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The Human and his Spectacular Autumn, or, Informatics after
Philosophy
Anustup Basu
University of Pittsburgh
anbst42@pitt.edu
(c) 2004 Anustup Basu.
All rights reserved.
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1. Toward the beginning of Gabriel García Márquez's novel El Otono
del Patriarca, the protagonist, who is the dictator of an
imaginary Latin American republic, is seen to witness his own
funeral. That is, he sees himself being buried /de facto/, in
terms of an ordering of words ("the king is dead") and
visibilities (the public rituals of the royal funeral) that
creates sovereign publicity and power. However, by a profound
trick of fate, it so happens that the physical body of the king
that graces this occasion does not belong to the protagonist
himself--it is of his double Patricio Aragonés, who has recently
been killed by a poisoned dart. The corpse of the official
imposter is interred with full state honors. When the dictator
peeks out of his half-ajar bedroom door to watch the ceremony
taking place in the audience hall of the presidential palace, he
is offered a glimpse of what may be called the televisual in its
most sublime form. By virtue of this unusual situation, he
temporarily assumes a godly, panoptic perspective that he will
never achieve again in his career.
2. I am using the concept of the televisual in its basic sense, that
of projection and reception of visibilities across distances--in
other words, as a primary cognitive task of the human who wants to
read the world. But we face a profound question in trying to see
matters from the dictator's "televisual" point of view: what
exactly must be the nature of "distance" in this case, when the
"self" is paradoxically made to see the "self" being buried afar?
It is the mysterious and extraordinary body of the sovereign
himself that needs to be unraveled before one can even begin
entering that ontological conundrum. We can say that "distance"
here is manifested first of all by a death-induced split between
the phenomenal and the epistemo-constitutive poles of the king's
body; the mortal carcass of the sovereign is thereby detached from
the abstract stately form endowed with the iron deathmask of
power. The patriarch (we will call him by this name to distinguish
him as the not-named son of Bendición Alvarado who was, till now,
holding the post of the dictator) feels alarmed and powerless
because he, for the time being, is the bearer of none of the
aforementioned bodies. Patricio Aragonés hijacks the first of the
two to be buried with him, while the mask and the regalia, which
ensure that the king lives long after the king is dead, are left
intact but vacant. The patriarch realizes--even as contending
forces belonging to the church, the cabinet, and the military get
ready to compete for the throne--that the paraphernalia of power
make an inhuman terminal that is presently empty, but always with
a life of its own. This distinction between the two bodies of the
sovereign is a fundamental one that Marx makes between the
"mediocre and grotesque" protagonist and the hero's part he
assumes in the farce in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(144). In our present case, Patricio Aragonés the double, by dying
and being buried spectacularly, has, for all practical purposes,
pushed the "real person" out of his earthly mantle. This is
established in the "audience room" as an event in the public
domain of knowledge through a ceremonial bringing together of
signs, affects, and things: there is the royal corpse with its
"chest armored with military decorations, the showy dress uniform
with the ten pips of general of the universe, [...] the
king-of-spades saber he never used, the patent leather boots with
two gold spurs" (García Márquez 28), as well as the people brought
to bear witness--the old man who gives the Masonic salute, the one
who kisses the ring, the schoolgirl who lays a flower on him, or
the fishwife who embraces his body and sobs. And then there are
the sounds--the sudden cannon shots from the fortress on the
harbor and the rolling of the cathedral bells.
3. The production of the corpse as spectacle in "direct telecast"
causes much consternation in the mind of the patriarch. After all,
the vast paraphernalia of power and the lugubrious martial
glories reduced to his human size of a fagot lying in state,
God damn it, that can't be me, he said to himself in a fury
it's not right, God damn it, he said to himself, contemplating
the procession that was parading around his corpse, and for an
instant he forgot the murky reasons for the farce and felt
raped and diminished by the inclemency of death toward the
majesty of power [...]. (García Márquez 28)
The moment of panic is hence that in which the patriarch realizes
that he is not the powerful author of the scene being realized
below with the dictator at the center. He discovers that he is not
controlling the perceptual universe around him; it is rather
because of the very facticity of his "death" that he is able
momentarily to occupy the omniscient, inhuman point of view that
is at the heart of the visual architecture of power itself. It is
clearly a publicity stunt gotten out of "hand," a situation in
which the image no longer /represents/ an essence of the self, but
has become a perverse automaton. From the point of view of the
patriarch, the non-temporality of such a perception is out of
joint with history /as/ autobiography, simply because it cannot
fall within the order of living consciousness and the finite
human's being in the world. Only when the patriarch becomes a
ghost and transcends the eschatological limitations of the human
is the theatre of the rotten state--with its body of secrets,
constellation of forces, subjects, interests, conflicts, and
corrosive intrigues--revealed to him. This is thus a magical truth
that is produced, an otherworldly knowledge that only Hamlet's
father and those he haunts can possess--a "total" and inhuman
picture of the world fomented by the spirit.
4. Hence, what seems "unreal" is only so from the vantage point of
the individual reduced to his own ghost. It becomes clear that the
erstwhile dictator can subsequently "come back" from the dead not
by reentering the stage as the "real" persona and thereby proving
the previous spectacle to be a false one, but by casting himself
as "double of the double," the next one in a long line of
imposters--indeed, by way of an all new /coup d'état/ that inserts
his face into the mask left behind by Patricio Aragonés. The
return is possible not by disrupting the "direct telecast" and
revealing it to be illusory, but by violently reinstating its
realness in letting oneself be claimed by it completely. Hence,
from the phenomenological point of view of the average spectator
and as per the uninterrupted flow of the direct telecast, it would
be such that it is never Patricio Aragonés who is assassinated,
but the patriarch himself who goes into and returns from the dead.
And that is exactly how it happens subsequently: it is the
"unburied" president who comes back triumphantly, chasing away the
bishop primate, Ambassador Schontner, and other conspirators who
have been exposed by a televisuality that only a ghost or a god
could have witnessed. If the mask of the "dictator" (as opposed to
the faces of the patriarch or Aragonés) is a special instance of
the televisual, it is because it preserves an inorganic continuity
for itself, independent of all those incessant ebbs and flows of
doublings. It is assumed by individuals who slide into it or slip
out of it without being able to make it into an expressive tool to
be used solely for their personal ends. The mask as televisual
therefore becomes an aspect of power itself, rather than a
reflection, image, or possession of powerful men who may be
mediocre or grotesque, or patriarchs with herniated testicles
underneath their uniforms. But then, the question becomes, what
can be the nature of such a mask? In what sense is it always
already televisual, with or without the presence of television as
a technological reality? What we will be trying to examine by
starting from the premise of the televisual mask is a modality of
power that organizes distances, bodies, movements, statements, and
visibilities in a certain manner. In modern telematic societies,
this process of publicity becomes far more complex.
Fascism and the Dictatorship of the "Other"
5. We need to pause for a minute to dwell on the existential
predicament of the patriarch and to "world" it comically, even
philosophically, in the light of our occasion. It would be
pertinent to recall Heidegger's concern with the lure of modern
technology that causes /Dasein/ to lose itself through a massified
familiarity with the world. Mass technology in that sense, becomes a
Being-with-one-another [that] dissolves one's own Dasein
completely into the kind of Being of "the Others," in such a
way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit,
vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and
unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the "they" is
unfolded. (164)
As a freakish and exceptional case, the status of a
"super-spectator" can be ascribed to the patriarch since for him
the extinguishing of the self and the revelation of the being of
dictator as being of "others" is staged /figurally/ in front of
him. He is thus able to descend from the skies and locate the dead
"self" as a "human size of a fagot" in the landscape of the other.
A more illustrative example, one that involves "real" televisual
technology rather than the metaphysical situation we have been
discussing so far, comes later in the novel. The old, weak, and
dying patriarch once again witnesses the dictator as the
televisual other. This time, as his body grows more and more
decrepit, his wits dull, and his memories fade, the image on the
screen grows younger:
He recognized his own amplified voice in the quarters of the
presidential guard and he looked in through the half-open
window and saw a group of officers dozing in the smoke-filled
room opposite the sad glow of the television screen and there
he was on the screen thinner and trimmer, [...] sitting in the
office where he was to die with the coat of arms of the nation
behind him and three pairs of gold eyeglasses on the desk, and
he was reciting from memory an analysis of the nation's
finances with the words of a sage that he never would have
dared repeat, damn it, it was a more upsetting sight than that
of his dead body among the flowers because now he was seeing
himself alive and listening to himself speak with his own
voice, [...] I who had never had been able to bear the
embarrassment of appearing on a balcony and had never overcome
the shyness about speaking in public [...]. (233)
Many more years later, after ruling the land for over a hundred
years, when the patriarch dies inside the palace, people watching
from a forbidding distance come to know of the passing away only
when the regime that endows signs with meaning and valence--the
architectural compact of words and things in a given situation of
power--throws up a wondrous spectacle, one which crosses the
thresholds of human presence, agency, and judgment, and passes
onto a realm of the absurd only an animal can dare enter: a
wandering cow appears on the balcony of the presidential palace.
6. We are, in a general way, already talking about fascism and the
strange existential predicament of the individual grappling with
it. This, despite the fact that the individual in this case may
either be the Fuhrer himself, or the enlightened philosopher
trying to understand this modality of power through a meaningful
reading of the world. Both García Márquez's patriarch, who thinks
he "holds" power and the primordial Heideggerian thinker--whose
inventory of tasks include avoiding this or that ensnarement of
being as subject, staying away from the herd, and thinking about
Being--are seen to be already inducted into an overall
mass-technological production of "they-selves." In bringing these
two figures together in a constellation of thought, we are trying
to understand a historical turn in Western industrial societies
when the autumn of the patriarch (who may or may not have an
enlightened head on his shoulders, but who always "holds" the
scepter of power with a despotic sway) also proves to be the
twilight of the disinterested philosopher. These figures
"represent" two important aspects of the historical agency of the
Western subject of enlightenment. As we know, Kantian modernity
was founded on these two agents and their respective
executive-juridical and moral-legislative authorities as
caretakers of the political state and the ethical one.[1]
It was this secular compact between power and knowledge in the
body politic that created the epistemological figure of the
European human who presumed to make history exactly the way he
liked it. While the Heideggerian project was to announce the end
of that philosophy of progress and deconstruct the transcendental
subject that it proposed as the free-willed agent of history, it
also entailed an atavistic and agrarian denial of industrial
modernity.[2]
7. I want to draw out several points here. The first concerns the
relation between distance and power. The patriarch realizes that
the mask of power is not an aspect naturalized to him, by the dint
of his own activity. The televisual visage of the dictator--which
is made omnipotent through the technological erasure of
distance--is that which powerfully animates his human face, and
not the other way round. In "dying" and acquiring the panoptic
vision, what the patriarch sees is much more than various subjects
breaking their conspiracies of silence and registering support for
or antagonism against him. Over and above that, he is disturbed in
hearing that great monologue of a language instrumentalized by the
state--power speaking to itself, as Heidegger puts it--that
reduces his faggot self, friends, and foes, to a vast herd of
"they selves." The "Master" of the land understands that even he,
once pressed into the production of information values in terms of
the televisual, is not free from what Walter Benjamin called the
"growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing
formation of masses" ("Work of Art" 234). The patriarch is
therefore alienated from the dictator as televised icon only by a
lesser degree than the pauper, in terms of a graduated and
differential hierarchy of distance and accessibility.
8. When we transpose the problem from the landscape of "primitive
accumulation" in Garcia Márquez's novel to modern metropolitan
societies, the situation becomes more dense and intricate in its
alignment of forces. If modern technology is that which massifies
and disempowers the human subject who had formerly killed god and
taken his place, it is equally important to understand that this
fateful loss of agency shared by the patriarch and the beggar
alike can be defined only in terms of formalistic positionalities
of power, as in a chess game, unless it is related to production
and the laboring process. It would be a mistake to account for
lines of force, energies, visibilities, words, and things that
constitute flexible and dynamic diagrams of power purely in terms
of the self-conscious human and his conspiratorial or benevolent
intentionalities. But the point is also to understand that such
diagrams certainly have something to do with bodies of "interest,"
congealment of some desires and foreclosure of others, density and
regularity of some ideology statements and rarefactions of others,
and uneven circuits of social rewards that gather and group humans
together in the registers of class, caste, race, religion, gender,
or nation. Also, thinking the televisual in terms of such complex
forms of metropolitan power has to involve pondering over
technologies of the social that de-essentialize classic self-other
categories, making them into flexible and mobile Benettonesque
visages that can transform peoples into multiculturalist
populations, and ways of life into marketable lifestyles.[3]
I am speaking, for instance, of that form of
televisuality that can generate the most celebratory image of
"in-corporation" in the racial history of the United States, one
that can spectacularly compound the figure of the prince with that
of the pauper--in the form of William Jefferson Clinton as the
first American "black president."
9. Secondly, I would like to relate the Heideggerian anxiety about an
increasing erosion of distance between the earth and the sky not
to the obsolescence of being in the world, but to a question that
seems to have resonated in various conceptual forms in the works
of a long line of Western thinkers, from Antonio Gramsci to Gilles
Deleuze: how was it possible that modern technologies of
mechanical reproduction and electrification of public
communication should produce European fascism as one of its first,
grotesque world historical spectacles? The paradox, as it is
expressed in Benjamin's "Work of Art," can be outlined as follows:
from the perspective of the enlightenment humanist one could say
that mechanized mass culture in the twentieth century was supposed
to "de-auratize" the work of art and make it more democratically
available; but what Benjamin notices in his time is a disturbing
incursion of aesthetics into politics, rather than the
politicization of art that could have been possible. This, for
him, constitutes a "violation" of the technologies of mass
culture, by which the "Fuhrer cult" produces its ritual values of
aesthecizing war and destruction (234-35). Benjamin formulates the
problem as belonging to a society not yet "mature" enough to
"incorporate technology as its /organ/" (235, emphasis added).
10. Thirdly, I would note here that the problem extends to the act of
communication itself as conceptualized in hallowed liberal
democratic categories; that is, in terms of he who speaks and he
who listens, various social, moral, and juridical contracts, and
consequent rights, freedoms, and the choices that are said to
facilitate rational exchanges and consensus. During the publicity
drive toward building up domestic and international support for
the 2003 war on Iraq, no functionary of the United States
government (except U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney) actually made
a public statement directly suggesting that Saddam Hussain had an
active part to play in the devastation of 11 September 2001.
Nevertheless, it was subsequently noted in the opinion polls that
an alarming number of American people believed that the Iraqi
despot was involved in the conspiracy and its execution. Hence the
two propositions--Saddam the evil one, and 9/11, the horrible
crime--seem to be associated in a demographic intelligence without
having any narrative obligation to each other; that is, without
being part of the same "story." The outcome, it would seem, was
achieved by a mathematical chain of chance, by which two disparate
postulates, in being publicized with adequate proximity,
frequency, and density, gravitate toward each other in an inhuman
plane of massified thought. They, in other words, are bits and
bytes of newspeak which come to share what I will call an
"informatic" affinity with each other, without being organically
enjoined by /constitutive/ knowledge.
11.
The formation of the latter entity is of course something we are
prone to consider a primary task of the philosophical human
subject, who is also the modern citizen with rights and
responsibilities. Attaining knowledge by reading the world is how
we are supposed to /self-consciously/ exercise reason, form views,
and partake in an enlightened project of democratic consensus and
legislation. Hence, insofar as these pious protocols of liberal
politics are concerned, the presence of this mass prejudice[4]
poses some disconcerting questions: How does one account
for the fact that what is, at face value, the most sophisticated
technological assemblage for worldly communication and
dissemination of "truth," should sublimate what, in Kantian terms,
must be called an unscientific /belief/ or dogma? To be mediatized
literally means to lose one's sovereign rights. Hence, what
happens to the idea of government by the people and for the people
if the "false" is produced as a third relation which is not the
/synthetic/ union of two ideas in the conscious mind of the
citizen or in the general intellect of the organic community, but
is a statistical coming together of variables? How is the cynical
intelligence of power that calls this sublimation into being to be
configured and what consequences does it have for human politics?
Lastly, this manufacture of the false as "informatic" perception
requires /money/, in order not only to bring the variables Saddam
Hussain and 9/11 into a state of associative frequency, but also
to minimize and regulate the appearance of other variables from
appearing in the scenario. For instance, in this case, to reduce,
for the time being, the frequency of the proper name Osama. Hence,
the obvious question--what is the role of money in a purportedly
postmodern, increasingly technologized sphere of communicative
action? What does one do when Hitler's lie proliferates without
Hitler the liar? In a way, this anxious query seems to yet again
resonate the old Pascalian question posed at the very gestative
period of a godless modern world: how does one protect the
interests of abstract justice from being /outfunded/ and dominated
by real, material interests of power in the world?
Hitler as Information
12. The title of this subsection is clearly paradoxical. We need to
create a clearing in our inherited discursive domains in order to
broach this figure of thought in a satisfactory manner. Let us
briefly return to the concept metaphor of organicity that Benjamin
invokes in his diagnosis of a technologization of mass society in
his times.[5] The statement comes under considerable
duress and loses its positivistic, idealistic charge if it is
located in the overall context of Benjamin's oeuvre. The
historical landscape of politics, aesthetics, and culture Benjamin
draws up in his major works--pertaining to Baudelaire's Paris, the
German /trauerspiel/, the works of Kafka and Brecht, or a possible
philosophy of history--is indeed one of ruins. It is not spirited
by an otherworldly and inevitable Hegelian impulse of progress--as
an ongoing chronicle of /constitution/ already foretold. Society
in that sense is not a vegetative mass that builds itself
relentlessly by /subsuming/ the fall of heroes and other
tragedies; it is perpetually giving rise to and destroying
institutions that are at once pillars of civilization and of
barbarity. The social as such is always fraught with anarchic
fragmentations, discontinuities, and with the event as unforeseen
catastrophe. There is indeed an inhuman aspect about the very
process of /figuration/ in Benjamin's thinking--in the helpless
movement of the angel of history blind to the future and caught in
tempestuous circumstances, in the welter of shock and distraction
(rather than contemplative stances of the human) of moving traffic
in Paris and of the moving image, or in the past that
indeterminately /strives/ to turn toward a rising sun in the
historical sky like a flower induced by a secret heliotropism.
These concept metaphors of /supra-normalcy/, machinism, mysticism,
and a magical naturalism that abound in Benjamin's work, are
features that can be located in a general temper of disenchantment
in Western thought between the great wars--one that pertained to a
rigorous questioning, after Husserl, of a unified phenomenology of
the subject, of closed scientifico-propositional systems of logic,
and of a Hegelian positivistic philosophy of historical progress.
Benjamin's work, in that sense, can be placed alongside Marcuse's
return to Nietzsche and Freud, or Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis
of the culture industry and the instrumentalization of reason. The
logic of this grouping lies in proposing not a common
methodological home for these thinkers, but a common historical
understanding: namely, that fascisms in the world, more than ever,
render philosophy absolutely homeless and in dire poverty. The
greatness of these thinkers lay in the fact that in their
examination of mediatization and reification, degradation of
aesthetic and intellectual culture, and a corrosive Weberian
rationalization of society into bureaucracies and markets, they
chose to be in a perpetual state of critical exile, without
seeking assuring, administered shelters of the subject, unity, and
law.
13. Gilles Deleuze has rearticulated Benjamin's argument about the
work of art and technologies of mass reproduction by transposing
it from its organicist parabasis into a subhuman, machinic, and
molecular-pragmatic one. In invoking Deleuze in conjunction with
Benjamin, I am not trying to harness them, with their obvious
methodological differences, into a synthetic metacommentary.[6]
Neither is my objective that of proposing a dynastic
continuity that could eclectically house them in a peaceful
philosophical tradition of the West. Indeed, there can be no
bridge of "truth" between them. The purpose on the other hand, is
perhaps to do violence to pieties of propositional logic and bring
the two discourses together in a constellation, or a catachrestic
assemblage. In other words, to read them historically as powerful
theoretical fictions that disrupt habits of the commonsensical--as
instances of thinking which are, at once, political and taking
place in a moment of danger. Such a critical but disjunctive
bringing together of Benjamin and Deleuze would recognize and take
into consideration the shifting epistemic configurations of
knowledge and power in the world, locating the former in a
scenario where the great edifices of Newtonian geometry, the moral
subject of Kant and Hegel, and the Darwinian positivisms of the
previous two centuries are in a state of ruinous dispersal, while
placing the latter in a universe of Heisenbergian uncertainties.
14. According to Deleuze, the discourses of fascism, as the dominant
myth of our time, establish themselves by an imperial-linguistic
takeover of a whole socius of expressive potentialities. The
latter, for him, constitutes an immanent field of particle signs,
of matters, perceptions, and memories that become attributes of
consciousness models (like in the phenomenology of the subject)
and deictic enunciations (like that of the Nazi mythology) only on
a secondary level. In other words, the relationship between a
diffuse semiotics and a molar semiology is always one where the
latter is a part of the former, and not the other way round (for
instance, it is not an essential, organic act of national
narration that imperially and /categorically/ imparts meaning to
all signs). The relationship between the two is always that of
either catastrophic balance or antagonistic movement. That is not
to say that we have languages without language systems, but that
language systems exist only in relation to the expressive
nonlinguistic materials that they continually transform.[7]
What is also important here is that eruptive
singularities and anarchy of signs and expressions always harbor
potentials to transvaluate and alter normalizing enunciations of
the subject or grand metanarratives of history. Without sharing
Deleuze's occasional impulses toward a transcendental empiricism
or an acosmic vitalism, one can find in him a consistent effort
toward thinking the battleground of language in terms of
perpetually altering disjunctive assemblages, rather than in those
of synthetic, organicist propositions pertaining to culture,
nation, or narration. The "maturity" of society, as per a
Deleuzian critique, can be understood to be a perpetually dangling
holy carrot of Western-style modernity that promises a moment of
synthetic arrival--an ideal state of perpetual peace when the
organs of culture are no longer abused, but incorporated into the
being and destiny of the national, or even the world spirit as a
whole.
15. According to liberal historicist imaginations that take social
maturity all too seriously, the basic fault of the Nazi party
would simply lie in the fact that it proposed an "inauthentic"
founding myth of the state, in the form of the psychobiography of
the white Aryan male. The root of the error thus was only in the
content, in Adolf's perversion and lies, and not in the
/technological/ form of the proposition or its social relations of
production. The money-technology assemblage of propaganda, as
such, is therefore taken to be value-neutral--it is only the
voluntarism of the human that decides its deployment between truth
and falsehood, between good and evil. It is the same historicism
that proposes that the present global dominance of neo-liberalism
has at last created the post-historical moment of a finally
naturalized episteme and a union devoutly desired between the
earth and the sky.[8] It is, in other words, a
historicism that announces its own dazzling and spectacular death,
and in the process tries to foreclose historical thinking /in
toto./ As a result, unlike the inauthentic rampage of the Nazi
pretender's war machine, the founding violence of a neo-liberal,
transnational sovereignty in the world, from Rwanda, to the Middle
East, to the Phillipines, is seen by such an ideology to have a
totalizing legitimacy drawn from the jealous and vituperative
religiosity of a Market Being. It is in the auspices of such a
naturalized episteme, when state language becomes global to a
degree unprecedented in history, that the category "information"
assumes a special "postmodern" status, in contrast to traditional
and modern ways of reading the world through revelation, grace,
discovery, or knowledge.
16. Deleuze on the other hand leads us toward a machinic understanding
of fascism, rather than one that diagnoses the body politic in
terms of sickness and health. In such a conception, Adolf does not
feature as the madman who abuses technology, but is himself a
grotesque, spectacular production of technologism itself. As we
were saying, there are different forms of life and expressive
energies in any situation of the historical which are capable of
generating multiple instances of thought, imaginative actions,
creative impulses and wills to art. Fascism destroys such
pre-signifying and prelinguistic energies of the world,
extinguishes pluralities, and replaces them with a monologue of
power that saturates space with, and only with, the immanent will
of the dictator. This is the moment in which the language system
sponsored by the sovereign is at its most violent; it seeks to
efface historical memory by denying its constitutive or
legislative relation with non-linguistic energies of life and the
socius; it casts itself and its monologous doctrines as absolute
and natural. For Deleuze, this is a psychomechanical /production/
of social reality, more than an organicity of community torn
asunder by human alienation and the incursion of reactionary
ideologies, false consciousnesses, and agents. Not that the latter
do not exist, or are unimportant components in this world picture,
but that this technology of power cannot be seen simply as a
value-free arrangement of tools misused by evil ones. The figure
of the dictator is therefore not that of the aberrant individual
madman, but a psychological automaton that becomes insidiously
present in all, in the technology of massification itself. The
images and objects that mass hallucination, somnambulism, and
trance produce are attributes of this immanent will to power.[9]
The hypnotic, fascinating drive of fascism is seen
paradoxically to operate below the radar of a moral and
voluntaristic consciousness of the human subject; fascism becomes
a political reality when knowledge-based exchanges between
entities of intelligence give way to a biotechnologism of
/informatics./ The elaboration of the latter term requires caution
and patience.
17. In Benjamin, we can see this being articulated in terms of a
situation in which forms of storytelling (which are at once
educative and exemplary to the citizen for his cosmopolitan
education, and also amenable to his freedom of critical
interpretation and judgment) are replaced by a new form of
communication that he calls information. The first characteristic
of information is its erasure of distance--it is its
near-at-hand-ness that gets information a "readiest hearing" and
makes it appear "understandable in itself" ("Storyteller" 88). The
dissemination and reception of information are thus predicated on
the production of the event as "local," as "already being shot
through with explanation." For the conscious subject, this also
entails the disappearance of a temporal interval required for
movement within the faculties from cognition to understanding and
then finally to knowledge. Information is that which is
accompanied by the entropic violence brought about by a
supercession of the commonplace, and a reduction of language into
clichés. It is therefore in the ruins of a constitutive or
legislative language that the instantaneous circuit of the
commonsensical comes into being.
18. Thinking, knowledge, or communicability (which is different from
this or that technologism of communication) become foreclosed in
such an order of power because one cannot really say anything that
the social habit does not designate as already thought of and
prejudged by the dictator. The publicity of fascism is one where
friend and foe alike are seen to be engaged in tauto-talk,
repeating what the dictator has already said or warned about.
Benjamin calls this an eclipse of the order of cosmological
mystery and secular miracles that the European humanist sciences
of self and nature and an enlightened novelization of the arts
sought to delineate and solve. There can be neither secrecy in
fascism, nor anything unknown. Conspiracies, in that sense, can
only be manifestations of what is already foretold and waiting to
be confessed. The SS (or sometimes, the CIA) can of course procure
and store "classified information," but it can never say anything
that the Fuhrer does not know better. Information therefore
becomes an incessant and emphatic localization of the global will
of the dictator; in its seriality and movement, it can only keep
repeating, illustrating, and reporting the self-evident truth of
the dictatorial monologue.[10] For Deleuze, it is in
this sense of the immanent dictatorial will that Hitler becomes
information itself. Also, it is precisely because of this that one
cannot wage a battle against Hitlerism by embarking on a battle of
truth and falsehood without questioning, but taking for granted,
the very parabasis of information and its social relations of
production. Hence, "/No information, whatever it might be, is
sufficient to defeat Hitler/" (Cinema 2 269).
19. Like the patriarch in Garcia Márquez's novel whose face was
animated by the dictator's mask, Adolf the Aryan anti-Semite does
not exhaust the figure of Hitler. Informatics has not ceased after
the death of Adolf and his propaganda machine, or the passing away
of the particular discourse of the Adolphic oracle and its
immediate historical context. As a figural diagram, as a special
shorthand for a particular technology of power, Hitler
subsequently must have only become stronger--that is, if indeed we
are still to account for him as an immanent will to information
that invests modern societies. But how can one conceptualize him
without the formalist baggage of a historicist understanding of
Hitler? In other words, without the grotesque, arborescent
institutions of repression, like the secret police or the
concentration camps, that constitute an armada of affects
frequently used to domesticate the concept of fascism to Europe
between the wars? If one were to put the question differently,
that is, occasion it in terms of a present global order of
neo-liberalism, marked by American-style individualism, consumer
choices, democracy, and free markets that supposedly come to us
/after/ the agonistic struggles of liberation in the modern era
are already settled, how can one enfigure the dead and buried
tyrant in our midst in such an "untimely" manner? How is Hitler
possible in a liberal constitution?
20. Perhaps one has to begin by not trying to enfigure Hitler in the
contours of the human--as the irrational apex of the suicidal
state, or the pathological Goebbelsian liar who perverted the
tools of human communication into mass propaganda machines. Hitler
in that sense, would not simply be the mediocre and grotesque
madman who uses or abuses technology (apart from that, he of
course is long dead and buried beneath the dazzling obscurity of a
sanitized spectacle--a museum piece of mass culture). Rather, in
his latest neo-liberal incarnation, he would still be a proper
name for technology itself, but not as the figure of the
psychopathic /individual/ who simply imprisons the human in
enclosed spaces like the death camp or exercises a Faustian
domination over him through arborescent structures like the Nazi
war/propaganda machine. The "postmodern" technology of information
that we are talking about qua Hitler is neither external nor
internal to the human individual; it is one that is a part of the
latter's self-making as well as that of the bio-anthropological
environment he lives in. Hitler enters us through a socialization
of life itself, through a technology of habituation that involves
our willingness to be informed. It is a diffuse modality of power
that perpetually communicates between the inside and the outside,
erasing distance between them. It is in this context that
Deleuze's statement, that there is a Hitler inside us, modern
abjects of capital, becomes particularly significant. Hitler, as
per this formulation, becomes an immanent form of sovereignty that
is bio-politically present, percolating individuals and
communities in an osmotic manner. Hitler as information, is not
the addressor who speaks to us while we listen. It was only Adolf
who did that in the old days, as the anachronistic caricature of
the sovereign who had not yet had his head cut off, but had simply
"lost it." Information on the other hand, is a metropolitan habit
of instant signification; it is an administered social automaton
that does not presume a contract between the speaker and the
hearer. Since it has no point of origin other than the person
informed, the instance of information is thus always one where the
self listens to the "they-self," to the point where the two become
indistinguishable and unavailable as separate instances of an
agonistic self-other psychodrama of the integrated Western
subject. /This, however, needs to be understood not in terms of
the patriarch's crisis, or the existentialist anxieties of the
Heideggerian philosopher, but in terms of labor and production:
information as value has no source other than the person informed
because it is he who labors to produce social meaning./ It is only
then that we can understand technology according to its logic of
production, rather than solely as an externalized "other"--a
Frankensteinian monster seen from the point of view of the
individual. But the obvious query here would be, if information
has something to do with capital, does that make it essentially
fascistic? More specifically, in a "postmodern age" witnessing the
obsolescence of modern cultural institutions, when Hitler is to be
understood in terms of a diffuse, horizontal presence rather than
as a vertical axiomatic in human form, the question to ask,
perhaps, is who or what is the dictator?
Theses on Informatics
21. It is impossible to talk about information from the beginning,
since it is always already on its way, unlike the story that
originates somewhere and ends somewhere. I thus choose to assemble
a scattered inventory of postulates.
22. *Thesis 1:* First, let me attempt to clarify, as best as possible,
some categories that have been anarchically intersecting with each
other in our discussion. By the term televisuality (as with
telephonicity), I mean a simple mechanism of projecting and
receiving visibilities and sounds across distances. It is in this
basic form that the telescope or the postcard is televisual. The
invention of the former was one of the signal events that created
the human as a global postulate; indeed, the European anthropos
was a sublime creation that emerged from the Pascalian horror at
seeing an interstellar space without the face of the Holy Ghost
hovering over the martins. The disenchanted birth of the self was
coincident with the twilight of the starry sky which was a map of
the epic world; it was, in other words, a genesis of a novel and
secular cosmology itself, one that could be understood through
cognitive functions of the transcendental human subject rather
than through a patient wait for revelatory happenings.
Televisuality in this abstract sense, has something to do with the
primary epistemological tasks of the modern man--that of reading
his godless, degraded universe in terms of a world historical
totality. It is to be located in the very interstice between the
home and the world that multiple strands of Western philosophy
after the Greeks have tried to reconcile in different ways. For
our immediate project, it is important to understand is that all
/conceptual/ forms of the televisual are not informatic, just as
many incarnations of the televisual (the Internet or smart bombs
for instance) may not have anything to do with this or that
institution of television. We need to distinguish televisuality as
/techne/, art, science, or fabrication, from the televisuality
that is claimed by informatics.
23. What we are interested in is the moment in which televisuality
becomes /technologistic/ in a specific sense, as part of an
overall social command of capital. Here, in using the proper name
"technology," we refer to a form of /production/ (as distinguished
from making or fabrication as /potentia/) that is, /in toto/,
underwritten by the logic of capital alone. This technology of
televisuality comes with an ideological baggage of "progress,"
with a /faith/ of technologism that is part of a global imperative
of profit. Questioning technology as such is not to propose a
primitivistic, Luddite-romantic return to an unmediated state of
nature, but to understand historically, in terms of imminent
potentialities of the world, whether one cannot think of forms of
life and forms of making that are different. In terms of culture
and politics, this also pertains to a basic distinction between a
globality of exchanges between societies and a particular
managerial-financial project of globalization. Hence, in
suggesting that we need to make a distinction between
televisuality in a simple form and a technologism of informatics
qua capital, I am insisting on a pure, conceptual force of
/difference/, as Marx does in making a distinction between use
value and exchange value. That is, I am not positing an originary
moment when the televisual was a pure event of the primitive, yet
to be capitalized by informatics. It would be instructive to
recall here how Marx designates primitive accumulation as a
determinate extraction from the historicity of capital formation
itself:
We have seen how money is transformed into capital; how
surplus-value is made through capital, and how more capital is
made from surplus-value. But the accumulation of capital
presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes
capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the
availability of considerable masses of capital and labor power
in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement,
therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle,
which we can only get out of by assuming a "primitive"
accumulation [...]; an accumulation which is not the result of
the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.
This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role
in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam
bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race.
(Capital 873)
Hence, to talk about the televisual as a nascent, prelapsarian
moment in gross empirico-historicist terms is to subscribe to the
same onto-theology of capitalism. That is, in terms of a secular
narrative of progress, before informatics there could have been
the televisual only as a magical revelatory task of God. After the
fall, the history of the human thereby becomes a gradual but
irresistible coming into being of informatics qua capital,
starting with the fire and the wheel. The original "sin" of
capital and the technological omnipresence of informatics would be
seen to constitute the only mode of being for a species cursed
with the labor of Adam. As per this logic, "after" information
there can be only apocalypse and death; pure televisuality,
without capitalist social relations, can only be of the epic order
of gods and monsters. It is precisely to demystify informatics as
a science of Power qua capital (/potestas/ in the Spinozist sense)
that one needs to understand televisuality as power (/potentia/)
that is productive activity pertaining to labor.[11]
24. *Thesis 2:* Informatics is the technology which capitalizes and
translates televisuality into value as information. It is the
circulation of different kinds of words and images across global
distances, /in the least amount of time possible./ Moreover, the
mechanism of /value/ in such a turnover is computed according to a
digital architecture of temporality, where time /is/ money.
Informatics therefore creates value not in terms of veracity of
knowledge (which is settled through rational debates between
experts), but in terms of abridgement of reporting time. Hence, it
does not rely upon modern cognitive-representational prejudices
(the camera does not lie), but a machinic coda of efficiency (the
camera has had no /time/ to lie). This is where informatics
differs from what can be called news in an older sense. The latter
can be accounted for as a secular verification of rumor, a process
of expert scientific recoding of the world, absolving it of
miracles and magic. Informatics on the other hand is a pure force
of circulating commonsense, in which the temporal logic of the
bomb and that of the image coincide. Hence, in this realm of
massified common sense, the specular pleasure of seeing the bomb
drop is accompanied by the casting of the legitimacy of the
bombing as an ongoing, "already explained" clearing for the
immanent entry of the post-historical. Like capital, informatics
tends toward the abolishment of /circulation time/; it is, in
fact, capital itself (and not a reflection of it) precisely
because it acquires a "life of its own" by the virtue of being
value in serial flow.[12] Marx makes this important
distinction between money as simple medium of exchange, as in
Aristotelian economics, and money that becomes capital precisely
because it is in circulation. Put simply, the military-industrial
assemblage that makes the moment of the bomb coincide with that of
the image does not belong to an older paradigm in which societies
at war exchanged violence through a terminal and fatalistic
deployment of weapons and resources. Rather, it is one in which
capital never ceases to flow--the bomb as money is immediately
translated into image as money. In a figural sense, that is how we
can understand "embeddedness"--as that which tends to
/informationize/ the temporal and spatial distance between making
war and making news.
25. The relation between informatics and capital that I am proposing
here is not that of a superstructural aspect of public culture
reflecting the machinations of the economic base. In the general
capitalistic production of social life itself, informatics does
not mirror realities, but produces them. Informatics as such, is
thus possible when money as capital increasingly becomes
immediately socialized value, without going through formal
mediating circuits of society, law, and culture. Apart from
Antonio Negri's thesis in Marx Beyond Marx, here I of course have
Guy Debord's observation in mind--that spectacle is capital
accumulated to the point of image.[13] Hence, in
speaking of an immanent flow of capital qua informatics, I am not
suggesting that money is translated into image-commodity on the
screen and subsequently returned to its original form as
televisual revenue. Rather, the movement is that of money through
and throughout. In the Grundrisse, Marx makes a very important
distinction between money and coin that may be instructive here:
Money is the negation of the medium of circulation as such, of
the /coin./ But it also contains the latter at the same time
as an aspect, negatively, since it can always be transformed
into coin; positively, as /world coin/, but, as such, its
formal character is irrelevant, and it is essentially a
commodity as such, the omnipresent commodity, not determined
by location. (228)
Hence, both the coin that goes into the making of the image, and
the image itself, are only different moments of money as value in
continuous, "omnipresent" circulation. Marx calls money a "mental
relation" that can be seen to be emphatically /in currency/ all
the time, regardless of perceptual transformations from coin to
image and back to coin again, in capital's conditions of command
(Grundrisse 191). It is in this sense that money does not stop
being money once the image is produced; as Goddard puts it, there
is always money "burning on screen," or as Fellini says about the
ancient curse of money on cinema, "when the money runs out, the
film will be over."[14]
26. *Thesis 3:* The televisual, as /techne/, becomes a part of
informatics in the same manner as general attributes of social
life become increasingly capitalized. Televisuality as a
phenomenological proposition is of the order of the subject (he
who posts the card and she who sees or reads out of love), and the
distance between its origin and its telos is the enunciative space
between the positions of the addresser and the addressee, where
the card can be said to "world" itself in transit. It is this
bipolar communicative arrangement between subjects (one of the
many social contracts of the human) that is translated into
immanent value on the move when televisuality is informationized,
since, as we have said earlier, informatics, or the circulation of
information, tends to erase all distance between the speaker and
the listener. It is the habit of massification that reduces love
to a cliché.
27. *Thesis 4:* This is not to say that informatics or the flow of
information has nothing to do with institutions of truth, culture,
representation, or art. Simply put, the forces of global
informatics "report" such events whenever and wherever they happen
by instantaneously translating them into value in circulation
(screentime = money time). For instance, there are many ways of
claiming "authenticity" for the art work, one of them being the
originality of inscription in conjugation with the originality of
the substrate. As per this logic, the piece garners auratic value
only when the brush stroke of Van Gogh, as a geometric, tactile,
or formal inscription, is seen to be in assemblage with the
original substrate used (the paint, the canvas). The camera and
print capitalism detached the two in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, as Benjamin so astutely observed, when copies
were produced by the mechanical substitution of the canvas and
paint with ink and paper--in other words, by changing the
substrate while keeping the abstract diagram of the painting
intact. The work of art, in becoming capable of democratic
dissemination, acquired what we have been calling a televisual
potential in the simple form. But today, it becomes properly
informationized when its abstract diagram is electronically
transcoded, circulated, and then erased instantaneously from a
substrate of pixels or digits in order to make room for the next
one. It is in this sense that cinema or video--media that involve
leaving lasting impressions on permanent bases like celluloid--are
industrial recording technologies that are not informatic, but
ones that can be subsequently informationized. The camera of
informatics on the other hand, can "scan" one thing after
another--the sunflowers, the Taj Mahal, a film by Rossellini, an
advertisement--translating them into the same pulsating substrate
of information, just as capital liquefies everything by
translating them into money in transit. The Age of Information is
indeed one in which all things solid melt into pulses and copies
proliferate without originals. Different forms of artistic,
cultural, social, and political activities, various bodies and
objects, are all potentially informatic, but only in differential
degrees of "newsworthiness" and other forms of commodity value. In
concrete terms, what we are talking about thus has much to do with
the increasing corporatization of the public sphere and the
gradual obsolescence of institutions of public culture, "art" or
pedagogic cinema, and public television like the BBC, PBS, or
/Doordarshan/ that the postwar developmentalist welfare state
invested in.
28. *Thesis 5:* Scanning and transmission create images that are more
matter and energy in the social circulation of value, rather than
simulations of a "real" that is perceptually distant from the
viewer but brought nearer to him through electrified
re-presentation. As money on the move, information is not
immediately knowledge, although knowledge can certainly be derived
from it. For a classically defined individual subject
contemplating the world, knowledge can be said to be formed in the
temporal interval that houses the movement of the faculties from
sense perception, to intuition, to understanding, and finally to
reason; it therefore, is always "belated" in the order of the
present. Knowledge thus can only follow the Taylorized seriality
of informatics, which presents the /now/ as an instant of
socialized production that produces image-realities only on a
commonsensical, psychologically automotive parabasis. The machinic
intelligence of informatics can accommodate the self-conscious
human only in an environment of habitual distraction, in an
automotive sensory-motor engagement that can present the world as
"shot through with explanation" by an already-generated body of
clichés. Knowledge can only be a distant afterthought of the
human, when informatics has already passed on, leaving "news" at
its wake, to be analyzed by disciplinary experts. This is also
why, properly speaking, there can be no "misinformation," only
different kinds of reported knowledge, some of which may be true
and some false. All "false" publications circulated by the Enron
management before 2002 were indeed information of the real order
because they did not disrupt the circulation of value as
informatics. Similarly, the "true" revelations about the company
that followed were also information in the same sense--as screen
time, they made money. The digitized memory of informatics,
reliant on a continuous flow of impression and erasure, does not
aim to produce a book of the world; the two moments, one
pertaining to the "false" and the other to the "true" are only so
from the retroactive perceptual universe of the citizen who is a
student of history. The systemic intelligence of information does
not seek to tie the two happenings in an obligatory relationship
of causality that would be essential for dominant forms of
metanarration. In the age of secular novelization, that was the
task of the storyteller, whose modernist agon was to connect the
past with the present via a weak messianic power. On the other
hand, the organization of forms of life and intelligence into a
global dynamics of information creates an epoch where it is only
the "superstate," as a transnational military-corporate diagram of
governance, that is rendered capable of reading the book of the
world. This is because if information is something that produces
realities rather than reflecting them, it is only global
superstatal formations of capital, like CNN or Fox, that can
adequately invest in molar instruments of command and dominance in
this field. It is thus here that the operative logic of the
satellite intersects with that of the cannon; the phenomenology of
information coincides with that of the bomb. No one can out-war
the transnational corporate state because it has the bomb; no one
can out-inform the same because it has the satellite. It also goes
without saying that power based on informatics has serious
consequences for human politics and governance. When state
activity is based on an organizing principle of information rather
than politics, (such as instant management of security and
policing terror induced "emergencies"), governance includes
legislative actions, rational debates, or knowledge formations
only as "afterthoughts" that follow the instantaneous, preemptive
reflex of informatic action. Informatics, as we have noted
earlier, is that which makes the will of the state, rather than
its word as law, immanently operable. This is done through a
performative, on-the-spot surveillance and management of variables
instead of traditional juridical protocols involving law, its
interpretation, and its application. Elsewhere I have elaborated
in greater detail how, in our post-9/11 world, informatization and
policing on a global scale has become indistinguishable from
militarization of civic spaces.[15]
29. *Thesis 6:* An ideology critique of CNN is quite useless if it is
conducted purely on the basis of politico-ethical responsibilities
and Kantian ideas of public exercise of reason. Such a discourse
would locate the problem squarely on the question of voluntarism
that idealistic modernity demands from its citizens, including the
administrative heads of public media houses. The human
intentionalities of CNN need to be understood only as attributes
of a corporate body of "trans-human" interests--that of capital
and its circulation.[16] In that sense, CNN always
telecasts the unfolding, circulating story of CNN itself, as value
in a perpetual state of making on screen, where time, no matter
what it reflects, champions, denigrates, or represses, is always
money. A nominalist denunciation of media politics, based on
categorical notions of "rights" and "representation," is akin to a
wishful critique of "capitalism" from a checks and balances
perspective of liberal humanism--that is, a critique of predatory
capital without a critique of wage labor or the money form. To go
back to Deleuze's formulation, such an effort would be to revise
and reform Hitler with information itself, when no amount of the
latter can be sufficient to defeat him. In nominal terms of the
liberty that the free market brings, there actually can be no
vertical installations of power or spaces of enclosure (the
factory, prison, gulag, or concentration camps in their classic
carceral incarnations, Hitler in his paradigmatic human
figuration) to prevent the subaltern from speaking. It is an
entirely different matter that she cannot speak either because it
takes money to do so or because the speech itself has to accrue
value in terms of global /interests/ of money. The meritorious
communicative actions between publics and counterpublics are thus
always informed by the great monologue of power, in which money
alone speaks to itself. In an immanent, multifarious global domain
of bodies, statements, practices, lifestyles, and ideologies, it
is the circulating logic of capital as informatics that determines
the newsworthiness of each. Undeniably, it is also the radically
innovative and revolutionary nature of capital that allows for a
global panorama of activities without the graduated, hierarchical
mediation of the priest or the king. However, the head of the
sovereign that was cut off now micropunctually appears on the
currency note. Nominally thus, in a postmodern theater of consumer
capital, everyone can play the game of representations, since
everyone has money. It is a different matter altogether, one that
has not much to do with the language games of neo-liberal
economics and ideology, that increasingly, to a degree
unprecedented in history, some have a lot more of it than others.
30. *Thesis 7:* A Kantian understanding of modern culture would
suggest that it is a "commanded effect" of social pedagogy--a real
compulsion to be free--that allows the citizen to voluntarily
submit to the ethical mass of a cosmopolitan whole.[17]
It is only by being cooked in culture that the citizen can be
trained to follow the categorical imperatives of a secular
morality out of his own reasonable volition and agency, rather
than through a dogmatic and virtuous fear of an angry and jealous
Jehovah. Kant's formulation is of course only a special instance
in a general Western aesthetics of teaching, moving, and
delighting that determine the ethical value of art. It is
important to note that in Kant this idealistic proposition is
immediately and anxiously related to social relations of
production: culture requires the development of skills that can
lead only to "inequality among men" and the institution of private
property (Critique of Judgment 356).[18] In this light,
we can formulate a working theory of the "postmodern" (which is
not something that comes /after/ the modern, but which is simply
outside the categorical logic of modernity[19]) as per
which the extension of industry into all domains of social life,
and the financialization of the globe has, in the last century,
led to a gradual obsolescence of an aesthetic of high
modernism--that is, art with a pedagogical function. Informatics,
in that sense, is a technology that is no longer subservient to
the cultural skills of the human or his civil conversations. As a
form of production, metropolitan informatics calibrates and
reports cosmopolitan culture according to a differential and
relative matrix of value and commodity relations. When we speak of
a dominant ideology of global capital in its present form, we
speak of a horizontal proliferation of energies and a particle
semiotics of Anglo-American pragmaticist commonplaces[20];
in other words, of an immanent form of power that is
quite different from the agonistic, transcendental battles of old
Europe qua German idealism in particular, battles in which the
human found a reasonable freedom in the historical task of
supplanting the god or the tyrant. The point is, informatics, as a
technology of the social, gains supremacy precisely in a so called
post-historical, post-political world, where a massification of
common sense states that there is nothing new to narrate at all,
in terms of a "totality" of the "human" project.
31. *Thesis 8:* In the ancient Greek polis, the classical form of
public action that the citizens undertook to achieve immortality
was possible only in a spatial and temporal order free of the
necessities of the household. The latter space was for production
of goods and valuables for the animal existence of man; it was the
domestic enclave of the Negro, the woman, or the infant (as in
/in-fans/, or the one without language) as various incarnations of
the /animal laborans./[21] Public action, or the task of
the citizen, could thus begin only after the questions of property
and labor were settled, after "man" had, through the labors of the
woman and the Negro, provided for his animal existence. In the
epoch of enlightenment modernity, we see a similar formulation in
Kant, who suggests that it is only the man of property who is
capable of /disinterested/ public exercise of reason.[22] Property,
however, in the sense Kant uses it, is static
and has value primarily as /Vermögen/--that is fixed capital, or
ground rent, to use a term from nineteenth-century political
economy. The German thinker is very careful to deny it the dynamic
and expansive interest of capital. It is useful to recall here
Kant's anxious warnings against "dangerous money power" and too
much foreign trade as being detrimental to the freedom of
individual states and their co-existence in "eternal peace."[23]
When it came to dictatorship of political realities of
the republic, that is, the very question I began this essay with,
Kant famously opted for enlightened, republican monarchy instead
of aristocracy or democracy precisely to ensure that the spheres
of interest-free public reason and interest-driven private
practice were kept separate.[24] Now the question
therefore becomes, in an era of multinational capital, neo-liberal
ideology, and unprecedented global trade, where the household and
its logic of production extend completely over the public sphere,
when all of us become shareholders in the public tasks of the
/animal laborans/, who or what may be the monarch that says,
"Argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, but
obey!"?[25] It is indeed money that is the sovereign in
our occasion, in moving from being "a servant of commerce" to the
position of the latter's "despot" (Marx, Grundrisse 199).
Postscript on the Political
32. What the patriarch in Garcia Márquez's El Otono del Patriarca
dreads is not the televisual as such, but the mysterious force of
transfer, by which the televisual, without his command or approval
has already become informatic. During the royal burial ceremony,
the mask of power becomes televisual not just in the old
ritualistic sense of seeing the sovereign in the distance through
a series of graduated, hierarchical mediations; it becomes
bewitchingly informatic for the patriarch after his "death,"
precisely when the order of spectacle (of which he thought he was
the author) and the dictatorial visage that it creates refuses to
die with him. The mask as information merely circulates between
heads of pretenders that climb into it from time to time, for
their proverbial fifteen minutes, almost as if by a mathematical
chain of chance that is inhuman in its operative intelligence. The
patriarch's dead, "fagot self" thus becomes the latest calendrical
newsbyte in the eternity of circulating informatics and the
deathlessness of the mask which is always on the screen. When the
televisual becomes "live" as in informatics, it does not
monumentalize the mortal son of Bendición Alvarado in his
afterlife, as an arrested profile of power itself. The perpetual
iconography of the dictatorial mask, telecast "live" amidst the
ebb and flow of human fortunes, presents the figure of power as
catachresis, as an unstable conglomeration of forces which
deterritorializes and reconfigures from moment to moment, as it
flows from head to head.
33. But the predicament, in our occasion, is of course not just the
old patriarch's alone. This metropolitan geometry of producing
social meaning seems, to a far greater degree, to have inducted
both the silent subaltern as well as the "interest free" humanist
intellectual who presumed to speak for him to differential states
of global /in fan/-ness--beings without language. By that token,
one can certainly talk about a functional equation between
"wealth, sufficiency, and truth" that fragments and destroys the
constitutive, world historical impulse of the political which
various strands of enlightenment modernity had propounded.[26]
Indeed, the /habit/ of information becomes a technical
possibility in what is called a post-historical landscape of
ruins, where nature is gone for good, where the great pedagogical
and exemplary institutions of culture are inducted into a
transnational museum of images, and where it becomes increasingly
difficult to make a categorical distinction between documents of
civilization and those of barbarity. After all, how can one even
speak of a public exercise of reason amidst an operational logic
of capital that reduces discussion and consensus to the business
of adequately investing in public relations, mathematizing and
controlling the "free" information environment through a strategic
saturation of images, and finally getting a desired feedback in
terms of sales or opinion poll numbers? If, in social terms of
massification (the tasteful individual or group can always switch
off CNN or engage in parodic motions of culture and art without
any socially transformative potential) we are all virtual laborers
of consumption and consensus, how can man even presume to make
history, with or without deliberative choice? Perhaps in
understanding this systemic picture of global informatics we need
to avoid the mistake of granting it a total moment of worldly
arrival, that is, picture it as an instant that, in its all
encompassing finality, extinguishes history itself (the meaning of
history would then be confined to a charter of tasks and contracts
attributable to the epistemological fiction of the self-conscious
"human" subject). In other words, we need to understand that a
working notion of virtual labor should not virtualize the concept
of living labor itself, with its massive antagonistic energies
directed against capital globally. Indeed the question of habit is
a tricky one: it could be a fundamental Eurocentric habit of
thinking politics /solely/ in terms of representation, rights,
property, law, legislation, and justice as per the normative
protocols of liberal democracy that could lead us to the mistake
that both history as a chaosmos of interacting forces and politics
as class struggle are either over or mediatized beyond redemption.
34. The point is thus to understand that the metropolis, as a
managerial and marketing terminal of power that besieges the
global countryside through informatics and militarization, can
generate the surplus energy to sustain itself only by perpetually
producing the Negro at the frontiers. The metropolis, we must make
clear at this point, is not the same as the modern city. The
modern city had evolved a few centuries ago, through the creation
of avenues and alleys of production, labor, and communication /in
between/ the great feudal estates, surreptitiously or dramatically
cutting the bonds of filiality and rentiership. The metropolis, on
the other hand, is an abstract diagram of an urban value system
that informs the city, recasting the latter as a center for
managerial, technocratic, and military governance. It is thus a
site for news, surveillance, security, advertising, entertainment,
consumer choices, products, marketing, spying, war, and
communications. When the diagram of the metropolis inscribes the
city, it reinvents the latter as a center of financialization
rather than industrialization. Hence, the metropolis, as a figure
of thought, should not be considered in an empiricist manner; real
cities like San Francisco and Bangalore are merely dense,
topological assemblages of money, technology, and goods in such a
worldwide web of urbanity. This is also why the latter can be
called the Silicon Valley of India, as a terminal of power that is
different from its counterpart in the West only in terms of
degrees and intensities of value-laden happenings. This is also
the driving logic that increasingly redresses all urban formations
in the world, in differential degrees, like rich and poor cousins
of Las Vegas. According to this metropolitan cartography, there
can be no political citizens in the old historical sense within a
city now reserved for denizens employed in managerial action,
because the worker engaged in class struggle and the conscientious
Kantian legislator would be simply anachronistic
figures--displaced refugees momentarily trespassing into prime
real estate. If the latter figure is gone for good, the former is
relocated, with the classical factory itself, in the "third world"
elsewhere.[27] In this context one could mention a
recent statement made by the U.S. administration pertaining to an
unreal and frightening diagram of an "ownership society"[28],
a violent and abstract coda of metropolitan conformity
which constitutes the ultimate fantasy of capital--a totalized and
consummate social vanishing of labor.
35. The search for another form of politics has to begin with a
critique of the aphasic, self-conscious navel-gazing of the North
Atlantic intellectual, who approaches a state of stupefied entropy
on looking at a monstrous military-informatic-financial assemblage
which has reduced the great modernist projects of culture and
ideology to incidental arrangements that can be only locally
applied. To restrict an understanding of the political that is
emergent to a set of cognitive phenomenological tasks of the human
subject, who, as Foucault points out, is an
empirico-transcendental fiction of the West very much in the
twilight of his career[29], would be, in the last
instance, subscribing to a transcendental stupidity not dissimilar
from that of informatics itself. That is, the assumption that
today everything and everybody is already spoken for, evaluated,
and ordered by the hidden tongue of the market, instead of by the
king or the philosopher of yore. This is why, when all of us are
irremediably tinged with the curse of money, a caricature of
liberal political action, conducted through conservative channels
of human conscience and morality, becomes part of an overall
shareholding of neo-imperial "guilt."
36. A new form of political thinking has to begin by taking into
account vast amounts of energies in the world antagonistic to
capital in terms that do not refer back to the normalcy of the
human subject inaugurated by the classical enlightenment of
Europe. It is part of the transcendental stupidity of
geo-televisuality to impart such hostile energies with a catalogue
of profiles: the criminal, the delinquent, the madman, the Negro,
the woman, the child, the African AIDS victim, the poor, the
unemployed, the illegal immigrant, or the terrorist. Informatics
is about the reporting of the state's pharmacopic action on these
bodies, as objects of charity, aid, medication, schooling, or
military intervention. This is why the unspeakable antagonism of
living labor in the world is never "visible" on CNN or any other
corporate geo-televisual schema of metropolitan representation.
The latter can discern only the ontology of money and its
coalitionary interests; humans, who are only refugees great and
small, can only climb into one or many of the designated profiles
of massification. The centralizing, perspectivist drive of CNN--as
a repetitive human psychodrama of development, birthpangs of
modernity in the frontier, subjugated and freed consumer
desires--overlooks forces from the margins of the frame in trying
to fit entire crowds into the telegenic face. Labor and its
multiple wills to antagonism (of which various narratives of
resistance are only partial but undeniably important molar
expressions) are actually unrepresentable precisely because they
lack a "human" face. Global antagonisms to capital are at once
utopic (as in "non-place," since the logic of globalization cannot
posit an "outside") and pantopic; they are, in multiple forms, and
in different degrees of sublimation, nowhere and everywhere. They
constitute a gargantuan beastly body that Hegel feared, in being a
passional, multitudinal formation no longer guided by the soul of
humanism.
37. A judgment of the panorama of expressions of this global
antagonistic will along the lines of good and bad can only be an
afterthought; political thinking in our occasion can begin only
with the acknowledgement of these energies as eventful, and not
subject to essential categories of a state language that has
become global. In other words, thinking has to proceed acutely,
from an awareness of that very point of danger where the state
fails to "translate" such affective hostilities into repetitive
instances of its own psychobiography. It is this dire poverty of
political language that the neo-liberal state tries to cover up
with violence dictated in a situation of "emergency," legitimized
by an emotionalist, alternately folksy and biblical rhetoric of
"good" and "evil." Here I must strongly clarify that I am not
registering support for this or that statist ideology of violence
such as that of /Al Qaida/ which, like its Western counterparts,
merely captures and mobilizes some of these energies. But it is
not difficult to see how informatics peddles the worst clichés of
neo-liberalism in trying to enframe antagonism through a host of
good and evil profile doublets according to which a population is
invented and managed, or policed and fed--the model minority
/contra/ the inner city delinquent, the healthy /contra/ the mad,
the peaceful Arab /contra/ the Islamic bigot. In terms of
spectacle and violence, it thus falls perfectly within the logic
of war/information to have the yellow cluster bomb interspersed
with the yellow food packet during the recent war in Afghanistan.
The global state of security today violently tries to foreclose
the political by informationizing complex insurrectionary
potentialities in terms of a simplistic, self-evident, and bipolar
logic of peace and terror. The latter thus becomes a generic term
to describe reductively a multiplicity of forces--from Latin
American guerilla movements to African tribal formations to
Islamic militancy in the Middle-East or Maoist rebellions in
Nepal. The freedom of choice offered by the globally rampant North
Atlantic machine of war and informatics is no longer between
dwelling as a poet or as an assassin, but between being a
statistic or a terrorist.
38. Informatics, in our occasion, is a form of power that, in its
transcendental stupidity, tries to harness all antagonistic
desires into a hermeneutic of consumer culture and a behavioralist
sociology of the human. A functionary of the United States Federal
Government once described a discontented lot at some part of the
world as people who basically want refrigerators. The reportage in
CNN takes place on the same parabasis of value as, and of, capital
alone--one that always seeks to translate political energy into
configurations of consumer desire, that of seeing and being seen
on CNN. The old Clausewitzian exchanges between war and politics
thus become mode retro moments of crises management in a general
metanarrative of development; the agonistic dialectic of Hegelian
history gives way to functionalist modalities of facilitation and
investment--adequate CNN and adequate refrigeration. Thinking the
new, thinking politically in our time, should begin with a radical
questioning of the money form and its production of global social
life. It needs to proceed without the comforting assurance of
ready-at-hand narratives of resistance and has to explore existing
practices and potentialities of antagonism, not only in terms of
how, in moments of danger, they are sometimes territorialized by
fundamentalist ideologies, but also in terms of how they
perpetually, insidiously, and in completely inhuman ways,
transvaluate values.
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
anbst42@pitt.edu
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Notes
Brief portions of this essay have been published as Anustup Basu,
"Bombs and Bytes," Metamute 27 (Winter/Spring 2004).
1. See Kant, "Eternal Peace": "It is not to be expected
that kings philosophize or that philosophers become kings, nor is
it to be desired because the possession of power corrupts the free
judgment of reason inevitably. But kings or self governing nations
will not allow the class of philosophers to disappear or to become
silent, but will let them speak publicly" (456). From such a
premise Kant creates the compound, secular figure of the /moral
politician/ who "employs the principles of political prudence in
such a way that they can co-exist with morals" (459).
2. I will not open the can of worms about the fascist
Heidegger here, who identifies the German /volk/ as being qua
Being and ironically ends up supporting the Nazi party, although
perhaps one can say, not in the hope that it would develop a
monstrous technological war assemblage which would require
millions of human bodies as basic raw material.
3. For instance, one could consider in this respect
Etienne Balibar's argument about new racism as a differential
index of exclusion and discrimination, a racism without a
categorical deployment of race as a biological essence. In other
words, Balibar argues that in the aftermath of the civil rights
struggles of the 1960s, culture has increasingly replaced biology
as a chief operative force in the modalities of racism. The
celebratory spirit of Clintonian multiculturalism of the 1990s can
be seen in this light.
4. To clarify the obvious: even if further "investigations" were
to reveal a logical link between Saddam Hussain and Al Qaeda, it
would not dispel this thesis about the
present circumstances.
5. It must be understood that the version of the "Work of
Art" essay I am discussing here is the one translated (often with
unhappy results) by Harry Zohn in Illuminations. There are about
eleven drafts of the essay. I also need to make clear that the
hope in the ultimate maturing of society, in an irresistible
dialectical development of the socius toward a politicization of
aesthetics, is a Hegelian positivism that Benjamin inherits from
the German idealist tradition and begins to discard in the "Work
of Art" essay itself. The critique of such historicism arrives
more memorably later in Benjamin's study of Western modernity in
"Theses on the Philosophy of History."
6. The point, perhaps, is to commit a disciplinary
sacrilege. A political departure from the comforts of metaphysical
and ontological truths should not lead to a professional-academic
hermeneutics of sanitized repetition, or to a domestication of
thought into neatly separated and hermetically sealed categories
like modernism and postmodernism.
7. See Deleuze Cinema 2 28-29 and 264-70.
8. I am of course alluding to Francis Fukuyama's
Kojevian-Hegelian thesis in The End of History and the Last Man.
9. See Deleuze, Cinema 2 263-69.
10. In this context see Arendt's useful elaborations in
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
11. See Negri, The Savage Anomaly 10-11 for a remarkable
elaboration of these concepts.
12. See for instance in the Grundrisse: the "tendency of
capital is /circulation without circulation time/; hence also the
positing of the instruments which merely serve to abbreviate
circulation time as mere /formal aspects/ posited by it" (671).
13. See Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons from the
Grundrisse, and Debord, Society of the Spectacle 24.
14. See Deleuze, Cinema 2 77-78.
15. See Basu.
16. Does the corporation have a persona in terms of the
human figure? Perhaps we need to talk a bit more concretely, in
terms of an illustrative feature of the American style
neo-liberalism that is now rampant all over the world. In 1886, a
bizarre distortion of the Santa Clara Supreme Court decision by
the Court's reporter led to corporations claiming that that they
were also entitled to human rights laid out for the "people" in
the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution and the Fourteenth
Amendment that ended slavery. This "corporate personhood," as an
inhuman concentration of immanently flowing money, a dense
accumulation of interest-bearing forces, is the figure that has
taken the business of rightful representation away from the hands
of the human agent. As giant assemblages in a great civilizational
plane of interest group maneuvers, advertising, propaganda, law,
legislation, justice and consensus, corporate personas are to be
seen as individual entities that share the same rights (including
those of privacy) as humans, but also as bodies that have more to
do with R&D than Homboltian education, lobbying than polity,
managerial intelligence rather than the tics of the human. In
contradistinction to the individual, they also incidentally have
more money, more processing power, more energy, and more technical
intelligence at their disposal.
17. See Kant, The Critique of Judgment 355-57.
18. Elsewhere, of course, in "Idea for a Universal
History," Kant suggests that man, with his "egoistic animal
inclination," needs a master who "is supposed to be /just in
himself/ and yet a /man/" (122-23). When we talk about
enlightenment and Kant, it is always productive to remember that
the ideal of normative freedom that is so essential for the moral
education of the modern citizen, was, in his historical context,
very anxiously located in a state that rested its fragile
body-politic on the benevolent but despotic shoulders of Frederick
the Great.
19. Indeed, in recent times it has become plainly evident
that postmodern metropolitan formations can operate very
effectively in tribalistic modes.
20. It needs to be made clear that I am not categorically
tying this to a philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This robust
anti-formalist, anti-Cartesian line of thinking that began in the
nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce was founded on the
rejection of the individual as the sole custodian of truth, a
critique of a medieval scholasticism that traced all knowledge
back to one authority on the one hand and of massified commonsense
as bad logic combined with metaphysics on the other. The call for
Peirce was thus for an irreverent scientific experimental
community that would not allow thought to ossify into dogma.
Thinking pragmatically entailed a fundamental refutation of the
subject-object duality endemic in continental thinking; reality
was to be accounted for as an adequate, for-the-moment coming
together of sensations and beliefs. It is not possible here to
discuss this variegated tradition, including its later instances
of conservative defense of American capitalism, but one can
perhaps point out briefly that what we have been talking about so
far qua informatics is precisely that form of power that
forecloses "experience" or "action" in this sense. Informatics
(rather than communitarian-experimental experience) is that which
increasingly dominates the space of action between a globality of
managerial, military, and money interests, and a locality of
professional and familial satisfaction. Politics and knowledge
thus threaten to become precisely what John Dewey warned
against--merely spectatorial, with the correspondence between a
locality of American communal /belief/, and a global materiality
of Americanization in the world becoming increasingly
informationized, taking place only through planetary circuits of
investment, charity, terror, and militarization. Democracy too
tends to become what Dewey, speaking in terms of human governance,
called sovereignty chopped into mincemeat, buttressed by opinion
poll demographics of power based on a numerical notion of equality
and a formalistic isolation of the "I."
21. See Arendt, The Human Condition for an elaboration of
this theme.
22. See Kant, "Theory and Practice":
He who has the right to vote on basic legislation is called a
citizen [...]. The requisite quality for this [status], apart
from the natural one that the person not be a child or a
woman, is only this: that such a person be /his own master/
(/sui iuris/) and hence that he have some property (under
which we may include any art, craft or science) that would
provide him with sustenance. [...] a man who, when he must
earn a livelihood from others, acquires property only by
selling what is his own and not by conceding to others the
right to make use of his strength. Consequently he /serves/ no
one, in the strict sense of the word, but the commonweal. (420)
Kant is however careful in clarifying that the legislative
equality among citizens should be dictated by a qualitative aspect
of property, not a quantitative one: "Not the amount of property,
but merely the number of those owning any property, should serve
as a basis for the number of voters" (421).
23. See Kant, "Eternal Peace." This is postulation 4: "
No debts shall be contracted in connection with the foreign
affairs of the state." While Kant is ready to admit state
borrowing for the purposes of internal development, he is against
debt
as an instrument of the struggle between the powers, a credit
system of debts endlessly growing though always safe against
immediate demand (the demand for payment not being made by all
the creditors at the same time)--such a system, the ingenious
invention of a trading people in this century, constitutes a
dangerous money power. It is a resource for carrying on war
which surpasses the resources of all other states taken
together. (433)
24. See Kant, "Eternal Peace" 437-41 and "What is
Enlightenment?" 137-39.
25. This is the disposition Kant attributes to the
enlightened princely figure of Fredrick the Great. See "What is
Enlightenment?." The secular monarch permits his subjects to "make
/public/ use of their own reason and to submit /publicly/ their
thoughts regarding a better framing of such laws together with a
frank criticism of existing /legislation/" (139).
26. I am of course referring to Lyotard's thesis in The
Postmodern Condition.
27. One has to be careful here; I am not proposing the
category "third world" in a positive territorial sense, informed
by traditional Eurocentric discourses of self and other. The
relation between the globalized third world and the metropolitan
diagram as planet city is a dispersed, micropunctual one that
infectiously erodes classic inside/outside divisions: the country
and the city, the East and the West, the home and the world. The
international division of labor is a useful determination to make,
but not in categorical terms of molar identities like nationhood.
28. See Bush.
29. See for instance Foucault: "man is neither the oldest
not the most constant problem that has been posed for human
knowledge [...] [...] As the archaeology of our thought easily
shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing
its end" (386-87).
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---. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt-Harvest,
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Balibar, Etienne. "Is There a New Racism?" Race, Nation, Class:
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Basu, Anustup. "The State of Security and Warfare of Demons."
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---. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
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