[-empyre-] Lee, Susan, Bill, Matteo, more others
This time, I may disagree with HG. Can be more a bit with Christina? Let us
see if may be not (regarding my possible misunderstanding of EN).
For beginning I quote again the exposition "Iconoclash" that appears the
reference concerning the anachronistic point of view of iconography after
post modernity.
1.
Of Lee Lozano,
http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/archives20040301.shtml (EN)
http://www.art21.fr/quitterart.php (FR)
That could be among these artists of their life as experiment as living Art
work both producing Art works; more Surrealist influence from the forties
and the beginning fifties that have been high in New York, cause the war in
Europe made emigrated the most of them (more any thinkers as the inventor of
structuralism from Ethnology that was Claude Levy-Strauss).
But there were several more ones in in these years of Lee Lozano (early
sixties and a bit later), both and otherwise characterized by the radical
criticism or representative Arts as power of the value through a free social
conception of current life as proper Art work (the total coherence of the
value by denying the value): as/and the political criticism of Art, more the
critical Art as poetry from NYc to Cisco, since the beat generation till
underground movement, crossing Hippies and Pop years and for the time free
experimental multi fields works from text to painting through "collages" and
simulated collages (or movies). But can you talk of ecstatic regarding her
works? It is not what coming at my idea (even you think she could be self
ecstatic regarding her proper visions to the painting, mostly if you knew
her), can means both anxiety if ecstatic, it appears.
If she is the artist I think (conferring both EN and FR links), well-known
in my youngness:) as she was famous in NY (having exposed at the Whitney,
and other places) . The question can be: of a most radical process from a
self dissolution both coming from self abuse to herself, more voluntarism of
staying high in Art by not reproducing her Art instead of making her Art, at
the moment she could not follow to create inspired ( more as she could not
more created but Art 'marijuana and 'Marijuana as Art ;-)
Anything more simply regarding the context and the environment it is the
political re discovery just emerging US from Mac Carthy in the growing
sixties making the common link between each cause. Art that was the
incredible solution of beauty being not beauty but the critical politics
which end in Pop Art as Art of the new galleries, with the produces and
stars of The factory as radical criticism of the American society of
commodity and information ( last end celebrated by Valery Solanas' author of
Scum manifesto in her tentative of killing Warhol as revenge for an
humiliation she has received about a scenario): It is just to say of life
as/and Art but anyway a productive activity in these years.
2. Arts regarding Abu Graib
From a part
I think that Baudrillard's "War pornography" to answer the critical question
of the pics (sorry FR but integral quote below of Pornographie de la guerre"
because it is not more reachable in LibÃration even I quote the link at the
end of the text)
What coming much more after his "Disneyworld company" (translated in
Ctheoryâ3/27/1996 )
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=158
More this comment EN regarding both texts after Abu Graib:
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1592.shtml
From a second part
Susan Sontag's last article in The New York times "Regarding the torture
of others" (tribute her book "Regarding the Pain of others") that was
published more in a critical answer just after Baudrillard's War pornography
in Liberation, and being republished in The guardian under the title: " What
Have We Done?" (quote from Common Dreams below)
From a third part
Matteo Pasquinelli on videoclash in
" Warporn Warpunk â Autonomous Videopoesis in Wartime"
Published in rekombinant and more other sites.
>From these quotations by self regarding the pics of Abu Graib I think that
you cannot argue more of Artists but the Entire Society both integrated as
watcher and as photographer: this a phenomena, this is an event, but this is
not Art. It excess tech arts by tech media and technological medias as mode
of society by the tech view of the bare scene.
As for the frame and the scene nothing more but to see with the prime frames
of the post cards in several times of the history of public photography and
traditional frames coming from the naturalist iconography useful to inform
since the times of paintings till the times of photography.
As for cruelty: what you say does not regard otherwise Arts as SM being a
way of Art specially designated to their consumers. The public event is porn
not SM (that is community).
Not to quote historic dark examples of SM in emergent Art from the power, as
counter examples of insubordination of Queer, that would not more glorify
the critical society as well the insubordination of Sade or Sacher Masoch...
Understand the critical sense from Salo, the film which probably has costed
the life to Pasolini because he treated of SM as emergent Salo as extreme
Art from the nazis' and fascist power.
Being still secretly powerful alive since the war, this part of the power
could not have an extreme revenge.
I is not Art but Politics through the Art of being a filmaker and a poet in
bare critical implication.
In this base, concerning the quotations of Lebanese letters that appealed,
in such a debate of emergent arts and life from an historical disposition of
Arts, I think that the public quotation of the bare life under the mediate
writing both needs the public reparation (the petition or other act): or
becoming porn (at the sense of the three essays I refer) from the basic
statement of watch/watching of the writers and of the readers.
To finish, I do not think that the quotation of bare life re-interpretated
in a language such as subjective expression in writings or paintings, and
whatever mode of critical fiction, at the moment they are not direct
naturalistic technical tracks (as well sounds, as well pics, as well videos,
in report), they never can be porn. But the question that comes is that
unfortunately it is no more representative of arts at the view of the public
interest or the public power;-)
L.
//////////////////
"Les images de tortures en Irak sont chargÃes de la dÃmesure d'une puissance
se dÃsignant elle-mÃme comme abjecte" -Jean Baudrillard.
Pornographie de la guerre
Par Jean BAUDRILLARD
mercredi 19 mai 2004
World Trade Center : l'Ãlectrochoc de la puissance, l'humiliation infligÃe Ã
la puissance, mais de l'extÃrieur. Avec les images des prisons de Bagdad,
c'est pire, c'est l'humiliation, tout aussi meurtriÃre symboliquement, que
s'inflige la puissance mondiale à elle-mÃme  les AmÃricains en l'occurrence
Â, l'Ãlectrochoc de la honte et de la mauvaise conscience. C'est en quoi les
deux ÃvÃnements sont liÃs.
Devant les deux, une rÃaction violente dans le monde entier : dans le
premier cas, un sentiment de prodige, dans le second, un sentiment
d'abjection.
Pour le 11 septembre, les images exaltantes d'un ÃvÃnement majeur, dans
l'autre les images avilissantes de quelque chose qui est le contraire d'un
ÃvÃnement, un non-ÃvÃnement d'une banalità obscÃne, la dÃgradation, atroce
mais banale, non seulement des victimes, mais des scÃnaristes amateurs de
cette parodie de violence. Car le pire est encore qu'il s'agit là d'une
parodie de violence, d'une parodie de la guerre elle-mÃme, la pornographie
devenant la forme ultime de l'abjection d'une guerre impuissante à Ãtre
simplement la guerre, Ã simplement tuer, et qui s'extÃnue dans un
reality-show ubuesque et infantile, dans un simulacre dÃsespÃrà de la
puissance.
Ces scÃnes sont l'illustration d'une puissance qui, parvenue à son point
extrÃme, ne sait plus quoi faire d'elle-mÃme  d'un pouvoir dÃsormais sans
objet, sans finalitÃ, puisque sans ennemi plausible, et dans l'impunitÃ
totale. Elle ne peut plus qu'infliger une humiliation gratuite, et comme on
sait, la violence qu'on inflige aux autres n'est jamais que l'expression de
celle qu'on s'inflige à soi-mÃme, elle ne peut du mÃme coup que s'humilier
elle-mÃme, s'avilir et se renier elle-mÃme dans une sorte d'acharnement
pervers. L'ignominie, l'immonde est le symptÃme ultime d'une puissance qui
ne sait plus quoi faire d'elle-mÃme.
Avec le 11 septembre, c'Ãtait comme une rÃaction globale de tous ceux qui ne
savent plus quoi faire de cette puissance mondiale, et qui ne la supportent
plus. Dans le cas des sÃvices infligÃs aux Irakiens, c'est pire encore :
c'est elle-mÃme, la puissance, qui ne sait plus quoi faire d'elle-mÃme et ne
se supporte plus, sauf à se parodier elle-mÃme d'une faÃon inhumaine.
Ces images sont aussi meurtriÃres pour l'AmÃrique que celles du World Trade
Center en flammes. Pourtant, l'AmÃrique en soi n'est pas en cause, et il est
inutile de charger les AmÃricains : la machine infernale s'emballe
d'elle-mÃme dans des actes proprement suicidaires. En fait, les AmÃricains
sont dÃpassÃs par leur propre puissance. Ils n'ont plus les moyens de la
conjurer. Et nous sommes partie prenante de cette puissance. C'est tout
l'Occident dont la mauvaise conscience cristallise dans ces images, c'est
tout l'Occident qui est là dans l'Ãclat de rire sadique des soldats
amÃricains, comme c'est tout l'Occident qui est derriÃre la construction du
mur israÃlien.
Là est la vÃrità de ces images, ce dont elles sont chargÃes : la dÃmesure
d'une puissance se dÃsignant elle-mÃme comme abjecte et pornographique. La
vÃritÃ, et non la vÃracitÃ. Car, Ã partir de lÃ, il est inutile de savoir si
elles sont vraies ou fausses. Nous sommes dÃsormais et à jamais dans
l'incertitude quant aux images. Seul leur impact compte, dans la mesure mÃme
oà elles sont immergÃes dans la guerre. MÃme plus besoin de journalistes
ÂembeddedÂ, ce sont les militaires eux-mÃmes qui sont immergÃs dans l'image
 par la grÃce du numÃrique, les images sont dÃfinitivement intÃgrÃes à la
guerre. Elles ne la reprÃsentent plus, elles n'impliquent plus ni distance,
ni perception, ni jugement. Elles ne sont plus de l'ordre de la
reprÃsentation, ni de l'information au sens strict et, du coup, la question
de savoir s'il faut les produire, les reproduire, les diffuser, les
interdire, ou mÃme la question Âessentielle de savoir si elles sont vraies
ou fausses, est ÂirrelevanteÂ.
Pour que les images soient une vÃritable information, il faudrait qu'elles
soient diffÃrentes de la guerre. Or, elles sont devenues aujourd'hui
exactement aussi virtuelles que la guerre, et donc leur violence spÃcifique
s'ajoute à la violence spÃcifique de la guerre. Par ailleurs, de par leur
omniprÃsence, de par la rÃgle aujourd'hui mondiale du tout-visible, les
images, nos images actuelles, sont devenues substantiellement
pornographiques, elles Ãpousent donc spontanÃment la face pornographique de
la guerre.
Il y a dans tout cela, et tout particuliÃrement dans le dernier Ãpisode
irakien, une justice immanente à l'image : celui qui mise sur le spectacle
pÃrira par le spectacle. Vous voulez le pouvoir par l'image ? Alors vous
pÃrirez par le retour-image.
Les AmÃricains en font et en feront l'amÃre expÃrience. Et ceci en dÃpit de
tous les faux-fuyants ÂdÃmocratiques et d'un simulacre dÃsespÃrà de
transparence qui rÃpond au simulacre dÃsespÃrà de puissance militaire. Qui a
commis ces actes et qui en est vÃritablement responsable ? Les supÃrieurs
militaires ? La nature humaine, bestiale comme on sait, ÂmÃme en dÃmocratieÂ
? Le vÃritable scandale n'est plus dans la torture, il est dans la traÃtrise
de ceux qui savaient et qui n'en ont rien dit (ou de ceux qui l'ont rÃvÃlÃ
?). De toute faÃon, toute la violence rÃelle est dÃtournÃe sur la question
de la transparence  la dÃmocratie trouvant à se refaire une vertu par la
divulgation de ses vices.
En dehors de tout cela, quel est le secret de ces scÃnographies abjectes ?
Encore une fois, elles rÃpondent, par-delà toutes les pÃripÃties
stratÃgiques et politiques, Ã l'humiliation du 11 septembre, et elles
veulent y rÃpondre par une humiliation pire encore  bien pire que la mort.
Sans compter les cagoules qui sont dÃjà une forme de dÃcapitation (Ã
laquelle correspond obscurÃment la dÃcapitation de l'AmÃricain), sans
compter les entassements et les chiens, la nudità forcÃe est en soi un viol.
On a vu ainsi des GI promener des Irakiens nus et enchaÃnÃs à travers la
ville et, dans la nouvelle Allah Akhbar de Patrick Dekaerke, on voit Franck,
l'Ãmissaire de la CIA, faire se dÃnuder l'Arabe, lui faire enfiler de force
une guÃpiÃre et des bas rÃsille et le faire finalement sodomiser par un
porc, tout en prenant des photos qu'il enverra au village et à tous ses
proches. Ainsi l'autre sera-t-il exterminà symboliquement. C'est là qu'on
voit que le but de la guerre n'est pas de tuer ou de gagner, c'est d'abolir
l'ennemi, d'abolir (selon Canetti, je crois) la lumiÃre de son ciel.
Et, en fait, que veut-on leur faire avouer, Ã ces hommes, quel est le secret
qu'on veut leur extorquer ? C'est tout simplement au nom de quoi, en vertu
de quoi ils n'ont pas peur de la mort. LÃ est la jalousie profonde et la
vengeance du ÂzÃro mort sur ceux qui n'en ont pas peur  au nom de quoi on
leur infligera pire que la mort... L'impudeur radicale, le dÃshonneur de la
nuditÃ, la spoliation de tout voile  c'est toujours le mÃme problÃme de la
transparence : arracher le voile des femmes ou encagouler les hommes pour
les faire paraÃtre plus nus, plus obscÃnes... Toute cette mascarade qui
couronne l'ignominie de la guerre  jusqu'à ce travestissement, dans cette
image la plus fÃroce (la plus fÃroce pour l'AmÃrique) parce que la plus
fantomatique et la plus ÂrÃversibleÂ, de ce prisonnier menacÃ
d'Ãlectrocution et devenu tout entier cagoule, devenu un membre du Ku Klux
Klan, crucifià par ses congÃnÃres. LÃ, c'est vraiment l'AmÃrique qui s'est
ÃlectrocutÃe elle-mÃme.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, philosophe et Ãcrivain Dernier livre paru : le Pacte de
lucidità ou l'Intelligence du mal, Ãditions GalilÃe.
http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=207077
////////////
Published on Monday, May 24, 2004
What Have We Done?
by Susan Sontag
For a long time - at least six decades - photographs have laid down the
tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The memory
museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to
determine what people recall of events, and it now seems likely that the
defining association of people everywhere with the rotten war that the
Americans launched preemptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the
torture of Iraqi prisoners in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons,
Abu Ghraib.
The slogans and phrases fielded by the Bush administration and its defenders
have been chiefly aimed at limiting a public relations disaster - the
dissemination of the photographs - rather than dealing with the complex
crimes of leadership, policies and authority revealed by the pictures. There
was, first of all, the displacement of the reality on to the photographs
themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the
president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs - as if the fault or
horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the
avoidance of the word torture. The prisoners had possibly been the objects
of "abuse", eventually of "humiliation" - that was the most to be admitted.
"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I
believe technically is different from torture," secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld said at a press conference. "And therefore I'm not going to address
the torture word." Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the
strenuous avoidance of the word "genocide" while the genocide of the Tutsis
in Rwanda was being carried out 10 years ago that meant the American
government had no intention of doing anything. To call what took place in
Abu Ghraib - and, almost certainly, in other prisons in Iraq and in
Afghanistan, and in Guantanamo - by its true name, torture, would likely
entail a public investigation, trials, court martials, dishonorable
discharges, resignation of senior military figures and responsible cabinet
officials, and substantial reparations to the victims. Such a response to
our misrule in Iraq would contradict everything this administration has
invited the American public to believe about the virtue of American
intentions and America's right to unilateral action on the world stage in
defense of its interests and its security.
Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's
reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the "sorry"
word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to
moral superiority, to its hegemonic goal of bringing "freedom and democracy"
to the benighted Middle East. Yes, Mr Bush said in Washington on May 6,
standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was "sorry for the
humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by
their families". But, he went on, he was "as equally sorry that people
seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of
America".
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to
those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the
monster tyrants of modern times, "unfair". A war, an occupation, is
inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions
representative and others not? The issue is not whether they are done by
individuals (i.e., not by "everybody"). All acts are done by individuals.
The question is not whether the torture was the work of a few individuals
but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. Covered up. It was -
all of the above. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of
Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies
prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them
out makes such acts likely.
Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are
representative of distinctive policies and of the fundamental corruptions of
colonial rule. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, committed
identical atrocities and practiced torture and sexual humiliation on
despised, recalcitrant natives. Add to this corruption, the mystifying,
near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the
complex realities of an Iraq after its "liberation" - that is, conquest. And
add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush
administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war
(against a protean enemy called "terrorism"), and that those detained in
this war are "unlawful combatants" - a policy enunciated by Rumsfeld as
early as January 2002 - and therefore "do not have any rights" under the
Geneva convention, and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and
crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges and
access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up as part of
the response to the attack of September 11 2001. Endless war produces the
option of endless detention, which is subject to no judicial review.
So, then, the real issue is not the photographs but what the photographs
reveal to have happened to "suspects" in American custody? No: the horror of
what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that
the photographs were taken - with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over
their helpless captives. German soldiers in the second world war took
photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but
snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims
are exceedingly rare. (See a book just published, Photographing the
Holocaust by Janina Struk.) If there is something comparable to what these
pictures show it would be some of the photographs - collected in a book
entitled Without Sanctuary - of black victims of lynching taken between the
1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them
church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated
body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching
photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt
perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu
Ghraib.
If there is a difference, it is a difference created by the increasing
ubiquity of photographic actions. The lynching pictures were in the nature
of photographs as trophies - taken by a photographer, in order to be
collected, stored in albums; displayed. The pictures taken by American
soldiers in Abu Ghraib reflect a shift in the use made of pictures - less
objects to be saved than evanescent messages to be disseminated, circulated.
A digital camera is a common possession of most soldiers. Where once
photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers
themselves are all photographers - recording their war, their fun, their
observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities - and swapping
images among themselves, and emailing them around the globe.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. Andy
Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time - life isn't edited, why
should its record be edited? - has become a norm for millions of webcasts,
in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here
I am - waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making
breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of
their lives, store them in computer files, and send the files around. Family
life goes with the recording of family life - even when, or especially when,
the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. (Surely the dedicated,
incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over
many years was the most astonishing material in the recent documentary about
a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges, Andrew Jarecki's
Capturing the Friedmans [2003].) An erotic life is, for more and more
people, what can be captured on video.
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and
therefore, to go on with one's life, oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious,
to the camera's non-stop attentions. But it is also to pose. To act is to
share in the community of actions recorded as images. The expression of
satisfaction at the acts of torture one is inflicting on helpless, trussed,
naked victims is only part of the story. There is the primal satisfaction of
being photographed, to which one is more inclined to respond not with a
stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in
part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There
would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't
take a picture of them.
You ask yourself how someone can grin at the sufferings and humiliation of
another human being - drag a naked Iraqi man along the floor with a leash?
set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering, naked prisoners? rape
and sodomize prisoners? force shackled hooded prisoners to masturbate or
commit sexual acts with each other? beat prisoners to death? - and feel
naive in asking the questions, since the answer is, self-evidently: people
do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in
Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when
they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over
whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated,
tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they
are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the
meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but
that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what
the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be
circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun. And this idea of fun is,
alas, more and more - contrary to what Mr Bush is telling the world - part
of "the true nature and heart of America".
It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American
life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the games of killing
that are the principal entertainment of young males to the violence that has
become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. From the
harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high
schools - depicted in Richard Linklater's film Dazed and Confused (1993) -
to the rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation to be found in
working-class bar culture, and institutionalized in our colleges and
universities as hazing - America has become a country in which the fantasies
and the practice of violence are, increasingly, seen as good entertainment,
fun.
What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme
sado-masochistic longings - such as Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film,
Salà (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the fascist redoubt in northern
Italy at the end of the Mussolini era - is now being normalized, by the
apostles of the new, bellicose, imperial America, as high-spirited
prankishness or venting. To "stack naked men" is like a college fraternity
prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who
listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs?
No matter. The observation, or is it the fantasy, was on the mark. What may
still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response:
"Exactly!" exclaimed Limbaugh. "Exactly my point. This is no different than
what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin
people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and
then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time."
"They" are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on. "You
know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people
having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?"
It's likely that quite a large number of Americans would rather think that
it is all right to torture and humiliate other human beings - who, as our
putative or suspected enemies, have forfeited all their rights - than to
acknowledge the folly and ineptitude and fraud of the American venture in
Iraq. As for torture and sexual humiliation as fun, there seems little to
oppose this tendency while America continues to turn itself into a garrison
state, in which patriots are defined as those with unconditional respect for
armed might and for the necessity of maximal domestic surveillance. Shock
and awe was what our military promised the Iraqis who resisted their
American liberators. And shock and the awful are what these photographs
announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of
criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international
humanitarian conventions. But there seems no reversing for the moment
America's commitment to self-justification, and the condoning of its
increasingly out-of-control culture of violence. Soldiers now pose, thumbs
up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their
buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the
culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic
brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that,
formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to
get on a television show to reveal.
The notion that "apologies" or professions of "disgust" and "abhorrence" by
the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response to the
systematic torture and murder of prisoners revealed at Abu Ghraib is an
insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not
an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the doctrines of world struggle
with which the Bush administration has sought to fundamentally change the
domestic and foreign policy of the US. The Bush administration has committed
the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war - for
"the war on terror" is nothing less than that. What has happened in the new,
international carceral empire run by the US military goes beyond even the
notorious procedures enshrined in France's Devil's Island and Soviet
Russia's Gulag system, which in the case of the French penal island had,
first, both trials and sentences, and in the case of the Russian prison
empire a charge of some kind and a sentence for a specific number of years.
Endless war permits the option of endless incarceration - without charges,
without the release of prisoners' names or any access to family members and
lawyers, without trials, without sentences. Those held in the extra-legal
American penal empire are "detainees"; "prisoners", a newly obsolete word,
might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and
the laws of all civilized countries. This endless "war on terror" inevitably
leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush
administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for
debate. An interminable war inevitably suggests the appropriateness of
interminable detention.
The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and
Afghanistan being non-existent - the Red Cross estimates that 70% to 90% of
those being held have apparently committed no crime other than simply being
in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects"
- the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation".
Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know.
If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then
physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of situations, the "ticking
bomb" scenario, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies
torture of prisoners. This is information-gathering Authorized. by American
military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of
evildoers about which Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about
which they are singularly ignorant - so that any "information" might be
useful. An interrogation which produced no information (whatever the
information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more
justification for preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing
them out - these were the usual euphemisms for the bestial practices that
have become rampant in American prisons where "suspected terrorists" are
being held. Unfortunately, it seems, more than a few got "too stressed out"
and died.
The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in
which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to
acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the report
submitted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other,
sketchier reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations
about the atrocious punishments inflicted on "detainees" and "suspected
terrorists" in prisons run by the American military, have been circulating
for more than a year. It seems doubtful that any of these reports were read
by Mr Bush or Mr Cheney or Ms Rice or Mr Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the
photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be
suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this "real" to Mr Bush and
his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are a lot
easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and
self-dissemination.
So now the pictures will continue to "assault" us - as many Americans are
bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already
saying that they have seen "enough". Not, however, the rest of the world.
Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will American newspaper,
magazine and television editors now debate whether showing more of them, or
showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, gives a
different and in some instances more appalling view of the atrocities
committed at Abu Ghraib), would be in "bad taste" or too implicitly
political? By "political", read: critical of the Bush administration. For
there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Mr Rumsfeld testified,
the reputation of "the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are
courageously and responsibly and professionally protecting our freedoms
across the globe". This damage - to our reputation, our image, our success
as an imperial power - is what the Bush administration principally deplores.
How the protection of "our freedoms" - and he is talking here about the
freedom of Americans only, 6% of the population of the planet - came to
require having American soldiers in any country where it chooses to be
("across the globe") is not up for debate either. America is under attack.
America sees itself as the victim of potential or future terror. America is
only defending itself, against implacable, furtive enemies.
Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging
in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication of the pictures
is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right
to defend ourselves. After all, they (the terrorists, the fanatics) started
it. They - Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's the difference? -
attacked us first. James Inhofe, a Republican member, from Oklahoma, of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, before which secretary Rumsfeld testified,
avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee "more
outraged by the outrage" over what the photographs show. "These prisoners,"
Sen Inhofe explained, "you know they're not there for traffic violations. If
they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're
terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on
their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those
individuals." It's the fault of "the media" - usually called "the liberal
media" - which is provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence
against Americans around the world. More Americans will die. Because of
these photos.
There is an answer to this charge, of course. It is not because of the
photographs but of what the photographs reveal to be happening, happening at
the behest of and with the complicity of a chain of command that reaches up
to the highest level of the Bush administration. But the distinction -
between photograph and reality, between policy and spin - easily evaporates
in most people's minds. And that is what the administration wishes to
happen.
"There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist," Mr Rumsfeld
acknowledged in his testimony. "If these are released to the public,
obviously, it is going to make matters worse." Worse for the US and its
programs, presumably. Not for those who are the actual victims of torture.
The media may self-censor, as is its wont. But, as Mr Rumsfeld acknowledged,
it's hard to censor soldiers overseas who don't write letters home, as in
the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out
unacceptable lines, but, instead, function like tourists, "running around
with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then
passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise". The
administration's effort to withhold pictures will continue, however - the
argument is taking a more legalistic turn: now the photographs are
"evidence" in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if the
photographs are made public. But the real push to limit the accessibility of
the photographs will come from the ongoing effort to protect the Bush
administration and its policies - to identify "outrage" over the photographs
with a campaign to undermine the American military might and the purposes it
currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism
of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who were
killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will
increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the aberrant photographs
and tarnish and besmirch the reputation - that is, the image - of America.
After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell. The only good Indian
is a dead Indian. Hey, we were only having fun. In our digital hall of
mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one
picture is worth a thousand words. And there will be thousands more
snapshots and videos. Unstoppable. Can the video game, "Hazing at Abu
Ghraib" or "Interrogating the Terrorists", be far behind?
 Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0524-09.htm
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WARPORN WARPUNK!
Autonomous videopoiesis in wartime*
Matteo Pasquinelli
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 freedom of speech is exercised only in
private. 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
Before pulling the monkey out of the TV set, we have to focus on the
chessboard 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 liveâbroadcasting 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 recently 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
(paradoxically they did not treat painting in the same way), 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 speakâ
at the same time â 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 sense; 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 and social animal, 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 and 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 âvictimâ 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 â to the image as self-referential
simulacrum â 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, whilst lowering the level of
civility of the visible, thus 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-controlled bombs, a
panoplia of images that some define as the aseptic substitute of pornography
proper. Ridley Scottâs 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 â 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, from the depletion of 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 âradicalâ 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
âphysicalâ 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
âneural icons running on the spinal motorwaysâ, 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 Artaudâs 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 weekâs 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 frame of mind. 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 adultsâ 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 sheepâs 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 Kordaâs 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.
*translated by Matteo Pasquinelli
Edited by Arianna Bove and Erik Empson
from http://rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2386
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