brain
Western media and
awareness was woken up by the physical force of live-broadcasted images not by
the news of tortures at the Abu Ghraib prison or of Nick Berg's beheading.
Television is the medium that taught the masses a Pavlovian reaction to images.
It is also the medium that produced the globalisation 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
collective narration. The global video-brain functions through images whereas
our brains think out of images. This is not about crafting a theory, but recognising
the natural extension of our faculties. Electronic and economic developments
move at too high a speed for the collective mind to have time to communicate
and elaborate messages in speech, there is only time for reacting to visual
stimuli. A collective imagery arises 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 the movie industry). In the case of the TV medium such a serial
communication of a million images is much more lethal, because it is
instantaneous. On the other hand, the networked imagery works in an interactive
and non-instantaneous way, this is why we call it connective imagery. Imagery
is a collective serial broadcasting of the same image across different
media. According to Goebbels, it is a lie repeated a million times that becomes
public discourse, part of everyday conversations, and then accepted truth.
Collective imagery is the place where media and desire meet each other, where
the same repeated image modifies millions of bodies simultaneously and
inscribes pleasure, hope and fear. Communication and desire, mediasphere and
psychosphere, are the two axis that describe the war to the global mass, the
way in which the war reaches our bodies far from the real conflict and the way
image inscribes itself into the flesh.
Animal Narrations
Why does reality exist
only when framed by a powerful TV network? Why is the course of events affected
by the evening news? Collective imagery is not affected by the video evolution
of mass technologies only, but also by the natural instincts of human kind. As
a political animal (Aristotle), the human being is inclined to set up
collective narratives, that represent the belonging instinct to its own kind.
Let's call them animal narratives. For this reason television is a
"natural" medium, because it responds to the need of creating one
narrative for millions of people, a single animal narrative for entire nations,
similarly to what other narrative genres, like the epic, the myth, the Bible
and the Koran, did and still do. Television represents, above all else, 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, etc.),
which the rest of the media relate to. Beside the macro-attractors, 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: the
list could continue and end with blogs, which we can define as group
micro-attractors, the smallest in scale, but suffice it to say here that the
audience and power of the main attractor are ensured by the natural animal
instinct. This definition of mass media might seem strange, because they are no
longer push media that communicate in unidirectional ways (one-to-many),
but pull media that attract and group together, media in which we invest
our desires (many-to-one). Paraphrasing Reich's remark on fascism, we can say
that rather than the masses being brainwashed by the media establishment, the
latter is sustained and desired by the perversion of the desire to belong.
Digital Anarchy: A Videophone vs. Empire
Traditional media
war incorporates the internet and the networked imagery (with television, internet,
mobile phones and digital cameras) turns into a battle ground: personal
media such as digital cameras bring the cruelty of war directly into the living room,
for the first time in history at the speed of an internet download and out of
any governmental control. This networked imagery cannot be stopped, and neither
can technological evolution. Absolute transparency is an inevitable fate for
all of us. The video phone era seriously undermines privacy, as well as any
kind of secrecy, state secrecy included. Rumsfeld's vented outrage in front of US
Senate Committee on Armed Services about the scandal at Abu Ghraib is extremely
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". A few days later
Rumsfeld prohibited the use of any kind of camera or videophone to the American
soldiers in Iraq. Rumsfeld himself was the 'victim' of the internet
broadcasting of a famous video that shows him politely shacking hands with
Saddam Hussein in 1983. New digital media seem to have created an
unpredictable digital anarchy, where a video phone can fight against Empire. The
images of torture at Abu Ghraib are the internal nemesis of a civilization of
machines that is running out of control of its creators and demiurges. There is
a machine nemesis but also an image nemesis: as Baudrillard notes, the Empire
of the Spectacle is now submitted to the hypertrophy of the Spectacle itself,
to its own greed for images, to an auto-erotic pornography. The infinitely
repeatable character of digital technology allowed for the demise of the
copyright culture through P2P networks, but also for the proliferation of
digital spam and the white noise of contents on the web. Video phones have
created a networked mega-camera, a super-light panopticon, a horizontal Big
Brother. The White House was trapped in this web. Digital repetition no longer
delivers us to the game of mirrors of Postmodern weak thought — to the image as
self-referential simulacrum — but rather to an interlinked universe where
videopoiesis can connect the farthest points and cause fatal short circuits.
War Porn
Indeed, what came to light with the Abu Ghraib media scandal was not a casual short-circuit, but the
implosion into a deadly vortex of war, media, technology, body, desire.
Philosophers, journalists and commentators from all sides rushed to deliver
different perspectives for a new framework of analysis. The novelty of the
images of Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg (whether fictional or not is not the point)
consists in the fact that they forged a new narrative genre of collective imagery.
For the first time, a snuff movie was projected onto the screen of global
imagery and internet subcultures, used to such images, suddenly came out of the
closet: rotten.com finally reached the masses. Rather than making sense of a
traumatic experience, newspapers and weblogs worldwide are engaged in drawing
out the political, cultural, social and aesthetic repercussions of a new genre
of image that forces us to upgrade our immunity system and communicative
strategies. As Seymour Hersh noted, Rumsfeld provided the world with an good
excuse to ignore the Geneva Convention from now on. But he lowered the level of
tolerance of the visible as well, forcing us to accept cohabitation with the
Horror. English-speaking journalism defines as war porn the popular tabloids
and government talk-shows fascination with super-sized weapons and
well-polished uniforms, hi-tech tanks and infrared-guided bombs, a panoplia of
images that some define as the aseptic substitute of pornography proper. Ridley
Scott's Black Hawk Down is war hardcore, to name one. The cover of Time, where
the American soldier was chosen as Person of the Year, was defined pure war
porn by Adbusters: "Three American Soldiers standing proudly, half-smiles playing
on their faces, rifles cradled in their arms". War porn is also a
sub-genre of trash porn — still relatively unknown, coming from the dark side of
the net. It simulates violent sex scenes between soldiers or the rape of civilians
(pseudo-amateur movies usually shot in Eastern Europe and often passed as
real). War porn is freed from its status of net subculture: its morbid
interest and fetish for war imagery become political weapons, voyeurism and the
nightmares of the masses. Is it a coincidence that war porn emerges from the
Iraqi marshes right at this time?
Digital-Body Rejection
The metaphorical
association of war with sex that underpins much Anglo-American journalism
points to something deeper that was never before made so explicit: a libido
that, alienated by wealth, awaits war to give free reign to its ancestral
instincts. War is as old as the human species: natural aggressiveness is
historically embodied in collective and institutional forms, but several layers
of technology have separated today's war from its animal substratum. We needed
Abu Ghraib pictures to bring to the surface the obscene background of animal
energy that lied underneath a democratic make-up. Did this historic resurfacing
of the repressed occur today simply because of the mass spreading of digital
cameras and video phones? Or is there a deeper connection between the body and
technology bound to prove to be deadly sooner or later? As the mass media are
filled with tragic and morbid news, the framing of digital media seems to be
missing something from its inception. This could be that passion of the real (Alain Badiou) which,
exiled onto the screen, explodes out of control. New personal media are directly connected
to the psychopathology of everyday living, we might say that they create a new format for it and a new genre
of communication, but above all, they establish a relation with the body that
television never had. War porn seems to signal the rejection of technology by
subconscious forces that express themselves through the same medium that
represses them: this rejection might point to the ongoing adaptation of the body
to the digital. Proliferation of digital prosthesis is not as rational, aseptic
and immaterial as it seems. Electronic media seemed to have introduced
technological rationality and coolness into human relations, yet the shadows
of the digital increasingly re-surface. There comes a point when technology
physically unbridles its opposite. The internet is the best example: behind the
surface of the immaterial and disembodied technology lies a traffic of porn
content that takes up half of its daily band-width. At the same time, the
Orwellian proliferation of video cameras, far from producing and Apollonian
world of transparency, is ridden with violence, blood and sex. The next
Endenmol Big Brother will resemble the movie Battle Royal, where Takeshi Kitano
forces a class of students on an island and into a game of death where the
winner is the last survivor. We have always considered the media as a
prosthesis of human rationality, and technology as the new embodiment of the logos.
But
new media also embody the dark side of the Western world. In war porn we found this Siamese
body made up of libido and media, desire and image. Two radical movements that
are the same movement: war reinvests the alienated libido, personal media are filled by the
desperate libido they alienated. The subconscious can not lie, the skeletons
sooner or later start knocking on the closets door.
Imagery Reset
War results from the
inability to dream, after depleting all libidinal energy in an outflow of
prosthesis, commodities, images. War violence forces us to believe again in
images of everyday life, images of the body as well as images of advertising.
War is an imagery reset. War brings the attention and excitement for advertising
back to a zero degree, where advertising can start afresh. War saves
advertising from the final annihilation of the orgasm, from the nirvana of
consumption, the inflation and indifference of values. War brings the new
economy back
to the old economy, to traditional and consolidated commodities, it gets rid
of immaterial commodities that risk dissolving the economy into a big potlatch
and
into the anti-economy of the gift that the internet represents. War has the
"positive" effect of redelivering us to 'radical' thought, to the
political responsibility of representation, against the interpretative flights
of "weak thought", of semiotics and postmodernism (where
postmodernism is the western image looking for an alibi to its own impotence).
The pornographic images of war, as we said, are the reflux of the animal
instinct that our economic and social structure has repressed. But rather than
a psychoanalysis that reactively justifies new customs and fashions, we seek to
carry out a 'physical' analysis of libidinal energy. 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 and affirmative force, like Artaud's theatre,
they are re-magnetised images that do not provoke incredulity, they are neural
icons running on the spinal motorways, as Ballard would put it. Radical images redeliver the body to us, radical
images are bodies, not simulacra. Their effect is first physical then
cognitive. The movement-image and the flux-matter are rigorously one and the
same thing (Deleuze). The damned tradition of the image is back, with the psychic
and contagious power of Artaud's theatre, a machinic image that joins together
the material and the immaterial, body and dream. Fiction is a branch of
neurology (Ballard).
In a libidinal explosion, war porn liberates the animal energies of Western
society like a bomb. Such energies can be expressed through fascist reactions
as well as liberating revolts. Radical images are images that are still capable
of being political, in the strong sense of the word, and they can have an
impact on the masses that is simultaneously political, aesthetic and carnal.
Videopoiesis: The Body-Image
How can we make an
intelligent use of television? The first intelligent reaction is to switch it
off. Activists collective such as Adbusters.org (Canada) and Esterni.org
(Italy) organize yearly TV strikes, promoting a day or a week's abstinence from
television. Can Western society think without television? It cannot. Even if we
were to stop watching TV because of a worldwide black-out or a nuclear war, our
imagery, hopes and fears would carry on thinking within a televised brainframe.
This is not about addiction, the video is simply our primary collective
language: once upon a time there were religion, mythology, epic and literature.
We can repress the ritual (watching TV) but we cannot repress the myth. We can
switch television off, but not our imagery. For this reason the idea of an
autonomous videopoiesis is not about practicing of alternative information but
about new mythical devices for the collective imagery. In its search for the
Perfect Image — that is the image that is capable of stopping the War,
subverting Empire and starting the Revolution — the global movement has
theorised and practiced video activism (from Indymedia to street TVs)
and mythopoiesis (from Luther Blissett to San Precario). However, it never
tried to merge those strategies into a videopoiesis capable of challenging
Bin Laden, Bush, Hollywood and the CNN at the level of myth, a videopoiesis for
new icons and formats, like for instance the video sequences of William
Gibson's Patter recognition distributed on the net. Videopoiesis does not mean
the proliferation of cameras in the hands of activists, but the creation of
video narratives, a new design of genres and formats rather than alternative
information. The challenge lies in the body-image. Through videopoiesis
we have to welcome the repressed desires of the global movement and open the
question of the body, buried under a para-catholic and third-worldist rhetoric.
While Western imagery is being filled with the dismembered bodies of heroes,
the global movement is still uneasy about its desires. War porn is a challenge
for the movement not to equal the horror but to produce images that awaken and
target the sleepy body. Throughout its history, television has always produced
macro-bodies, mythical giant bodies magnified by media power, bodies as cumbersome
as Ancient Gods. The television regime creates monsters, hypertrophic bodies
such as the image of the President of Unites States, the Al-Qaeda brand and
movie stars, while the net and personal media try to dismember them and produce
new bodies out of their carcasses. Videopoiesis must eliminate the unconscious self-censorship that we find in the
most liberal and radical sections of society, the self-censorship that, behind
a crypto-catholic imagery, hides the grin of the monkey. Once crypto-religious self-censorship
is eliminated, videopoiesis can begin its creative reassembly of dismembered
bodies.
Warpunk: I Like to Watch!
Watching cruel images
is good for you. What the Western world needs is to stare at its own shadows.
In Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition war news and violent scenes
improve adults' sexual activity and the condition of psychotic children. War
lords are filling the collective imagery with brute force. Why leave them to do
it in peace? If in the real world we are always victims of the blackmail of
non-violence, in the realm of imagery and imagination we can feed our wet
dreams at last. If American imagery is allowing a drift towards Nazism and is
offering an apology and justification for any kind of violence, our response
can only be an apology of resistance and action, that is warpunk. Warpunk is not a delirious
subculture that embraces weapons in an aesthetic gesture. On the contrary it
uses radical images as weapons of legitimate defense. To paraphrase a Japanese
saying, warpunk steals from war and empire the art of embellishing death.
Warpunk uses warporn in a tragic way, to overcome Western culture and the
self-censorship of its counter-culture. Above all we are afraid of the hubris
of the
American war lords, of the way they face any obstacle stepping over all written
and unwritten rules. What is the point of confronting this threat with the
imagery of the victim, that holds up to the sky hands painted in white?
Victimhood is a bad adviser: it is the definitive validation of Nazism, the
sheep's baa that makes the wolf even more indifferent. The global movement is
quite a good example of "weak thought" and reactive culture. Perhaps
this is because, unlike war lords and terrorists, it never developed a way of
thinking about the tragic, war, violence and death. A tragic thought is the
gaze that can dance on any image of the abyss. In Chris Korda's I like to
watch video (download available on www.churchofeuthanasia.org) porn scenes of oral
sex and masturbation are mixed with those of football and baseball matches and
with well-known NY911 images. The phallic imagery reaches 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. This video is the projection of the lowest instincts of American
society, of the common ground that bind spectacle, war, pornography and sport.
It is an orgy of images that shows to the West its real background. Warpunk is
a squadron of B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the heart
of the Western imagery.
Matteo Pasquinelli
Bologna, May 2004
Web + PDF file: www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2386
Edited by Arianna Bove and Erik Empson
