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We might have some more special guests, last week of April. Still working it, but for a hint check out the Gang of Four songlist and Eugene's cameo in most recent issue of the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060327ta_talk_mcgrath
VTY
JDD
It seems Alexis found this week's thematic question a bit too 'obvious', so we've decided to complicate things with a slightly embellished version:
"Was the Gulf War the first 'tv', 'video', 'network', 'postmodern', 'new', 'cinematic', 'cyber-', 'anti-',and/or 'post-war'? Did it even take place? Discuss, in five pages or less, with reference to Doug Kellner, Bruce Cummings, Arthur Cebrowski, Chris Hables Gray, Mary Kaldor, the Tofflers, Timothy Lukes, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and/or James Der Derian"
VTY
JDD
Just in case you're looking for something to do over the break, here are some additional materials for our first class upon return and our thematic question: 'Was the Gulf War (1991) the first video war?'
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/cyber.deter.html?topic=&topic_set=
http://museable.home.comcast.net/IEEE.htm
and because antidiplomacy has gone down the out-of-print rabbit-hole, I'm attaching the ms. version.
jdd
8
CYBERWAR, VIDEOGAMES, AND THE GULF WAR SYNDROME
'Let us take a limited example, and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games.'
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine
Introduction
This is not a final chapter; it does not conclude. It happens to come at the end of a book and at the beginning of a 'new world order', which is sufficient reason to apply the theoretical claim of this book - that new technostrategic, antidiplomatic forces in international relations require a poststructuralist approach - to the first and surely not the last, late modern war.
Let me stress - in case the 'excess of writing' is not emphatic enough - the word 'approach': not 'analysis', 'theory', 'methodology', or 'model', but an 'approach', which recognizes the impossibility of pure congruence of thought and object, and yet draws the self into the event. Social scientific theory can act as a proxy in war, as did organization and systems theory in Vietnam, to distance the observer from the primary purpose of war, to kill the enemy, in the name of studying the secondary purpose, to vanquish the enemy. A poststructuralist approach closes the distance to death, asking first before any other question, how is my own identity implicated in a study of the killing of others? This is not to take up an a priori pacifist or belligerent position, but to understand fully the forces in a de-territorialized, hyper-mediated, late modern war already at work to fix that position before one has even begun to consider it. During the war, as the level of killing became inversely proportional to the level of knowing the Other, I tried to disturb that position. This chapter is the unfinished result.
Mind Games
'Do we not feel the breath of empty space?'
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science
B.C. - Before Cyberspace - our leaders read books during world crises. Much has been made of the fact that during the Cuban Missile Crisis John Kennedy was heavily influenced by Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August. In his memoirs of the event, his brother Robert Kennedy claims that the President's decision-making was tempered at critical moments by Tuchman's account of how Europe stumbled into the first world war. In the midst of the Persian Gulf War I wondered what George Bush was reading: after watching George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and even a note-taking journalist watch CNN, I stopped wondering and watching, and started reading and writing again. Since no historian is likely to make note of it, I shall: I read Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and wrote this video-essay.
With this war, cyberspace came out of the research labs and into our living rooms. The written word lost out to the video of a video of a bomb that did not need books to be smart; to cruise missiles that read the signs of Baghdad's streets better than most of us read the signs of the war; to a hyperreal Gulfspeak that 'attrited' all critics who clung to the archaic notion that words meant what they said and said what they meant. The result is that the majority of people - not just the President - had neither the time nor the ability to read, write, or even reflect effectively about the war. For six weeks and one hundred hours we were drawn into the most powerful cyberspace yet created, a technically reproduced world-text that seemed to have no author or reader, just enthusiastic participants and passive viewers. This is not to reify or deify some new technological force in our society. But it is to recognize the possibility that we have become so estranged from the empty space left by the decline of American hegemony and the end of the Soviet threat that we eagerly found in cyberspace what we could no longer find in the new global disorder - comfort and security in our own superiority
But do not misread me: this chapter is not a literacy campaign, a neo-luddite attack on new technologies, or an exercise in cyber-bashing. I am merely offering a cautionary tale, of how the technical preparation, execution, and reproduction of the Gulf War created a new virtual - and consensual - reality: the first cyberwar, in the sense of a technological, televisual, and global strategic power that dominated the formulation as well as the representation of U.S. policy in the Gulf. In name only cyberspace had its origins in science fiction: its historical beginnings and technological innovations are clearly military (from NASA's primitive flight simulators of the 1940's to the ultra-modern SIMNET-D facilities in Fort Knox, Kentucky), and now its widest civilian application has been by the media, continuing the Gulf War by the most technical and immediate means. Yet clearly it is science fiction that alerted us to the dangers of cyberspace, and now popular culture that drives the message home.
Indeed, popular journalism seems much more attuned to the phenomenon than academic critics. Consider, for instance, these two assessments of the Gulf War:
'The trouble is that order is a 19th century term that suggests Metternichian arrangements of large, heavy, somewhat static entities. History in the late 20th century seems to belong more to chaos theory and particle physics and fractals - it moves by bizarre accelerations and illogics, by deconstructions and bursts of light.'
and:
'It will not suffice to do extended textual readings of Pentagon briefings or Hussein's speeches. One must also know something about American culture, Iraqi history, etc. The whole deconstructive line of solipsism is obviously worthless or worse in this case. Are we talking about a discourse or are we talking about a war?'
When Time magazine (the first quote) begins to read like a critical theorist, and a critical theorist (the second quote) begins to read like Time, one begins to suspect that not only the Iraqi Republican Guard was out-flanked in the Six Weeks and One Hundred Hours War. Like old generals the anti-war movement fought the last war, while popular journalism and popular culture represented a new war of speed, perception, and spectacle - a 'pop' war ready-made for the video arcade. As the critics of the war hunkered down for a long war and high U.S. body counts, the rest of America climbed aboard the accelerating, solipsistic, deconstructive war machine. In effect, the 'New' Left fought a disastrous war of position, constructing ideologically sound bunkers of facts and history while the 'New' World Order fought a highly successful war of maneuver, enfilading the horrors and ugly truths of war with high-speed visuals and a high-tech aesthetics of destruction.
The modernist school of criticism ignored the new phenomenon of cyberwar and carried on with the important task of building an edifice of facts unobfuscated by false consciousness and disinformation, a la Chomsky ('Just take a look at the logic of the situation as it is evolving in the Gulf...') But efforts to construct a critical and universal counter-memory were handily isolated as anti-American and dismissed as utopian. Just as a foreign implant is set upon by antibodies, the 'radical' lessons of the Vietnam war and the cold war not only suffered pathological rejection but became the perverse justification for a hot, curative war ('By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all', said George Bush the morning after).
An alternative, late-modern tactic against total war was to war on totality itself, to delegitimize all sovereign truths based on class, nationalist, or internationalist metanarratives, a la Lyotard ('we have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one...'). Let me put my po-mo cards on the table: this is the strategy of this chapter, as it was for the presentations that I made at teach-ins and conferences on the war. Contrary to the claims of some of the New Left, I found neither quietism nor conservatism but activism and imaginative criticism coming from deconstructionist, feminist, literary and cultural critics with a bad (late-modern) attitude who organised and participated in anti-war events. To be sure, the attitude comes with a highly advertised side-effect: there is no absolute guarantee that a new pragmatic basis for justice and truth - rather than an infinite regress of language-games and textual free-play - will result from political encounters. But better strategically to play with apt critiques of the powerful new forces unleashed by cyberwar than to hold positions with antiquated tactics and nostalgic unities. As was proven by the accelerated pace of this war, to overcome someday is already a day too late.
All critics of the war, however, were caught (with apologies to the Rolling Stones) between Iraq and a hard place, between the history of a civilization and its sanctioned destruction, between the new Hitler in the bunker and Bush at the helm of the New World Order. From the start patriotic reflexes, journalistic practices, and presidential politics worked to sublate this difference into synthetic moral ends: naked aggression must be stopped, a nation-state's sovereignty restored, and a new regional peace constructed. We must war for peace. Vindication came in the after-math: roughly 100,000 Iraqi military dead minus precisely 268 U.S. dead equals victory. What was left for the critic? Only the less decidable after-image, the still unfinished product of the war between matter and perception that would determine the dominant memory of this conflict.
Here we might learn a lesson from the military: let the target determine the strategy. The most powerful objective of a post-war, anti-war movement must be the instant after-image, the war that was technically reproduced on the screen between the events and us. This site of perceptions was immediately targeted by the State and the war machine to provide what the economy no longer can: the foundation for a resurgent American hegemony. What was it that made the image so irresistible, and the after-image so resistant to criticism? Conversely - and inevitably - what new foundations will be produced by resistance to it?
I believe that these questions of position and maneuver, of theoretical bunkers and critical de-bunking, require a mix of modern and late-modern armaments. This chapter is a cross-border operation, violating the territorial principle of non-intervention that delimits both the theory and the system of international relations. Hence my use of still photographs of moving images, the crude black and white alienation from a living color war, and the play of agonistic video-games, to reveal what scientific procedures of causality cannot: how an immaterial conflict was given such serious substance through a war of simulations. In my targeting of the after-images of war I transgress disciplinary boundaries and regress with multiple representations. But this is, I believe, the only means by which the critical theorist might approximate and expropriate the language, video, and war games of the strategists of a late-modern war.
Where better to begin and end than with the first and last shot of the Six Weeks and One Hundred Hours War: the night bombing of Baghdad and the night liberation of Kuwait City, reproduced by television cameras equipped with night-vision technology and transmitted in real-time by portable satellite link-ups. The grainy, ghostly green images of the beginning and the end of the war stick. They seem more real, more authentic than all the packaged images that were sandwiched in between. Call it the new video verte: a powerful combination of the latest technology, the lowest quality image, the highest representation of reality. It reproduced a twisted Manichean truth: light - a tracer bullet, a secondary explosion, a flaring match - is danger; darkness - by camouflage, stealth, the night - is safety. Correspondents quickly learned that in wartime it was better to dwell and deal in the latter. The motto 'We own the night' (originating in the 7th Infantry Division) became the slogan of the war and the reality of its coverage. When obfuscating military briefers and mandatory 'security reviews' extended the ownership beyond the battlefield, the press and the public, already blind-sided in Grenada and neutered by the pool system in Panama, eagerly seized on the hi-tech prosthetics offered by the military. Words became filler between images produced by gun-cameras using night-vision or infra-red that cut through the darkness to find and destroy targets lit-up by lasers or radiating heat. Perhaps if a few journalists had known what all night-fighters know, that night-vision degrades depth perception, then the appeal of the videographic reproduction of the war might have been diminished. But from the beginning moving images took out fixed words, and photocentrism triumphed over logocentrism. The combination of surgical video strikes and information carpet bombing worked.
To be sure, for every public viewing of the war there was also a private perspective. I for one missed the collective moment of first images. Circling over Chicago's O'Hare airport when the bombs started to fall on Baghdad, I first heard of the war on the radio of a taxi. The first mediation came from the driver, who had not said a word during the trip until he turned around to give me change. In the thickest of Russian accents he said: 'They told me it would be over in three weeks - I was in Afghanistan for three years.'
The discordance of the first word with first images lasted right up to the last day of the war. Fast forward to the end of the Ground War, to the televised victory briefing by 'the chief architect of the ground war', better known as the commander of allied forces in the Persian Gulf, General Norman Schwarzkopf. Working his charts full of red and blue markers like a Jonathan Winters on amphetamines, he presented the keystone to the building that Norm built.
'I think this is probably one of the most important parts of the entire briefing I could talk about. As you know, very early on, we took out the Iraqi Air force. We knew that he had very limited reconnaissance means. And therefore, when we took out his air force, for all intents
and purposes, we took out his ability to see what we were doing down here in Saudi Arabia. Once we had taken out his eyes, we did what could best be described as the Hail Mary play in football.'
Stretching from the first days of the Six Weeks War to the last minutes of the One Hundred Hours War, these two simple statements by two disparate 'mud soldiers' frame the architecture of cyberwar. The construction and destruction of the enemy other would be:
* measured in time not territory
* prosecuted in the field of perception not politics
* authenticated by technical reproduction not material referents
* played out in the method and metaphor of gaming, not
the history and horror of warring.
In short, cyberwars of chrono-strategic simulations for pax Americana II.
Video Games
'It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical...'
Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images
The simulated nature of the war was apparent at the outset, but took on a critical consciousness when ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts asked General
Schwarzkopf, via satellite link-up, to comment on it:
Roberts: 'You see a building in a sight, it looks more like a video game than anything else. Is there any sort of danger that we don't have any sense of the horrors of war - that it's all a game?'
Schwarzkopf: 'You didn't see me treating it like a game. And you didn't see me laughing and joking while it was going on. There are human lives being lost, and at this stage of the game [sic] this is not a time for frivolity on the part of anybody.'
In the space of a single sound-bite Schwarzkopf reveals the inability of the military and the public to maintain the distinction between warring and gaming in the age of video. We were enchanted by the magic of applied technologies, seduced and then numbed by the arcane language of the military briefers, satisfied by the image of every bomb finding its predestined target. The wizards in desert khaki came out from behind the curtain only long enough to prove their claims on TV screens, to have us follow their fingers and the arcs of the bombs to the truth. At some moments - the most powerful moments - the link between sign and signifier went into Moebius-strip contortions, as when we saw what the nose-cone of a smart bomb saw as it rode a laser beam to its target, making its fundamental truth-claim not in a flash of illumination but in the emptiness of a dark screen. William Tecumseh Sherman meets Jean Paul Sartre in a sick syllogism: since war is hell and hell is others, bomb the others into nothingness.
Schwarzkopf's difficulty in separating war from its gaming is understandable. Back in October 1990 Schwarzkopf revealed in an USA Today interview that the U.S. military was ready for war in the Gulf over a year ago, because two years earlier they had learned that Iraq 'had run computer simulations and war games for the invasion of Kuwait'. He did not mention - it is doubtful that he did not know - that the software for the invasion simulations was supplied by an American company. In the same interview Schwarzkopf stated that he programs 'possible conflicts with Iraq on computers almost daily.' Having been previously stationed in Florida as head of the U.S. Central Command - at the time a 'paper' army without troops, tanks, or aircraft of its own - he had already earned a reputation as an adept simulation jockey.
In fact, Schwarzkopf sponsored a highly significant computer-simulated war game which was played in July 1990 under the code-name of Exercise Internal Look '90. According to a Central Command news release issued at the time, 'command and control elements from all branches of the military will be responding to real-world scenarios similar to those they might be expected to confront within the Central Command AOR consisting of the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia.' When Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, the war game specialist who put Exercise Internal Look together, Lt. General Yeosock, was moved from fighting 'real-world scenarios' in Florida to taking command of all ground troops - except for the special forces under Schwarzkopf - in Saudi Arabia. The war gamers went to cyberwar.
War Games
'How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster - and no smashed or sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings, nor devastated countrysides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.'
H.G. Wells, Little Wars
What Cokie Roberts and her journalist cohort had only begun to suspect, that the line between war and game was becoming irrevocably blurred, was common knowledge in the realm of popular culture - and down at the mall video arcade. Two films stand out as genre setters. The first is the late 70s, post-Watergate, pre-Challenger film Capricorn One based on the premise that the military and NASA would - and had the technological capability to - simulate a successful Mars landing after the 'real' mission aborts. The second is the Reagan-era film WarGames, a story of a young hacker who taps into an Air Force computer simulation and nearly triggers a nuclear war between the superpowers.
There are as well the ubiquitous video-games. 'Tank', one of the earliest and most popular, was a stripped-down version of an Army training simulation. Its graphics and sound effects now seem neolithic when compared to the simulations available for home computers. To name a few: from Navy simulations there is Harpoon, Das Boot Submarine, Wolf Pack, and Silent Service II; from the Air Force, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, F-19 Stealth Fighter, A-10 Tank Killer, and F-15 Strike Eagle; and for those seeking more serious global simulations, Populous, Balance of Power, SimCity, and Global Dilemma.
Simulations - the continuation of war by means of verisimilitude - have a much longer and much wider history. Prussia used Kriegsspiel ('war play') before their victories over the Austrians at Sadowa in 1866 and the French in 1870; Major William Livermore of the Army Corp of Engineers joined William McCarty Little and Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan at the Naval War College to set up the United States' first modern system of war gaming in 1889; and Japan made effective use of war games to achieve an unexpected victory over the Russians in 1904. Moreover, there is something of a law of uneven development at work in the field of war gaming. For instance, the Afghanistan resistance combined highly flexible sand box and toy soldier war games with hi-tech weaponry like the Stinger to defeat their far superior enemy, the Soviets - who, one could argue, were fighting the wrong war game. In this same period the U.S. military research labs began to develop simulations for smart ground and air weapons-systems that operated without pilots or drivers, taking us further along the slide into sci-fi war gaming and robotic war-fighting.
Logos Wars
'What entered Megavac 6-v as a mere logos would emerge for the TV lenses and mikes to capture in the guise of a pronouncement, one which nobody in his right mind - especially if encapsulated subsurface for fifteen years - would doubt.'
P.K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth
The most powerful dialogue of the cyberwar - if measured by the allocation of image resources - was the war of logos. It speaks for itself, but a genealogy helps us to understand how the media construct their own simulation cyberspace. Just around the time that Schwarzkopf wrapped up Operation Internal Look, the networks began to prepare their own war simulations. Most of them booked time at National Video on 42nd Street in New York City, a cutting edge video graphics lab known for its production of MTV logos.
NBC, cash-poor, went for the see-cubed-eye look, no fancy graphics, of the image of the news set as command and control HQ of America at War. CBS and ABC revealed the limits of simulated imagination when they replayed Time-Newsweek's simultaneous cover story of Bruce Springsteen: both came up with Showdown in the Gulf. ABC had the distinguishing underlay of a radar screen, but soon jettisoned the High Noon theme for a simpler logo, The Gulf War.
But it was ABC's Primetime Live and CNN's Headline News that should be the front runners in next year's Emmy awards in the special category of War Graphics. Primetime went for the Cruise Missile simulation. In successive frames the missile goes through some remarkable ground-hugging, terrain-following maneuvers, and just as it looms large - as the viewer realizes who the target is - The Gulf War logo and Diane Sawyer fade in. CNN, riding a high ratings wave, took the most innovative approach. It used as an underlay the military video of the week, and as the smart-bomb or missile homed in on the logo, War in the Gulf, block-lettered in fascistoid orange and black, rotated in over the destroyed target. Scary enough to hope that hologram TV never arrives.
To be sure, a more significant logomachy was in evidence at the less graphic, more subtextual level of semantics. Before the first shot was fired, language was enlisted in the war effort. Until we had sufficient troops in place 'to deter and defend' the hostages in Iraq were cautiously referred to as 'detainees'. In late fall, after 250,000 more troops had arrived, George Bush shifted linguistic gears and called for the 'unconditional surrender' of Saddam Hussein. When reminded shortly afterwards that this demand exceeded the requirements of the UN resolutions, he replied 'that's just semantics'. By February, with the air war going well and ground exercises for invasion taking place daily, General Colin Powell stripped U.S. strategy toward Iraq of any nuance or ambiguity: 'First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.'
But enough has been said about the systematic corruption of language by the military practices. It quickly became a commonplace that truth was the first casualty of war. But this was a slogan in need of a theory, of how truth is produced in the continuation of war by other, simulated means.
Theory Games
'The gratifying aspect of the image is that it constitutes a limit at the edge of the indefinite.'
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926, marveling at the immense popularity of the newly constructed picture palaces in Berlin, Siegfried Kracauer chronicled the emergence of a 'cult of distraction'. It is in these new 'optical fairylands', he wrote, that 'distraction - which is meaningful only as improvisation, as reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of the world - is festooned with drapes and forced back into a unity that no longer exists.' In Kracauer's view the picture palaces served as a kind of Hegelian asylum from Weimar disorder, ornate spaces where the alienated Berliner could seek reunification through a new, totally imaginary, cinematic (yet organic) Zeitgeist.
Taking his first measure of film production, Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', of the corresponding loss of authenticity, aura, and uniqueness in art. Benjamin believed mechanically reproduced art, especially film, to be especially useful to if not generative of Fascism, for the rendering of politics into aesthetics had the advantage of mobilizing the masses for war without endangering traditional property relations. He quotes the Futurist Marinetti to chilling effect: 'War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body...War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others...Poets and artists of Futurism!...remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art...may be illumined by them.!'
Surveying the rise of a consumer society, anticipating the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in 1968, Guy Debord, editor of the journal Internationale Situationniste, opened his book Society of the Spectacle with a provocative claim: 'In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.' At the root of this new form of representation was the specialization of power, with spectacle coming to speak for all other forms of power, becoming in effect 'the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned.'
After analyzing the political economy of the sign and visiting Disneyland, Jean Baudrillard, the French master of edifying hyperbole, notified the inhabitants of advanced mediacracies that they were no longer distracted by the technical reproduction of reality, or alienated and repressed by their over-consumption of its spectacular representation. Unable to recover the 'original' and seduced by the simulation, they had lost the ability to distinguish between the model and the real: 'Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.'
Paul Virilio's project to politicize the violence of speed, reviewed in the last chapter, illuminates the events of the Gulf War. The linking of the logistics of military perception and the use of videos in warfare (navy complained of their low quality) as hand-to-hand combat gave way to long-range conflict, the enemy receded from sight. An urgent need developed to accurately see and verify the destruction of the enemy at a distance. The necessity of collapsing distance, of closing the geographical space between enemies, led to the joint development of modern techniques for war filming and killing. Recounting a Vietnam pilot's story of how he was sent back repeatedly to bomb the same target, just to please the photo interpreters, Virilio remarks: 'People used to die for a coat of arms, an image on a pennant or flag; now they died to improve the sharpness of a film. War has finally become the third dimension of cinema.' In short, Virilio holds that in modern warfare, as the aim of battle shifts from territorial, economic, and material gains to immaterial, perceptual fields, the spectacle of war is displaced by the war of spectacle.
In the Gulf War the truth was not collaterally damaged as some incidental victim of a necessary violence. The truth - in the Nietzschean sense of 'illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten' - was constructed out of and authorized by spectacular, videographic, cyberspatial simulations of war.
Game Wars
'I hate to say it, but once we got rolling it was like a training exercise with live people running around. Our training exercises are a lot harder.'
Captain Kelvin Davis (after American troops captured Kuwait City)
We were primed for this war. Simulations had infiltrated into every area of our lives, in the form of news (re)creations, video games, flight simulators, police interrogations, crime reenactments, and, of course, media war games. Six days into the invasion of Kuwait Tom Brokaw on NBC News staged a war game with former U.S. officials standing in for Hussein and Bush. It ended with 'Hussein' threatening to 'send home body bags every day' and Brokaw warning us that 'that before too long we may have the real thing.' In October Ted Koppel on ABC Nightline weighed in with his 'Ides of November' war game. This war game differed from previous ones presented by Koppel (two on terrorism and one on nuclear war): there was not a pasha from Kissinger Associates in sight, and the talking-heads barely had equal time with the video simulations. Constructed and narrated by the authors of the book A Quick and Dirty Guide to War and the wargame Arabian Nightmare, the program featured stock clips of war exercises, computer simulations of bombing runs, many maps, and a day-by-day pull-down menu of escalating events. The post-game commentary (known in the ranks as a 'hot wash-up') was conducted by two military analysts armed with pointers, James Blackwell and Harry Summers, Jr. They ended with a split decision - and a final cautionary note that 'no plan survives contact with the enemy'.
By the first ultimatum in January, the representational boundary between the simulation and the 'real thing' was as attenuated as a fuse wire. War continued by means of simulation in its media representation as well as through its military preparation. Before the ground war the U.S. conducted a series of highly publicized war exercises, the largest being an amphibious Marine landing called 'Imminent Thunder'. In fact, no landing crafts were used because the seas were running too high. Nonetheless, the simulation 'worked'. When the allied troops reached Kuwait City they found in a school house used by the Iraqi military as a headquarters a room-sized model of the city. On a sand tableau there were, to scale, wooden ships, buildings, roads, barbed wire - and all the Iraqi guns pointing toward the sea attack that never came.
For those still retaining some control over their television sets during the war, there were illuminating intertexts to be seen on non-news channels. My local movie channel ran a Eastwood-Norris-Bronson-Stallone series to coincide with the real thing. But it was in switching over to the Fox station that I discovered the hoariness of the simulation theme when an episode on war games appeared on Star Trek - not on The Next Generation with its virtual reality holodeck, but on the toggle-switch and blinking-lights original. Called the 'Ultimate Computer', the episode pits Kirk against the 'M5 Multitronic Unit' in a wargame. After the crew is removed from the ship, Kirk is told by the creator of the computer 'to sit back and let the machine do the work'. As machine proves more adept then man, Kirk goes through several existential crises; that is, until the machine mistakes the game for war and destroys another ship by unfriendly fire. Angered and impassioned, Kirk stops soliloquizing and regains control of the ship by convincing the computer that by killing humans it has violated its primary purpose of protecting them.
It took Captain Kirk to pull the plug on the national security doublespeak of the Gulf War: we kill to live. Ironically, it was Peter Arnett reporting not from Baghdad but from Ben Tre, Vietnam who had recorded an earlier instance of that naked truth: 'it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.'
Science fiction offers other insights that journalism and lagging social science cannot provide. In the movie Aliens, when the Colonial Marines are being buffeted as they enter the atmosphere of the planet where the unknown awaits them, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) asks the obviously anxious Lieutenant how many combat drops this is for him. He replies 'Thirty-eight', pauses, and then adds - 'Simulated.' He quickly proves incapable of responding to situations that do not follow his simulation training. Both Kirk and Ripley should have been on the bridge of the U.S.S. Vincennes on July 3, 1988 when its radar operator and the tactical information coordinator mistook - after nine months simulation training with computer tapes - an Iranian Airbus for an attacking Iranian F-14 and shot it down.
Even more useful is the intertext of strategic power and popular culture provided by Tom Clancy. Clancy's first bestseller, the Red October has a hyperbolic blurb from former President Reagan. His second novel, Red Storm Rising, a thinly fictionalized mosaic of NATO war games, was authoritatively cited by Vice President Quayle in a foreign policy speech to prove that the U.S needs an anti-satellite capability. In his third, Patriot Games, Clancy magnifies the threat of terrorism to the prove that state counter-terrorism works; a view endorsed by Secretary of Defense Weinberger in a laudatory review of the book for the Wall Street Journal - which was then reprinted in the Pentagon's Current News for the edification of the 7,000-odd Defense and State Department officials who make up its readership. His fourth novel, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, in which Clancy plots the plight of a mole in the Kremlin, affirms the need to reconstruct the impermeable borders of the sovereign state with Star Wars. His fifth novel, Clear and Present Danger, opens with a quote from Pascal, 'Law, without force, is impotent', and closes with the unrepressed message that the U.S. will be impotent it it does not use -prudently of course - its technological edge in night-vision, GBU-15 laser-guided bombs, and satellite surveillance against drug cartels.
Taken together, Clancy's novels anticipate the strategic simulations that filled our screens during the Gulf War. Jammed with technical detail and seductive ordnance, devoid of recognizably human characters, and obliquely linked to historical events, they act as free-floating intertexts for saving the reality principle of the national security state: namely, that the sovereign state's boundaries, like those between fiction and fact, simulation and reality, can once again be made impermeable to any threat posed by this year's model of evil.
There is of course a fundamental and ultimate difference between war and its game: people die in wars. But this distinction also suffered erosion in the Gulf War. If we subtract the number of Allied soldiers (the Iraqi dead never 'figured') killed by 'friendly fire', there were more casualties in the war exercises leading up to 'G-Day' (the beginning of the ground war) than during the war itself.
End Game
'This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.'
William S. Burroughs, The War Universe
Was this a just war, or just a game? For the winners, both: for the losers, neither. To suggest as I have done in this video-essay that it could be both or neither simultaneously is to challenge the U.S. effort to construct out of this war a new world order based on one truth, one winner, one loser. To offer as I do nothing in its place but a Nietzshean 'breath of empty space' is to risk charges of relativism, or worse, nihilism. But this cyberwar is the result of the U.S. effort to fill and to delimit the new void left by the end of the cold war, the end of the old order, the 'end of history'. While the architecture of the new world order may be built of simulations, its hegemonic effect will be all too real for those nation-states that have little to gain from it.
Of course, the post-war historical possibilities are not so clear-cut, a nihilistic case of either all or nothing being permitted. But 'the end of the cold war' - that is, the end of the Soviet Union as a counter-balance to American hegemony - has re-opened a space - as pointed out by Baudrillard - for both war and peace.'
But Baudrillard does not get it quite right. If anything has been proven by this war, it is that simulations now rule not only in the war without warring of nuclear deterrence, but also in the post-war warring of the present. It was never in question that we would win the military conflict. But we did not win a 'war', in the conventional sense of a destroying a reciprocating enemy. What 'war', then, did the U.S. win? A cyberwar of simulations. First the pre-war simulation, Operation Internal Look 90, which defeated the Made in America Iraqi simulation for the invasion of Kuwait. Second, the war game of AirLand Battle which defeated an Iraqi army that resembled the game's intended enemy, the Warsaw Pact, in hyperreality only. Third, the war of spectacle, which defeated the spectacle of war on the battlefield of videographic reproduction. And fourth, the post-war after-simulation of Vietnam, which defeated an earlier defeat by assimilating Vietnam's history and lessons into the victory of the Gulf War.
Have we, 'by God', kicked the Vietnam Syndrome in Iraq? I am sure that as long as there is a great global gap in power and wealth there will be tenacious under-dogs with a taste for grey flannel - and more swift kicks to follow. But the score is being kept. Almost 25 years ago at the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm, Jean Paul Sartre rendered a verdict that bears remembering:
'It [the U.S] is guilty, by plotting, misrepresenting, lying and self-deceiving, of becoming more deeply committed every instant, despite the lessons of this unique and intolerable experience, to a course which is leading it to the point of no return. It is guilty, self-confessedly, of knowingly carrying on this cautionary war to make genocide a challenge and a threat to peoples everywhere. We have seen that one of the features of total war was a constant growth in the number and speed of means of transport; since 1914, war can no longer remain localized, it must spread through the world. Today the process is becoming intensified; the links of the One World, this universe upon which the United States wishes to impose its hegemony, are ever closer.'
Perhaps it is time to diagnose a 'Gulf War Syndrome', the construction and destruction of a lesser enemy that makes us all the greater in the 'new world order'. Iraq served its purpose well as the enemy other which redefined our own essential identities: but it was the other enemy, the new threat posed by the de-territorialization of the state and a disintegrating bipolar order that required the violent reconstitution of new monological truths.
The new disorder requires a commensurate de-territorialization of theory. We can no longer reconstitute a single site of meaning or reconstruct some neo-kantian cosmopolitian community; that would require a moment of enlightened universal certainty that has long past. Nor can we depend on or believe in some spiritual, dialectical or revolutionary processes to overcome or transcend the domestic and international divisions, ambiguities, and uncertainties that mark the age of video. Rather, we must find a way to live with and recognize the very necessity of difference, the need to assert heterogeneity before we can even begin to understand our role in the lives of others. This is not yet another utopian scheme to take us out of the 'real' world, but a practical strategy to live with less anxiety, insecurity, and fear in what Mikhail Bakhtin described as 'exotopy', and Michel Foucault as 'heterotopia'. These environments make possible broader realms of freedom where the heteroglossia of language bespeaks a heterodoxia in world politics, where radical otherness in international relations is assumed and asserted in dialogue, not subsumed and expressed in violence.
My strategy, to construct a counter-simulation to the war's after-images, is in the end only one of many beginnings towards one of many heterotopias. Not an endgame, then, but a game with no end, no winners, no losers, no rules but one: play in peace.
NOTES
See Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), pp. 40, 105.
The inspiration for the chapter comes mainly from the powerful (and yes, orientalist) opening to Spengler's chapter on 'Problems of the Arabian Culture'. See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Viking, 1927), vol. II, chapter seven, pp. 186-9:
'In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis.
'By the term "historical pseudomorphosis" I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.'
'This is the case of the Arabian Culture.'
This begs the onto-theological question that I deal with in the Introduction (see p. )
See in particular Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra (New York: Ace Books, 1964) and The Penultimate Truth (London: Triad, 1984); and the book in which William Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace', The Neuromancer (New York, Ace Books, 1984)
Lance Morrow, Time, 18 March 1991, p. 21.
Todd Gitlin, 'Theory in Wartime: An Interview with Todd Gitlin', Linguafranca, February 1991, p. 26. Another position of radical critics that I witnessed at various teach-ins and in journals like Z and Lies in Our Times was to attribute the war to a plan by the U.S. and Israel to lure Saddam Hussein into Kuwait and then spring the trap. This was such a perfect conspiracy that these same people were predicting as late as January U.S. casualties in the several thousands, a protracted war, and mass resistance. When this scenario failed to develop they fell back on a conspiracy theory to explain why the war so popular, so swift, and so total - and why their theoretical analysis was so far off.
See P. Virilio, Bunker Archeologie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1975), p. 42, on the dangers of 'bunker architecture: 'Le bunker est devenu un mythe, a la fois present et absent, present comme objet de repulsion pour une architecture civile transparente et ouverte, absent dans la mesure ou l'essential de la nouvelle forteress est ailleurs, sous nos pied, desormais invisible.'
See N. Chomsky, On Gulf Policy (Westfield, New Jersey: Open Magazine Series, 1991), p. 1. See also letter received from Chomsky ( ).
See J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81-2.
See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1988), and Walter Benjamin, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969).
New York Times, 28 February 1991, p. A8. I doubt whether we will ever see a 'Norm knows football' advertisement (rest easy Bo), for the only 'Hail Mary' play of the war was Iraq's desperate long bomb SCUD attacks. Charles Hables Gray (from the University of California at Santa Cruz) later pointed out to me that the appropriate football analogy for the Allies strategy was using the air game to set up the ground game, followed by a fake up the middle and power sweep around the left side.
USA Today, 8 October 1990, p. 8.
See J. Der Derian, 'War Games May Prove Deadly', Newsday, 9 December 1990.
See T. Allen, War Games: The Secret World of the Creators, Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing World War III Today (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987); and P. Perla, The Art of War gaming (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990)
Since journalists were as reluctant to credit the quote as they were keen to repeat it, it should be noted that Senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that '[T]he first casualty when war comes is truth.' Of course, the corruption of language is not always intentional. For instance, General Colin Powell's reference to the U.S. forces as 'Desert Storm Troopers' during a victory speech before a convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars went unreported, probably because it was considered to be an innocent slip (I'll leave it to the psychoanalysts to determine whether it was a Freudian one).
See F. Kracauer, 'Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces', trans. by T. Y. Levin, in New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), p. 95; and Kracauer's Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), forthcoming as The Mass Ornament, translated and edited by Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
See W. Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, ed. H Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 241-2.
See G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), no. 1, pp. 1 and 23. In a more recent work, Debord persuasively - and somewhat despairingly - argues that the society of the spectacle retains its representational power in current times: see Commentaires sur la Societe du Spectacle (Paris: Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1988).
See J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 2. The original French version, Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981), has more on the simulacral nature of violence in cinema. See in particular his readings of China Syndrome, Barry Lyndon, Chinatown, and Apocalypse Now, pp. 69-91.
See War and Cinema, p. 85.
See War and Cinema, p. 7.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), p. 67.
23Newsweek, 11 March 1991, p. 17.
24See Fatal Strategies, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. M. Poster (Standford, CA: Standford University Press, 1988), p. 191, quoted in Chapter Seven:
'Like the real, warfare will no longer have any place - except precisely if the nuclear powers are successful in de-escalation and manage to define new spaces for warfare. If military power, at the cost of de-escalating this marvelously practical madness to the second power, reestablishes a setting for warfare, a confined space that is in fact human, then weapons will regain their use value and their exchange value: it will again be possible to exchange warfare.'
25The art of deterrence, prohibiting political war, favors the upsurge, not of conflicts, but of acts of war without war.' See Paul Virilio, Pure War, p. 27.
26See Jean Paul Sartre, 'Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide', in Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 82-3.
greetings all
back from fufiling my professional obligations to the International Studies Association at our annual pow-wow (held this year at San Diego's Town and Country Resort, which resembles nothing so much as a Stalinist Vacation Camp), which included our watson-heavy panel on making IR docs (jim blight and janet lang doing their FOW riff as well), then back to 29 Palms for some quick follow-up interviews and getting lost in the desert...
Meanwhile, I heard good news from the situationist frontlines, a long email from eugene saying how much he enjoyed the class (and how much there is still left to do on the production front - he'll be back after the spring break to help kick-start the final projects). There is some apprehension about looming deadlines, so let's talk dates when we all return from the break.
I'm taking advantage of the down time to catch up on reading/;commenting on thematic essays/literature reviews/vblogs. If you've not done so yet, please do post them, or send them to me directly and I will post. As I said before, x-credit goes to those who contribute to the critical process and throw in their 2 cents as well - and 3 cents to those who, upon reflection and reviewing of the commentary offer up, in that '68 maoist spirit captured so well by chris marker in 'grin w/out cat' - their own auto-critique or meta-critique of the critiques (meta- always being betta').
Finally, Lauren reports (see below) that the NYTIME's is catching up to our class plan: a report today that the zombie zietgeist is once again stalking the dark halls of late modernity . Anyone who wants to join our top-secret mockumentary zombie short should let me know soon - or at least before I sell out and deliver the script to hollywood, the true mecca (having just returned from sunny southern california) of the undead.
VTY
JDD
Professor Der Derian
It seems the market is poised for the arrival of your mockumentary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/fashion/sundaystyles/26ZOMBIES.html?_r=1&8hpib&oref=slogin
(see: sunday styles section in nytimes "market for zombies? it's undead!)
Best,
Lauren Hinkson
Hey everyone: Here's my thematic essay for this week. Viva la revolucion!
Download file
Leora Fridman
3/21/06
IR180.95
Thematic Essay: Are we living the society of the spectacle?
According to Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle” is the society in which individuals no longer actually experience events, but in which all action is instead conducted through the represented image. Debord points to an institutional center that allows for communication and divorced-representation at the same time. He writes, “Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another.” (Debord 22) Despite today’s endless conversation about the isolating ability of networked media, are we of the contemporary era in fact linked only by this center that Debord describes? Is any kind of communication possible in a fashion not mediated by institutional forces? More concretely, what is it that we actually experience or see through today’s media?
In an era that continually defines itself with words such as “network” and “connectivity,” it may seem counter-intuitive to call its people isolated, but Debord’s society of the spectacle gives a name to the multiplicity of imagery that makes intimate communication so difficult today. In an internet chat-room for example, one individual’s statement is multiply translated before another individual understands it – be it through language or through the meanings that that statement holds for the receiving individual. Without the visual interaction that at one point in history was necessary for communication, these multiple meanings are much more available than they were in the past.
When we look to the concept of spectacle in the light of global media, we must first consider the institutions that most define our concept of the spectacular. The spectacular to Debord is a mode in which a person’s experience becomes mediated by capitalism and its prioritizing of consumption in the place of personal satisfaction. In a more popular-culture meaning, to make a spectacle of onself is to make a show of one’s experience or imaged self. These meanings shed light on one another because they allow us to realize that while one can create oneself as a spectacle, one creates it for a society made up of various institutions and classes of individuals. When one makes a spectacle of oneself, one displays awareness of this society. For Situationalists like Debord, there is no distinction between performed real-life and performed pretend-life. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” (Debord 12) Experience becomes a commodity that can be exchanged in order to reach across to people. Though it is primarily referred to in a negative light, the spectacle is a unifying force, for “in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece.” (Debord 33) The spectacle is in a sense necessary if we wish to establish discourse on image-related content.
In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin articulates the concept of “aura,” which he explains as a reaction of awe to art and other tokens of past moments. Benjamin argues that capitalist culture allows for the “decay of the aura” by mass-producing relics to the point that they no longer hold this type of awe. While he differs from Debord in his emphasis on the historical, like Debord, Benjamin expands his theory of images to the social realm. He writes, “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” (Benjamin III) It is important to note that Benjamin stresses the “organization” of human perception, rather than its existence or observation. This top-down language is similar to the central and singular imaging force that Debord describes. Benjamin draws a balance between the natural ability of many to organize his own perception with the historical necessity to organize this perception. When we consider the spectacular qualities of today’s image and media-relations, we must draw on this historical emphasis in order to understand the political workings of our global media.
With the advent of embedded journalism in today’s War on Terror, we are governed by an administration that clearly knows the power of journalism to communicate spectacle and has taken steps to integrate this communication into its definition of meaning in the War. A character like Saddam Hussein has been imaged differently throughout very recent history, but the contradictions of these multiple images are always held together by the spectacular connection necessary to communicate between the political arena and the general public. In the talk held in class last week by a panel of students at the Army War College (Lecture 3/15/06), one of the most striking characteristics of the discourse was the continual usage of the terms “good guys” and “bad guys.” Phil Scuda, Marine Career Infantry Officer, introduced his job with the description, “We find the bad guys and take care of them.” Speaking to a class at Brown University, the team must have been aware of the fact that they were not exactly “preaching to the choir,” so to speak. They in fact took several steps to defend military-press relations in a liberal light, but the “good guys” and “bad guys” remained unchallenged representations.
In order for a military to engage in a war on the other side of the world, it must remain spending and unbending, as well as vague, in its construction of the spectacular. While Scuda could rely on the historical awe and aura of the “bad guys” image to engage his audience in a unified understanding of who the War on Terror is fought against, in order to do so he had to separate this image from specific interpersonal connections. Corporal Frazier said at one point that, “Democracy is the freedom to…Fill in whatever you want.” However, in order to have a conversation about democracy, these fill-ins must fit within a limited number of blanks approved by the military administration.
In his 1988 follow up “Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Debord specified the idea of the spectacle to the “integrated spectacle,” the most hazardous and commanding form of spectacle, which he posits operates today. The integrated spectacle is one in which the spectacle is controlled by individuals considered experts, who often operate in secrecy in order to protect against an enemy (terrorism) of the spectacle “liberal democracy.” It is essential to this integrated spectacle that terrorism exists comparatively, which was demonstrated in the un-critiqued language of the Army War College speakers. At another point in the discussion, Scuda emphasized that, “One of the most effective weapons we have in the War on Terror is the truth,” and used this as a reason for not taking away the freedom of speech of others. This protection of an image of truthfulness requires careful consideration, a fact that became even clearer as the discussion turned to the role of an embedded journalist.
The increasing use of embedded and immersion journalists in today’s media points at our fascination with the ability to insert ourselves in an image—especially one fraught with power and danger. Though there is no question that the journalist develops a form of empathy when living the every day life of troops, we as viewers “back home” are in our turn empathetic with the journalist who we see in a battlefield through our television. In “Truth and Power,” an interview in Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault outlines truth as a concept that exists through “multiple forms of constraint” (Foucault 73) of power. These forms of constraint are certainly at work in the embedding of journalists, both through the restrictions that the military places on embedded journalists as well as the lifestyle constraints that we as viewers observe the journalist undergoing through embedding. Viewers tend to believe the truth of embedded journalists because they are constrained by the same constraints as the troops with which they are living. Viewers see the culture of home, of America (particularly white upper-middle class America), portrayed in a journalist who is constrained both the lifestyle of a soldier but who also constrains us in our understanding of what an individual of our culture would experience were we to be placed in such a foreign combat zone.
The process of a viewer’s determination of what side we are on in the conflicts narrated by global media allow an unfocused culture to understand itself behind a vague set of images. Debord describes modern culture as the locus of search for lost unity in an isolated representational world. (Debord 130) Benjamin further articulates a viewer who, unable to actually enter a world, instead consumes the image into him or herself and what he knows to be truth. He writes,
Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. (Benjamin XV)
This viewer ingests an image, rather than places himself into the world of the image to individually and thus critically comprehend it.
This idea of distraction is particularly meaningful in the context of today’s obsession with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) as both mental conditions and societal descriptions. Benjamin writes, “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise…The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” (Benjamin XV) What does examination entail if it is “absent-minded,” as Benjamin describes? Many have observed that it is the fault of today’s fast-paced media that so many children and adults develop symptoms of ADD. Critics of the influx of ADD diagnoses, such as Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the ADD Child, put forth the suggestion that viewers in fact use distractedness as an excuse not to accept what is actually going on in the world. In “ADD As a Social invention,” Armstrong notes the following;
During the 1992 political campaign, CBS News attempted to introduce an innovation in its newscasts: 30-second sound bites from the politicians to give the viewer more 'depth" into their views. The project had to be abandoned because the average adult viewer could not sustain his or her attention that long (the industry average for sound bites is around seven seconds). If this is true of adults--who grew up during the days of radio and early TV--then how much truer it is of today's children, who are inundated with Nintendo, the Internet, MTV, multimedia, and more.” (Armstrong “ADD As a Social Invention”)
Armstrong argues that as viewers today we remove ourselves to a condition or a point where we don’t have to see what’s going on but we can just catch glimpses of its production. Are viewers then distracted in Benjamin’s sense? Viewers have an immense multitude of modes of media and specifically news media, with which to engage ourselves. Yet if, as discussed earlier, these multiple images are in fact all centered, why do we find them so isolating that we are endlessly distracted? When the viewer is called into the cultured constraints of media journalism, he or she does not have to create his or her own versions of power. Instead, he or she has only to switch the channel to be again overwhelmed by power constraints and specified terminology behind images such as “bad boys.”
Today’s viewer is in fact centered by distraction itself. Louis Althusser in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” expresses the concept of “hailing,” in which a subject of an ideology is called into being as such when he or she is called (“hailed”) by labels internal to this ideology or system. In today’s media-public relationship, one can see that the more aware of this hailing the viewer is, the more lazy he or she is able to be, because he or she realizes that they can come into being without defining him or herself individually. Here we seem to have come full circle back to the substitution of the personal for the multiplied image. Debord writes, “In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality. Here ideology is at home; here separation has built its world.” (Debord 152) Today’s media imagery is continually multiplied to the point at which a viewer can no longer concentrate on an image individually and can no longer relate to another individual as a concentrated and focused self outside of the image. As watcher-consumers today, we have been inculcated with the idea that “the first casualty in war is truth,” but directly tied into this casualty is the casualty of the individual attention span. Perhaps instead of living exactly the society of the spectacle, we are living the society of the spectacular distraction.
Bibliography and Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc, 1998.
Armstrong, Thomas. “ADD As a Social Invention,” Education Week, 18 October, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin. February 2005. UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. 21 March 2006. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Der Derian, James. “Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos.” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1: 23 – 37, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York : Pantheon Books, 1984. 51-75.
IR180 Lecture. “Students from Army War College.” Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, Brown University, Providence, RI. 15 March 2006.
Hey - just thought you guys might be interested in this talk, definitely related to some of the theory we've been reading as well as evolving documentary rhetorics.
Leora
LAURA MULVEY
"Seeing the Past from the Present: Cinema Spectatorship in the Light of New
Technologies"
Laura Mulvey is widely known for her groundbreaking 1975 essay, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." She is Professor of Film and Media Studies,
Birkbeck College, University of London.
The Roger B. Henkle Memorial Lecture
Tuesday, April 4, 6:30 p.m. (tuesday after spring break)
Smith-Buonanno, Room 106
Sponsored by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Research in Culture and Media
Studies, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Department of English, The
Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Department of
Comparative Literature.
Greetings all
Have returned from embeddedness with 1st Battalion, 25th Marines exercise at 29 Palms. Survived sandstorm, snowstorm, and a sniper who seemed to dislike the media. Bottomline: it's not easy teaching military cultural awareness, as you shall see when I show some clips. With lean mean crew of Udris brother 6 hrs hi-def dv, 4 hrs dv, 1 hr super16 film, and over 400 stills were shot (some pix to follow). If anyone wants to help log this stuff, let me know.
Thanks to John Santos, Leora, Joe et al for keeping the ship on course. This week we go back to the future, looking at how the Cold War morphed into the Long War. We have some special guests coming to the seminar: five high-flyers from the Army War College, to give their perspective on the relationship between the military and the media. We'll be holding class in the Watson Joukowsky Forum since some other students will be joining us (feel free to bring a guest) and we want to shoot it with the robotic cameras. In case someone wants to gain some experience in robotics, they should let ellen and me know, pronto (first ones get into the control booth..). And if anyone wants to vblog for x-credit let me know as well.
See you at the screening Tuesday evening....
JDD
Hey I am wondering if anyone wants to video the 3-year-mark Iraq War rally in Providence on the 19th for the blog? I think it would be nice to get some real v-guerilla footage on the website---I was thinking 'Grin Without a Cat'/ 'Life out of Balence' style. I have two cameras and potentially can provide up to 5 if anyone is interested. Also, if anyone is out of town for the weekend, it might be a nice addition to get footage from another venue. Finally, I am almost done with my second video. It will hopefully be up by Tuesday, sorry for the delay.
This is the second part of Oliver and my vBlog for this week. The second section is a consolidated discussion between our class and Jim Blight and Janet Lang about the production techniques behind the Fog of War.
This first part of the vBlog is a consolidation of Jim Blight and Janet Lang's background in the making of Errol Morris' "The fog of War," and how they were catalysts in the film by getting McNamara interested in unearthing unknown facts from and gaining perspective on historical events he participated in.
Hey everyone - Here's my literature review for this week. Let me know if there's any problem reading it, and I'd really appreciate your comments! Thanks!
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Leora Fridman
3/6/2006
IR180.95
Literature Review: Global Media and Documentary Rhetorics
Although they come from distinct analytical perspectives, each of the readings on this week’s topic tackles the questions of media as it intersects with “the Real” and with “reality”. According to Jacques Lacan, “the Real” consists of that part of the outside world that resists description and compartmentalization through language. The documentary engages with the complications between the Real and reality as its makers and subjects struggle to intersect the written, the scripted and the filmed. Peter Steven’s The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media tackles these issues by defining in straightforward terms the power and effects of today’s globalized media. He highlights the political intersections of readership, ownership and manufacturing of knowledge through an explanation of conglomerates and summarized theories. Liz Stubbs’ Documentary Filmmakers Speak tackles several of Steven’s points more literally in a collection of interviews with contemporary documentary makers and their various techniques for handling objectivity, style, representation and the business of surviving on nonfiction film. Lastly, John Johnston’s collection of Friedrich A. Kittler’s essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems contextualizes Stubbs’ and Steven’s more economic and technical points in order to build a broader theory of screening, authorship and presentation in a mechanized age. I will proceed to summarize and analyze these texts further through the three central themes that I see running throughout; first, issues of objectivity, secondly, manners of authorship, and lastly, technology and its effect on representation.
Kittler uses the term Aufschreibesystem (translated as discourse network) to explain inscription by and on culture. This concept ties together some more diverse opinions on the handling of objectivity in media production. In the introduction to Literature, Media, Information Systems, John Johnston summarizes Kittler, saying,
“the notion of the discourse network points to the fact that at any given cross-sectional moment in the life of a culture, only certain data (and no other) are selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated, all else being ‘noise’…” (Johnston 9)
Johnston explains also that “in information theory ‘noise’ is precisely what disrupts a communication channel” (Johnston 9-10). In Kittler’s view we must then contextualize a documentary maker, who sees him or herself as a communication channel for a particular subject, as a filter for data within the discourse network, rather than a clear lens.
Stubbs’ interviews seem to fall relatively in line with this understanding. Albert Mayles highlights, “the problem we have in documentary in that it’s very difficult to film anything but what’s contemporary” (Stubbs 14). Mayles, like several of the other documentary makers in the book, does not downplay his personal role in filmmaking, but rather highlights the importance of empathy in gaining access to a story. He says, “There’s subjectivity and objectivity, and for me the thing that makes both possible is the affection, the empathy that you put into it” (Stubbs 6). This statement concurs with Kittler in some sense, by recognizing the fact that a story is brought out by an individual’s connection with it.
While there may be many levels of data, the documentary makers of Stubbs’ book admit that they can only represent one section of one moment if they hope to present a narrative. However, Kittler defines the role of film slightly differently than narrative, saying, “To presentify rather than narrate, simulate rather than verify –these are the maxims” (Johnston 98). The role of the filmmakers then, as defined by Kittler, would be to bring to light a particular moment’s presentness, rather than to narrate its existence. In turning a lens on one subject or element, film brings to light the responsibility of this element for allowing another object to present itself. Kittler, however, focuses on a general readership and general production rather than examining the intentions that come into play when individual creates a film. While they each express their goals differently, none of the interviewees in Stubbs’ book claim full objectivity. Bruce Sinofsky refuses to call his work “definitive truth,” saying,
I’m not one of those believers that you can ever have the definitive truth on film, because as soon as you edit one frame, what your cinematographer chooses to shoot…[has] an effect on the reality’s perception. I believe that it’s an impression, never the defined truth” (Stubbs 165).
The human voices of interviews like this one may be more difficult to condense into a theory, but they certainly present the individual aspect that Kittler neglects. D.A Pennebaker comments, “reality can mean so much to so many different people that I hesitate to even call our films reality films” (Stubbs 54). This comment also brings in the issue of multiplicity in filmic and genre interpretation, a theme, that is touched upon throughout several of the interviews.
The variation of answers in Stubbs’ book to the objectivity question indicates that different goals of media-makers can create different relationships with their subjects and societal contexts. In Global Media Steven explores this concept when he outlines three relationships of media and society; that in which media influence media, in which media reflect society, and in which media affect society (Steven 108). By engaging with these different categories, Steven is able to point at the subjectivity not only of the media itself, but of the audience, depending on what it hopes to receive from the media. For example, he discusses the pressure of business interests on journalists as media reflecting society and emphasized racial, ethnic and gender stereotyping as media affecting society. Steven’s outlook bears perhaps too heavily on the image of media as social control, but it does allow us to understand from a different perspective what documentary makers face in dealing in Kittler’s “discourse network.”
Stubbs’ focus on each documentary maker’s cutting and editing process forces her reader to look closely at the role of editing and self-editing in authorship. Though not all the interviewees agree with his statement, Joe Berlinger says, “The editing process, to me, is everything. That’s the equivalent of the script process, where you discover things you may not have noticed before…As a human being you can’t help but have some preconceived idea, but you have to be open to changing those ideas” (Stubbs 153). Ross McElwee also explains that he finds the structure of his film in the editing room that he many not have been completely aware of while shooting the footage (Stubbs 101). The documentary makers are aware of their own role in creating story. Some even speak of the pain of realizing that a scene has nothing to communicate. Many of the documentary makers in Stubbs’ book, however, seem to have escaped the larger ideological power conglomerations that Steven continually highlights, perhaps simply because of the marginal financial and power status that each one mentions in their interview.
In his reflections on editing, Steven emphasizes the fact that media communicates and emphasizes the legitimacy of those in power. However, when it comes to viewership he does admit that “not all texts are perfectly shaped vehicles for delivery of the dominant world view,” (Steven 100) and asks the reader about our own role in authorship by receiving media, particularly through the media of audience studies and broadcast rates (Steven 105). He differentiates between dominant, residual and emergent media, (Steven 93) each of which the reader understands and accepts at different levels.
Kittler, however, is much more unflinching in his approach to the godliness of the media creator, and cites the Bible and Koran as original texts of the storage of creation in writing. “…Writing stores only the fact of its authorization,” he writes, saying, “It celebrates the storing monopoly of the god who has invented it” (Johnston 37) and going on to detail the homogenization of the writing ability by state apparatuses. Kittler’s theory on inscription becomes even more relevant if we think of it in terms of a documentary maker like Ken Burns, who spends much of his films citing historical images and sources. Kittler declaims upon the “suspicion that all power comes from archives to which it returns,” (Johnston 35) pointing directly at the role of archival footage in films. Burns describes his work in the editing room as one with “all essentially detached static, moribund images. And we’re trying to tell a story. We’re trying to make the past come alive…into a moment where history is not was, but is, as William Faulkner says” (Stubbs 81). The story-making, then, comes about in the technology that allows for the cutting and re-forming of these images.
According to Kittler, the editing process and technology of film mimics human processes of perception. He writes,
Whereas the traditional arts treat orders of the symbolic or orders of things, film emits to its viewers their own process of perception—and this with a precision available only to experiment, which is to say, that it cannot be accessed either by consciousness or language. (Johnston 100)
Kittler is particularly fascinated by the contemporary shrinking difference between media through digitalization for the purpose of the viewer. He writes, “Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface, or, to put it better, the interface for the consumer” (Johnston 32). It is the process of readership then, that today’s technology serves. Even when there are incompatibilities between connected media, which he admits, Kittler says that it is the reader’s sense perception that “computes data” (Johnston 33).
Kittler meets Steven again here in the idea that though media’s forms converge in the personal computer, all this technology serves not only writerly, but readerly needs. Steven breaks these needs down into solutions to problems; as needs for realism, for spectacle, for privacy, for crowds, for consumption, for surveillance, for war, for globalization, and for democracy (Steven 69). Steven follows his familiar pattern in breaking down technology into the many different industrial forces that view for power on the viewer, but reminds us that, “to see technology as all-powerful…leads us into the conceptual trap known as technological determinism” (Steven 64). This is the point at which he differs from Kittler, who holds;
Film is total power…Mechanical media and strategies of shock…are triumphant precisely because of their self-exhibition. That is to say, how could a simulacrum of the central nervous system—and that, after all, was at one time phrased ‘of the Spirit’—be subject to further analysis? (Johnston 98)
To Kittler, it is the fact that we can see conceptualize a film is made that most tempts us to believe in its ability to capture reality, or even the Real that cannot be captured by other more language-based forms of media.
We can see in Stubbs’ interviews that the more her subjects are able to utilize technology, the more they feel able to program, or create, a film that closely aligns itself with their reality. Many address the beauties of a small camera that is less obtrusive during conversation or verite shooting, or the ease with which digital footage can be edited. In his introduction to Kittler’s essays Johnston summarizes that behind all of Kittler’s ideas “lies the recurrent specter of a totally programmable world” (Johnston 25). As a critical reader, one has to question the innate dangers of programming if film’s “presentifying” programming allows for the communication of unfamiliar or innovative stories, as in the cases of the documentary makers in Stubbs’ book.
Works Cited
Johnston, John, ed. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Friedrich A. Kittler Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997.
Steven, Peter. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2003.
Stubbs, Liz. Documentary Filmmakers Speak. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.
Although I am sure that eveyone knows this I just wanted to make sure... If you use Firefox or Safari or any RSS enabled browser, the GlobalMedia Blog is set up to use this new and very cool browsing system. Just bookmark the main website on your tool bar (or just normal bookmarks) and you are set to go.
Oliver
In our rush to be cutting edge, we should not forget the that old media war horse, the op-ed. While I'm in the desert chasing after the 25th Marines this week, I'd like you all to assess the pros and cons of this failed effort, as a kind of lessons-learned exercise. I'll read your comments from the field.....
JDD
(and I'm working on having a master of the medium , Michael Klare, come visit the class early in april to give us a quick tutorial in the art)
‘Oscar Likes Ike’ or
‘And the Winner is…the 1950s?’
James Der Derian
A specter is haunting Oscars night. In the 1940’s he helped save Western democracy from the Nazi war machine In the 1950’s his first act was to prosecute big oil; his last was to warn against the rise of a home-grown war machine. In the 1960’s, Procter and Gamble added the twinkle of a pirate’s earring to his iconic image to sell the premier kitchen product of the 1960s, ‘Mr. Clean.’
Dwight D. Eisenhower has come back from the graveyard of Dead Presidents to become the unlikely hero of Hollywood. George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’, a damning re-enactment of CBS-reporter Edward Murrow’s war on the Red Scare, ends with the grainy image of Eisenhower speaking in defense of habeas corpus. Guantanamo Bay, anybody?
Eugene Jarecki’s acclaimed documentary, ‘Why We Fight ’ (whose absence also haunts this year’s Oscars), opens with Eisenhower’s famous televised warning against the ‘unwarranted influence’ of a ‘military-industrial complex.’ Not a few viewers caught the analogy: The Long War on Terror as Cold War redux.
The Resurrection of Ike is happening in Washington as well as Hollywood. In January Al Gore opened a stemwinder speech (honest) to the American Constitution Society with a quote from Eisenhower: "Any who acts as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."
The battle for Ike’s ghost resumed a month later, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a rare outing to the Council on Foreign Relations to justify the DOD’s beleaguered ‘Information Operations’. He started with an anonymous quote: ‘we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of Muslims.’ These were not, said Rumsfeld, the words of ‘some modern-day image consultant in a public relations firm in New York City.’ The speaker, it turns out, was Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Rumsfeld closed his peroration for taking the media war to the enemy with – yes, a quote (liberally excerpted) from Eisenhower. He sets up the reference by noting how Eisenhower’s take on the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War has - despite some differences - ‘has resonance even today’. Rumsfeld then channels (and liberally excerpts) Eisenhower’s word: ‘We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope. . . ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. . . to meet it successfully [we must] . . . carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake.”
Seeking to make even more explicit the link between the Long War and the Cold War, Rumsfeld traveled last week to Independence, Missouri to deliver a major policy speech at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library. After WWII, many wished for a return to America’s isolationist past. But Truman held fast against the Cold War naysayers. America now faced a Long War against terrorism, an even more insidious kind of threat, one, said Rumsfeld, that ‘you couldn’t make a movie about.’ Oliver Stone, busy making a movie about the 9/11 attack, might beg to differ.
In a doppelganger war of nostalgia, Hollywood and Washington each claim the 1950s for their own. But let’s face it: as likable as Ike might have been, and as unappealing as the current global reality is, the 1950’s cannot be reduced to ‘Happy Days’ - or to the End Days. Nor does the present imbalance of terror inspired by a jihadist figurehead hiding in a cave compare to a Cold War balance of terror produced by two empires with thousands of nuclear warheads in silos. Indeed, making an icon of Ike now might just be the political equivalent of the Fonz jumping the shark: the official as well as popular narrative of the Long War being the successor to the Cold War has already peaked.
If the hallucinatory Penguins march away with the Best Documentary Award, and the Brokeback Cowboys ride off with Best Film, perhaps ‘50s nostalgia will give way to the ‘60s flashback; or worse, to ‘Flashback’ (understandably not nominated in 1990), in which the burnt-out radical played by Dennis Hopper uttered the movies’ singularly memorable line: ‘The '90s are going to make the '60s look like the '50s’. True enough, until Elvis left the White House. Stuck inside those military-industrial-media-entertainment blues again, the ‘50s - whatever way you slice and dice them - make the ‘00s look like a very bad trip. It’s time to fast-forward.
James Der Derian directs the Global Security Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, and is the author of Virtuous War
This is my Documentary Review from a week ago -- I'm sorry, it took some time to get me signed up to post! Thanks for reading,
Joe Posner
IR180.95
2/22/05
Incomplete Images
The two short pieces of film we watched this week for class, Late City and VY2K, both have new media and politics directly in their sights. Late City, in representing history and conveying information across great distances through television, and VY2K in creating it with VR military simulators and controllers that also span great distance. At the screening last night, Prof. Der Derian described VY2K as engaging the question of whether all the new technology should be viewed as an “enabler” or an “estranger.” It’s clear from the wide range of opinions expressed in VY2K that both of these statements are in some cases true. But while the utopian arguments for technology and new media made are important and inspiring, considering what we have today, the intermediate between then and the future utopians hope and work for, we need to be skeptical of both technology that eases the possibility of war, and arguments that simply blame that technology rather than the people and institutions using the technology. All the images we’re given now are at least somewhat incomplete – and the most we can learn from them is to be cognizant of that fact, skeptical, but not without a sense of history and of the possible future.
Late City’s segment on the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 makes, on the surface, important arguments about media representation of history in our age: if it is not documented in images, it is not history -- but images do not tell the whole story in any way. And as Art Simon points out in Late City, their meaning can be created as much by context as their content. This week’s reading in Tube of Plenty makes an important point about the context that media broadcast has had since the very beginning: “The network, having ‘sold’ a period, seemed to regard it as sponsor property, to be used as he designated. Sponsors were, in effect, being encouraged to take charge of the air.” (Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. p.57) Though things may seem different, the correlation between Nielsen ratings and advertising prices, between the constant threat of advertisers dropping your show, their influence shouldn’t be undervalued. This fact brings up a key intertext between Late City and “real” TV: while some of it’s advanced techniques in style have been adopted by popular TV, it’s stance against the superiority of images and the “military-industrial-media complex” hasn’t so much. An obvious exception is The Daily Show, but Jon Stewart will readily admit that his much-needed criticism of other media outlets is simply a search for laughs and advertising dollars, not “truth.” Late City seems much more pure in their intentions, and perhaps then its ultimate failure to become “ real TV” shouldn’t be so surprising: from the beginning, centrally broadcasted new media needs to be for the sponsors, because “press is free for those who own one,” not for those who will criticize those who own one.
In Prof. Der Derian’s “Cyber War” section of Late City, and in the various interviews in VY2K we see a more direct engagement of new tools used on the battlefield, and how new media redefines the commander’s relationship to that battlefield. Though Jaron Lanier professes to believe in the possibility of VR to perhaps create a pure improvisational space of human creativity, this half-statement shown in the documentary is certainly not the whole story. In a wired article Prof. Der Derian wrote for Wired about military simulators, he makes a much more pertinent point (to this class at least): “The simulated battlefield makes killing and dying less plausible, and therefore more possible.” (Der Derian, James. “Cyber-Deterrence.” http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/deterrence.cfm) This sentiment is echoed in a general consensus in VY2K: “tele-presence,” and the ability of new technology to extract people from the physical battlefield gives the illusion of control and make the war theatre seem much more like a play than a “human” endeavor. One critic even calls military “seductive,” as technology suggests “battle management,” again calling to mind theatre and business. Lanier’s optimistic statement of the possibility of “shared dreaming” seems much more malicious now – is this shared dream one where we’ll let images convince us to go to war under false pretenses? Or one where the supposed “control” over military action will make us dream of an impossibly “symbolic war?” Michael Ignatieff’s idea of symbolic war, in the context presented seems like a step forward: war will be able to get away from actual killing, and just send messages. This is nothing to be pleased about – I for one, would rather complicated diplomatic politics through conversation (or televised conversations) rather than precision bombs (or televised bombings).
The arguments faulting technology were initially much more convincing than those praising technology’s creative and potentially democratizing power as they inspire fear of technology as an “estranger,” because they show how on a large scale they might make going to war a little bit easier, a little bit less real, and as Der Derian says in Late City, simplified to a “screenful of good guys, bad guys, and passive viewers.” But the cloak that both VY2K and Late City pull over our eyes is a particular subjectivity – one that the producers of the films will readily admit to – that they’ve privileged the importance of their type of media (be it TV or VR) over the powerful forces that existed before it, and still exist above it. At last week’s screening of Why We Fight, Jarecki warned of the same thing. Just as it is “people who make the VR” (Mark Pesce, VY2K), it is people that use it too – people guided by their actions, but also by the pre-existing institutions in which they act. Both of these documents could be partially faulted for their narrow focus, but they do make some attempt to address their incomplete nature: Late City mentions the protests at news stations during the Gulf War and curious lack of demonstration at the pentagon. VY2K engages creative minds that are thinking outside of the box of current events. While both provide adequate and necessary warning about the present skepticism about images and technology, they don’t hold people and institutions accountable: people still pull the trigger on a “smart” bomb and people could read the written word rather than watch images of falling bombs. Their decisions are based on so much more than the technology they use to make them.
