[-empyre-] Warporn warpunk! Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime

[Matteo Pasquinelli <matteopasquinelli@gmx.it>]

"Warpunk is a squadron of B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical 
images into the heart of the Western imagery."

Edited by Arianna Bove and Erik Empson.
Web, Pdf, italian and spanish translation here:
www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2364

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Matteo Pasquinelli

WARPORN WARPUNK!
Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime




Grinning monkeys

How do you think you can stop war without weapons? The anti-war public 
opinion that fills squares worldwide and the cosmetic democracy of 
International Courts stand powerless in front of the raging US 
military. Against the animal instincts of a superpower reason cannot 
prevail: a homicidal force can be arrested only by another, stronger 
force. Everyday we witness such a Darwinian show: history repeating 
itself through a cruel confrontation of forces, whilst what rests is 
freedom of speech exercised in drawing-rooms. Pacifists too are 
accomplices of instinctive forces, because animal aggressiveness is 
inside us all. How do we express that bestiality for which we condemn 
armies? Underneath the surface of the self-censorship belonging to the 
radical left (not only to the conformist majority), it should be 
admitted publicly that watching Abu Ghraib pictures of pornographic 
tortures does not scandalize us, on the contrary, it rather excites us, 
in exactly the same way as the obsessive voyeurism that draws us to 
videos of 9/11 videos. Through such images we feel the expression of 
repressed instincts, the pleasure rising again after narcotized by 
consumerism, technologies, goods and images. We show our teeth as 
monkeys do, when their aggressive grin looks dreadfully like the human 
smile. Contemporary thinkers like Baudrillard and Zizek acknowledge the 
dark side inside Western culture. If 9/11 has been a shock for Western 
consciousness, Baudrillard puts forward a more shocking thesis: we 
westerners were to desire 9/11, as the death drive of a superpower that 
having reached its natural limits, knows and desires nothing more than 
self-destruction and war. The indignation is hypocrisy; there is always 
an animal talking behind a video screen.



On the videowar battleground

Before pulling the monkey out of the TV set, we have to focus on the 
battleground on which the media match is played. The more reality is an 
augmentation of mass, personal, and networked devices, the more wars 
become media wars, even if they take place in a desert. The First 
Global War started by live-broadcasting the 9/11 air disaster and 
continued with video-guerrilla episodes: everyday from the Iraqi front 
we received videos shot by invaders, militiamen, and journalists. Every 
action in such a media war is designed beforehand to fit its 
spectacular consequences. Terrorists have learnt all the rules of 
spectacular conflict while imperial propaganda, much more expert, has 
no qualms about playing with fakes and hoaxes (for instance the 
dossiers on weapons of mass destruction). Bureaucratic propaganda wars 
are a thing of the past. New media has generated guerrilla combat, 
opening up a molecular front of bottom-up resistance. Video cameras 
among civilians, weblogs updated by independent journalists, 
smart-phones used by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison: each 
represents an uncontrollable variable that can subvert the propaganda 
apparatus. Video imagery produced by television is now interlaced with 
the anarchic self-organized infrastructure of digital networked media 
that has become a formidable means of distribution (evidenced by the 
capillary diffusion of the video of the beheading of Nick Berg). 
Today's propaganda is used to manage a connective imagery rather than a 
collective spectacle, and the intelligence services set up simulacra of 
the truth based on networking technologies.


The videoclash of civilizations

Alongside the techno-conflict between horizontal and vertical media, 
two secular cultures of image face each other on the international 
mediascape. The United States embodies the last stage of videocracy, an 
oligarchic technocracy based on hypertrophic advertising and 
infotainment, and the colonization of the worldwide imagery through 
Hollywood and CNN. Nineteenth century ideologies such as Nazism and 
Stalinism were intimately linked to the fetishism of the idea-image (as 
all of western thought is heir to Platonic idealism). Islamic culture 
on the contrary is traditionally iconoclast: it is forbidden to 
represent images of God and the Prophet, and usually of any living 
creature whatsoever. Only Allah is Al Mussawir, he who gives rise to 
forms: imitating his gesture of creation is a sin (even if such a 
precept never appears in the Koran). Islam, unlike Christianity, has no 
sacred iconographic centre. In mosques the Kiblah is an empty niche. 
Its power comes not from the refusal of the image but from the refusal 
of its centralizing role, developing in this way a material, 
anti-spectacular, and horizontal cult. Indeed, on Doomsday, painters 
are meant to suffer more than other sinners. Even if modernization 
proceeds through television and cinema (that paradoxically did not have 
the same treatment of painting), iconoclastic ground remains active and 
breaks out against western symbols, as happened in the case of the 
World Trade Centre. To strike at western idolatry, pseudo-Islamic 
terrorism becomes videoclasm, preparing attacks designed for live 
broadcasting and using satellite channels as a resonant means for its 
propaganda. Al-Jazeera broadcasts images of shot-dead Iraqi civilians, 
whilst western mass media removes these bodies in favour of the 
military show. An asymmetrical imagery is developing between East and 
West, and it will be followed by an asymmetrical rage, that will break 
out with backlashes for generations to come. In such a clash between 
videocracy and videoclasm, a third actor, the global movement, tries to 
open a breach and develop therein an autonomous videopoiesis. The 
making of an alternative imagery is not only based on self-organizing 
independent media, but also on winning back the dimension of myth and 
the body. Videopoiesis should speak - at the same time - to the belly 
and to the brain of the monkeys.


Global video-brain

Western media and awareness was woken up by the physical force of 
live-broadcasted images not by the news of tortures at the Abu Ghraib 
prison or of Nick Berg's beheading. Television is the medium that 
taught the masses a Pavlovian reaction to images. It is also the medium 
that produced the globalisation of the collective mind (something more 
complex than the idea of public opinion). The feelings of the masses 
have been always reptilian: what media proliferation established is a 
video mutation of feelings, a becoming-video of the collective brain 
and of collective narration. The global video-brain functions through 
images whereas our brains think out of images. This is not about 
crafting a theory, but recognising the natural extension of our 
faculties. Electronic and economic developments move at too high a 
speed for the collective mind to have time to communicate and elaborate 
messages in speech, there is only time for reacting to visual stimuli. 
A collective imagery arises when a media infrastructure casts and 
repeats the same images in a million copies, producing a common space; 
a consensual hallucination around the same object (that afterwards 
becomes word-mouth or the movie industry). In the case of the TV medium 
such a serial communication of a million images is much more lethal, 
because it is instantaneous. On the other hand, the networked imagery 
works in an interactive and non-instantaneous way, this is why we call 
it connective imagery. Imagery is a collective serial broadcasting of 
the same image across different media. According to Goebbels, it is a 
lie repeated a million times that becomes public discourse, part of 
everyday conversations, and then accepted truth. Collective imagery is 
the place where media and desire meet each other, where the same 
repeated image modifies millions of bodies simultaneously and inscribes 
pleasure, hope and fear. Communication and desire, mediasphere and 
psychosphere, are the two axis that describe the war to the global 
mass, the way in which the war reaches our bodies far from the real 
conflict and the way image inscribes itself into the flesh.



Animal narrations

Why does reality exist only when framed by a powerful TV network? Why 
is the course of events affected by the evening news? Collective 
imagery is not affected by the video evolution of mass technologies 
only, but also by the natural instincts of human kind. As a political 
animal (Aristotle), the human being is inclined to set up collective 
narratives, that represent the belonging instinct to its own kind. 
Let's call them animal narratives. For this reason television is a 
"natural" medium, because it responds to the need of creating one 
narrative for millions of people, a single animal narrative for entire 
nations, similarly to what other narrative genres, like the epic, the 
myth, the Bible and the Koran, did and still do. Television represents, 
above all else, the ancestral feeling to belong to one Kind, that is 
the meta-organism we all belong to. Each geopolitical area has its own 
video macro-attractor (CNN, BBC, etc.), which the rest of the media 
relate to. Beside the macro-attractors, there are meta-attractors, 
featuring the role of critical consciousness against them, a function 
often held by press and web media (the Guardian, for instance). Of 
course the model is much more complex: the list could continue and end 
with blogs, which we can define as group micro-attractors, the smallest 
in scale, but suffice it to say here that the audience and power of the 
main attractor are ensured by the natural animal instinct. This 
definition of mass media might seem strange, because they are no longer 
push media  that communicate in unidirectional ways (one-to-many), but 
pull media that attract and group together, media in which we invest 
our desires (many-to-one). Paraphrasing Reich's remark on fascism, we 
can say that rather than the masses being brainwashed by the media 
establishment, the latter is sustained and desired by the perversion of 
the desire to belong.


Digital anarchy. A videophone vs. Empire

Traditional media war incorporates the internet and the networked 
imagery (with television, internet, mobile phones and digital cameras) 
turns into a battle ground: personal media such as digital cameras 
bring the cruelty of war directly into the living room, for the first 
time in history at the speed of an internet download and out of any 
governmental control. This networked imagery cannot be stopped, and 
neither can technological evolution. Absolute  transparency is an 
inevitable fate for all of us. The video phone era seriously undermines 
privacy, as well as any kind of secrecy, state secrecy included. 
Rumsfeld's vented outrage in front of US Senate Committee on Armed 
Services about the scandal at Abu Ghraib is extremely grotesque: "We're 
functioning... with peacetime constraints, with legal requirements, in 
a wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running 
around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs 
and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our 
surprise, when they had - they had not even arrived in the Pentagon". A 
few days later Rumsfeld prohibited the use of any kind of camera or 
videophone to the American soldiers in Iraq. Rumsfeld himself was the 
'victim' of the internet broadcasting of a famous video that shows him 
politely shacking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983.  New digital media 
seem to have created an unpredictable digital anarchy, where a video 
phone can fight against Empire. The images of torture at Abu Ghraib are 
the internal nemesis of a civilization of machines that is running out 
of control of its creators and demiurges. There is a machine nemesis 
but also an image nemesis: as Baudrillard notes, the Empire of the 
Spectacle is now submitted to the hypertrophy of the Spectacle itself, 
to its own greed for images, to an auto-erotic pornography. The 
infinitely repeatable character of digital technology allowed for the 
demise of the copyright culture through P2P networks, but also for the 
proliferation of digital spam and the white noise of  contents on the 
web. Video phones have created a networked mega-camera, a super-light 
panopticon, a horizontal Big Brother. The White House was trapped in 
this web. Digital repetition no longer delivers us to the game of 
mirrors of Postmodern weak thought - to the image as self-referential 
simulacrum - but rather to an interlinked universe where videopoiesis 
can connect the farthest points and cause fatal short circuits.



War porn

Indeed, what came to light with the Abu Ghraib media scandal was not a 
casual short-circuit, but the implosion into a deadly vortex of war, 
media, technology, body, desire. Philosophers, journalists and 
commentators from all sides rushed to deliver different perspectives 
for a new framework of analysis. The novelty of the images of Abu 
Ghraib and Nick Berg (whether fictional or not is not the point) 
consists in the fact that they forged a new narrative genre of 
collective imagery.  For the first time, a snuff movie was projected 
onto the screen of global imagery and internet subcultures, used to 
such images, suddenly came out of the closet: rotten.com finally 
reached the masses. Rather than making sense of a traumatic experience, 
newspapers and weblogs worldwide are engaged in drawing out the 
political, cultural, social and aesthetic repercussions of a new genre 
of image that forces us to upgrade our immunity system and 
communicative strategies. As Seymour Hersh noted, Rumsfeld provided the 
world with an good excuse to ignore the Geneva Convention from now on. 
But he lowered the level of tolerance of the visible as well, forcing 
us to accept cohabitation with the Horror. English-speaking journalism 
defines as war porn the popular tabloids and government talk-shows 
fascination  with super-sized weapons and well-polished uniforms, 
hi-tech tanks and infrared-guided bombs, a panoplia of images that some 
define as the aseptic substitute of pornography proper. Ridley Scott's 
Black Hawk Down  is war hardcore, to name one.  The cover of Time, 
where the American soldier was chosen as Person of the Year, was 
defined pure war porn by Adbusters: "Three American Soldiers standing 
proudly, half-smiles playing on their faces, rifles cradled in their 
arms".  War porn is also a sub-genre of trash porn - still relatively 
unknown, coming from the dark side of the net. It simulates violent sex 
scenes between soldiers or the rape of civilians (pseudo-amateur movies 
usually shot in Eastern Europe and often passed as real). War porn is 
freed from its status of net subculture: its morbid interest and fetish 
for war imagery become political weapons, voyeurism and the nightmares 
of the masses. Is it a coincidence that war porn emerges from the Iraqi 
marshes right at this time?


Digital-body rejection

The metaphorical association of war with sex that underpins much 
Anglo-American journalism points to something deeper that was never 
before made so explicit: a libido that, alienated by wealth, awaits war 
to give free reign to its ancestral instincts. War is as old as the 
human species: natural aggressiveness is historically embodied in 
collective and institutional forms, but several layers of technology 
have separated today's war from its animal substratum. We needed Abu 
Ghraib pictures to bring to the surface the obscene background of 
animal energy that lied underneath a democratic make-up. Did this 
historic resurfacing of the repressed occur today simply because of the 
mass spreading of digital cameras and video phones? Or is there a 
deeper connection between the body and technology bound to prove to be 
deadly sooner or later? As the mass media are filled with tragic and 
morbid news, the framing of digital media seems to be missing something 
from its inception. This could be that passion of the real (Alain 
Badiou) which, exiled  onto the screen, explodes out of control. New 
personal media are directly connected to the psychopathology of 
everyday living, we might say that they create a new format for it and 
a new genre of communication, but above all, they establish a relation 
with the body that television never had. War porn seems to signal the 
rejection of technology by subconscious forces that express themselves 
through the same medium that represses them: this rejection might point 
to the ongoing adaptation of the body to the digital. Proliferation of 
digital prosthesis is not as rational, aseptic and immaterial as it 
seems. Electronic media seemed to have introduced technological 
rationality and coolness into human relations, yet the shadows of the 
digital increasingly re-surface. There comes a point when technology 
physically unbridles its opposite. The internet is the best example: 
behind the surface of the immaterial and disembodied technology lies a 
traffic of porn content that takes up half of its daily band-width. At 
the same time, the Orwellian proliferation of video cameras, far from 
producing and Apollonian world of transparency, is ridden with 
violence, blood and sex. The next Endenmol Big Brother will resemble 
the movie Battle Royal, where Takeshi Kitano forces a class of students 
on an island and into a game of death where the winner is the last 
survivor. We have always considered the media as a prosthesis of human 
rationality, and technology as the new embodiment of the logos. But new 
media also embody the dark side of the Western world. In war porn we 
found this Siamese body made up of libido and media, desire and image. 
Two radical movements that are the same movement: war reinvests the 
alienated libido, personal media  are filled by the desperate libido 
they alienated. The subconscious can not lie, the skeletons sooner or 
later start knocking on the closets door.


Imagery reset

War results from the inability to dream, after depleting all libidinal 
energy in an outflow of prosthesis, commodities, images. War violence 
forces us to believe again in images of everyday life, images of the 
body as well as images of advertising. War is an imagery reset. War 
brings the attention and excitement for advertising back to a zero 
degree, where advertising can start afresh. War saves advertising from 
the final annihilation of the orgasm, from the nirvana of consumption, 
the inflation and indifference of values. War brings the new economy 
back to the old economy, to traditional and consolidated commodities, 
it gets rid of immaterial commodities that risk dissolving the economy 
into a big potlatch and into the anti-economy of the gift that the 
internet represents. War has the "positive" effect of redelivering us 
to 'radical' thought, to the political responsibility of 
representation, against the interpretative flights of "weak thought", 
of semiotics and postmodernism (where postmodernism is the western 
image looking for an alibi to its own impotence). The pornographic 
images of war, as we said, are the reflux of the animal instinct that 
our economic and social structure has repressed. But rather than a 
psychoanalysis that reactively justifies new customs and fashions, we 
seek to carry out a 'physical' analysis of libidinal energy. In wartime 
we see images re-emerge with a new autonomous and autopoietic force. 
There are different kinds of image: war porn images are not 
representations, they speak directly to the body, they are a cruel, 
lucid and affirmative force, like Artaud's theatre, they are 
re-magnetised images that do not provoke incredulity, they are neural 
icons running on the spinal motorways, as Ballard would put it. Radical 
images redeliver the body to us, radical images are bodies, not 
simulacra. Their effect is first physical then cognitive. The 
movement-image and the flux-matter are rigorously one and the same 
thing (Deleuze). The damned tradition of the image is back, with the 
psychic and contagious power of Artaud's theatre, a machinic image that 
joins together the material and the immaterial, body and dream. Fiction 
is a branch of neurology (Ballard). In a libidinal explosion, war porn 
liberates the animal energies of Western society like a bomb. Such 
energies can be expressed through fascist reactions as well as 
liberating revolts. Radical images are images that are still capable of 
being political, in the strong sense of the word, and they can have an 
impact on the masses that is simultaneously political, aesthetic and 
carnal.



Videopoiesis: the body-image

How can we make an intelligent use of television? The first intelligent 
reaction is to switch it off. Activists collective such as 
Adbusters.org (Canada) and Esterni.org (Italy) organize yearly TV 
strikes, promoting a day or a week's abstinence from television. Can 
Western society think without television? It cannot. Even if we were to 
stop watching TV because of a worldwide black-out or a nuclear war, our 
imagery, hopes and fears would carry on thinking within a televised 
brainframe. This is not about addiction, the video is simply our 
primary collective language: once upon a time there were religion, 
mythology, epic and literature. We can repress the ritual (watching TV) 
but we cannot repress the myth. We can switch television off, but not 
our imagery. For this reason the idea of an autonomous videopoiesis is 
not about practicing of alternative information but about new mythical 
devices for the collective imagery. In its search for the Perfect Image 
- that is the image that is capable of stopping the War, subverting 
Empire and starting the Revolution - the global movement has theorised 
and practiced video activism (from Indymedia to street TVs) and 
mythopoiesis (from Luther Blissett to San Precario). However, it never 
tried to merge those strategies into a videopoiesis capable of 
challenging Bin Laden, Bush, Hollywood and the CNN at the level of 
myth, a videopoiesis for new icons and formats, like for instance the 
video sequences of William Gibson's Patter recognition distributed on 
the net. Videopoiesis does not mean the proliferation of cameras in the 
hands of activists, but the creation of video narratives, a new design 
of genres and formats rather than alternative information. The 
challenge lies in the body-image. Through videopoiesis we have to 
welcome the repressed desires of the global movement and open the 
question of the body, buried under a para-catholic and third-worldist 
rhetoric. While Western imagery is being filled with the dismembered 
bodies of heroes, the global movement is still uneasy about its 
desires. War porn is a challenge for the movement not to equal the 
horror but to produce images that awaken and target the sleepy body. 
Throughout its history, television has always produced macro-bodies, 
mythical giant bodies magnified by media power, bodies as cumbersome as 
Ancient Gods. The television regime creates monsters, hypertrophic 
bodies such as the image of the President of Unites States, the 
Al-Qaeda brand and movie stars, while the net and personal media try to 
dismember them and produce new bodies out of their carcasses. 
Videopoiesis must eliminate the unconscious self-censorship that we 
find in the most liberal and radical sections of society, the 
self-censorship that, behind a crypto-catholic imagery, hides the grin 
of the monkey. Once crypto-religious self-censorship is eliminated, 
videopoiesis can begin its creative reassembly of dismembered bodies.


Warpunk. I like to watch!

Watching cruel images is good for you. What the Western world needs is 
to stare at its own shadows. In Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition war 
news and violent scenes improve adults' sexual activity and the 
condition of psychotic children. War lords are filling the collective 
imagery with brute force. Why leave them to do it in peace? If in the 
real world we are always victims of the blackmail of non-violence, in 
the realm of imagery and imagination we can feed our wet dreams at 
last. If American imagery is allowing a drift towards Nazism and is 
offering an apology and justification for any kind of violence, our 
response can only be an apology of resistance and action, that is 
warpunk.  Warpunk is not a delirious subculture that embraces weapons 
in an aesthetic gesture. On the contrary it uses radical images as 
weapons of legitimate defense. To paraphrase a Japanese saying, warpunk 
steals from war and empire the art of embellishing death. Warpunk uses 
warporn in a tragic way, to overcome Western culture and the 
self-censorship of its counter-culture. Above all we are afraid of the 
hubris of the American war lords, of the way they face any obstacle 
stepping over all written and unwritten rules. What is the point of 
confronting this threat with the imagery of the victim, that holds up 
to the sky hands painted in white? Victimhood is a bad adviser: it is 
the definitive validation of Nazism, the sheep's baa that makes the 
wolf even more indifferent. The global movement is quite a good example 
of "weak thought" and reactive culture. Perhaps this is because, unlike 
war lords and terrorists, it never developed a way of thinking about 
the tragic, war, violence and death. A tragic thought is the gaze that 
can dance on any image of the abyss. In Chris Korda's I like to watch 
video (download available on www.churchofeuthanasia.org) porn scenes of 
oral sex and masturbation are mixed with those of football and baseball 
matches and with well-known NY911 images. The phallic imagery reaches 
the climax: the Pentagon is hit by an ejaculation, multiple erections 
are turned into the NY911 skyline, the Twin Towers themselves become 
the object of an architectural fellatio. This video is the projection 
of the lowest instincts of American society, of the common ground that 
bind spectacle, war, pornography and sport. It is an orgy of images 
that shows to the West its real background. Warpunk is a squadron of 
B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the heart of the 
Western imagery.


Matteo Pasquinelli    (matATrekombinant.org)
Bologna, May 2004