[-empyre-] networks of catastrophe

Nicholas Ruiz III editor at intertheory.org
Sat Nov 29 08:29:20 EST 2008


As a reflection of the transparency of evil (Baudrillard), the whole lot of it, Mumbai, etc.--is commerical art...and the millions of downloads, transmissions and commentaries are its market, paid for in broadcast fees, cable and satellite subscriptions and financed by advertisers: with media art critics and all!  We are enveloped by a postmodern Roman media coliseum, where gladiatorial urges are elicited and fulfilled, where spectators take part in the war games, which are repeated endlessly and archived for posterity on the Network.

NRIII

 Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org





________________________________
From: Verena Conley <vconley at fas.harvard.edu>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 9:37:39 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networks of catastrophe

To add to Tim's post: The attacks also remind us of Virilio's city of panic. The planetary suburbs--that will add 1 billion slum dwellers by 2020 and gated communities (hotels) or missile shields. As PV puts it, through the accident of time, cities have become citadels. They are under siege. What is inside is global, outside is local, in situ. Civil peace is a figment of our imagination. Everything that takes place, in a strong sense, has been excluded from view. 
 
For PV, the entire world has become a banlieue and a panic city. Fear spreads through urban spaces  not as a mental but instru-mental image. The worldwide panic city--that includes us--is in the grip of terrorizing images. The city and its tele-spectartors live in a permanent state of siege.  Benjamin's notion of a reproduction of stereotypical images has been supseded by the production, even the collevtive hallucination of a unique image. PV urges us to deconstruct the mediated presentations of the polis (as they are seen in news programming) in real time and not as idealized representations in real space.

It is in the city that the war agains civilians is tested. Since the nineteenth century, war has evolved from organized battles to the creation of panic in urban centers. To struggle against a generalized sense of panic among the civilian population, PV wants to come back to a real geopolitics, that is, to a material politics whose transmissions and negotiations are not merely calibrated according to the speed of light.  The world, he argues, is not only liberal, it is territorial.

This is interesting in view of the Mumbai attacks and the confusion between territory and network that Tim pointed out. The area of Mumbai where the attacks occurred is at the same time one of the most networked and globalized in India. We can also think of the attacks and news programming. Where does art come in? How does it deal with these dilemmas?



On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Timothy Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:

Watching news coverage of the Mumbai catastrophe, I heard the Quote of the Day:

John Casey, Former Director of the CIA,

We think of this area as countries, India, Pakistan, etc., Al-Qaida
thinks of them as networks.
--
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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-- 
Verena Andermatt Conley

Department of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages
and Literature
Dana Palmer 202
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
tel: 617-495-2274; 617-496-6090
fax: 617-496-4682

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~rll/

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