"You ain't artsier than me…
you pseduo-elitst old-school sap
Don't let an 808 scare ya
shake stripes off your shirt and clear the whole area
I'm humanoid too"
-The Grouch, "Artsy"
It goes without saying that the media and the left are aflutter with the titillating possibility of an investigatory commission -- possibly leading to prosecutions of former Bush Administration officials -- into the systematic, premeditated and wide-spread policy of torturing individuals unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to be suspected of being "terrorists." While what we currently know of the program (nearly one hundred dead at the hands of CIA torturers, thousands extraordinarily rendered to secret prisons, according to recent revelations) will likely prove to be only a dark sillouette of an American torture operation of nightmarishly monstrous proportions when dragged out into the full light of day, I'd like to ask the question of how, in such a small amount of time, the "security fear mongering" tactics lost traction, seemingly overnight. To ask this question is, I believe, to pose the problem of how the consciousness of the American people appears to have changed.
But who was the enemy again in this global war on terror? Oh that's right...
Osama bin Laden is dead, according to Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zadari (husband of Benazir Bhutto), and several others in the intelligence community, including Obama's National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs have confirmed that the US cannot determine whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. In other words Osama bin Laden is dead, but President Zadari had the best comment on the matter when he said the other day, "there is no evidence, you cannot take that as a fact. We are between facts and fiction." Between facts and fiction?
What's more, this has been the case for the last 7 years, and the CIA has been unable to determine the fact or fiction of any of the recent Osama cassette tape communiqués! We must concur with Robert Gibbs assessment of the "security" situation of the world political scene is no longer about (perhaps never had anything to do with) "an individual." But the likely, and underreported, non-existence of Enemy No. 1 in this supposed war on terrorism cannot possibly explain this change in consciousness. Neither can the Obama hope-train politics of the last six months provide us with any insight beyond typical Op-Ed drivel.
I'd like to propose an alternate explanation -- something dialectically and historically materialist -- what Foucault once called a "revolt by cassette tape" in a report for the Nouvelle Observateur on exiled leader Allatoya Kohemini's following in Iran before the toppling of the shah in 1979.
[Allatoya Kohemini arrives in Iran after 14 years exile on February 1, 1979, wikipedia]
Foucault describes the lynch pin of Kohemini's political technology as follows: "It is said that De Gaulle was able to resist the Algiers putsch, thanks to the transistor. If the shah is about to fall, it will be due largely to the cassette tape. It is the tool par excellence of counterinformation. Last Sunday, I went to the Tehran cemetery, the only place where meetings are tolerated under martial law. People stood behind banners and laurel wreaths, cursing the shah. Then they sat down. One by one, three men, including a religious leader, stood up and started talking with great intensity, almost with violence. But when they were about to leave, at least two hundred sodiers blocked the gates with machine guns, armored vehicles and two tanks. The speakers were arrested, as well as all those who had tape recorders. But one can find, outside the doors of most provincial mosques, tapes of the most renowned orators at a very low price. One encounters children walking down the most crowded streets with tape recorders in their hands. They play these recorded voices from Qom, Mashhad, and Isfahan so loudly that they drown out the sound of cars; passerby do not need to stop to be able to hear them. From town to town, the strikes start, die out, and start again, like flickering fires on the eve of the nights of Muharram" (Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 219)
In other words, between the presence of speech in a rally and the mimesis of recorded voice on a strip of magnetic tape -- passed from hand to hand, copyable, replayable, spliceable -- a historical materialist change in the political technology of revolt and also political consciousness had taken place.
While I'm not one to repeat breathless accolades in praise of the "internet revolution," nor am I suggesting a noveau vulgar marxist analysis of the "internet commons" currently in circulation. However, there does seem to be a whiff of a "revolt by intertubes" in the air. And to think trenchantly about this revolt, we would first need to trace a materialist and dialectical history of the development of networked sound, textual, video, and information management technologies in their relation to political consciousness. Is there any better way to account for the increasingly political ramifications (and increasing decisivness) of the cultural production of postmodern late-capital society?
Too many of our marxist historians are too old-fashioned and cynical to provide us with any such history. Indeed, it seems that anyone with a good reading of Marx seems stuck in a technological paridgim as ancient as the 18th century looms that revolutionized textile production during Marx's era (Fredric Jameson, for instance, refuses to use a word processor and writes everything he's published on typewriters). Anyway, it would be a fascinating project to read such an account.
How did the 1990's technology boom in Silicon Valley give us both the means to slipstream M.I.A's politically militant 808 beats and lyrics, viciously parodying the terrorist fear-mongering Bush-Blair years, into the minds and speakers of millions of Brits and Americans, and simultaneously propel Abu Musab Zarquawi from being some random Jordanian dude struggling for traction in the power-vacuum of Iraq into the leader of "Al Quaeda in Mesopotamia" and don of a militant Islamist web empire? That silly anarchist aphorism in which "the revolution will not be televised" and naieve Baudrillard-esque assertions of simulacra seem totally irrelevant.
We're given, on the one hand, the figure of a Tamil-refugee-turned-superstar voice of the global poor who raps about genocide, the planet of slums and "the cost of AK's up in Africa / $20 ain't shit to you but that's how much they are," placed on a Department of Homeland Security list of banned people in the US and, on the other hand, a Jordanian-schmuck-warlord-turned-leader of the militant resistance to US occupied Iraq. Paradox? Antinomy?
We need a theory of the 808, which both refers to the penal code for disturbing the peace and the Roland TR-808 drum machine that creates these beats. Such a theory would seek to transcend the supposed antinomy of political technologies of "power" and "resistance" with a view towards their synthesis. Incidentally, section 808 of the 2001 US PATRIOT Act is the only section of this document which defines terrorism. In a further ironic twist to our antinomy, the very same document that authorized the executive branch to fight the global war on terror with exceptional means also redefined torture as terrorism. In other words: the same Bush Administration who tortured supposed terrorists, could, under the terms of the PATRIOT Act, be prosecuted for terrorism. What's more, the PATRIOT act amended § 2340A. of the US Code on torture to provide for the prosecution of any person who "conspires to torture." So much for the 'few bad apples' fall men!
How delicious would that trial be? Someone srsly needs to read Pelosi this 808!
In other words, between the presence of speech in a rally and the mimesis of recorded voice on a strip of magnetic tape -- passed from hand to hand, copyable, replayable, spliceable -- a historical materialist change in the political technology of revolt and also political consciousness had taken place.
While I'm not one to repeat breathless accolades in praise of the "internet revolution," nor am I suggesting a noveau vulgar marxist analysis of the "internet commons" currently in circulation. However, there does seem to be a whiff of a "revolt by intertubes" in the air. And to think trenchantly about this revolt, we would first need to trace a materialist and dialectical history of the development of networked sound, textual, video, and information management technologies in their relation to political consciousness. Is there any better way to account for the increasingly political ramifications (and increasing decisivness) of the cultural production of postmodern late-capital society?
Too many of our marxist historians are too old-fashioned and cynical to provide us with any such history. Indeed, it seems that anyone with a good reading of Marx seems stuck in a technological paridgim as ancient as the 18th century looms that revolutionized textile production during Marx's era (Fredric Jameson, for instance, refuses to use a word processor and writes everything he's published on typewriters). Anyway, it would be a fascinating project to read such an account.
How did the 1990's technology boom in Silicon Valley give us both the means to slipstream M.I.A's politically militant 808 beats and lyrics, viciously parodying the terrorist fear-mongering Bush-Blair years, into the minds and speakers of millions of Brits and Americans, and simultaneously propel Abu Musab Zarquawi from being some random Jordanian dude struggling for traction in the power-vacuum of Iraq into the leader of "Al Quaeda in Mesopotamia" and don of a militant Islamist web empire? That silly anarchist aphorism in which "the revolution will not be televised" and naieve Baudrillard-esque assertions of simulacra seem totally irrelevant.
We're given, on the one hand, the figure of a Tamil-refugee-turned-superstar voice of the global poor who raps about genocide, the planet of slums and "the cost of AK's up in Africa / $20 ain't shit to you but that's how much they are," placed on a Department of Homeland Security list of banned people in the US and, on the other hand, a Jordanian-schmuck-warlord-turned-leader of the militant resistance to US occupied Iraq. Paradox? Antinomy?
We need a theory of the 808, which both refers to the penal code for disturbing the peace and the Roland TR-808 drum machine that creates these beats. Such a theory would seek to transcend the supposed antinomy of political technologies of "power" and "resistance" with a view towards their synthesis. Incidentally, section 808 of the 2001 US PATRIOT Act is the only section of this document which defines terrorism. In a further ironic twist to our antinomy, the very same document that authorized the executive branch to fight the global war on terror with exceptional means also redefined torture as terrorism. In other words: the same Bush Administration who tortured supposed terrorists, could, under the terms of the PATRIOT Act, be prosecuted for terrorism. What's more, the PATRIOT act amended § 2340A. of the US Code on torture to provide for the prosecution of any person who "conspires to torture." So much for the 'few bad apples' fall men!
How delicious would that trial be? Someone srsly needs to read Pelosi this 808!
