an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, April 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Virtual Blood, Real
Media
If genocide is the dream of modern powers, that is not because of the
recent return of the ancient rights to kill; it is because power is situated
and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large scale
phenomena of population.
Michel Foucault
Against this artificial paradise of technicity and virtuality, against
the attempt to build a world completely positive, rational, and true, we must
save the traces of the illusory world’s definitive opacity and mystery.
Jean Baudrillard
Progressive mobilization of the image in modernity was accompanied by
the progressive imprisonment of the viewer.
Lev Manovich
Open societies defended themselves successfully
against the totalitarian states in the 20th century. The Italian
fascists and German national socialists have been defeated, as well as the
Russian communist and Japanese imperial autocracies. The dates of 1945 and 1989
– the capitulation of Nazi Germany and the breakdown of the Berlin Wall have
been written large in history books of western democracies. They have won both
the military victories (winning WWII after the initial coalition of Hitler and
Stalin fell apart) and prolonged economic, social and political rivalry
(winning the Cold War after the state socialist societies, including the Russian
oriental despotism in its communist guise, collapsed). The European working
class turned out to have been much better served by social democrats promising
upward mobility within the system of middle-class institutions (private
property, market economy, parliamentary democracy) than by communists promising
to eliminate upper classes in order to make place for the lower ones and to
introduce centrally planned economy supervised by a single-party dictatorship.
Have open societies also won ideological contests, by demonstrating that
shopping malls are preferable to gulags and parliaments to dictators? Have they
also won the comparative analysis, in which the communists claimed that welfare
of the western working class had been bought at the expense of the entire
societies of the third world, while social democrats claimed that former third
world societies can advance to the club of wealthier states by developing their
singular road to capitalism and democracy, but preserving the basics of
“openness”?. Has, in short, the “west”, won against communist “east” and is the
southern “rest” convinced that this victory was justified and irreversible?
The answer is positive where ideological
doctrines of Marxism-Leninism or Maoism or even Castroism are concerned. All
three (and their multiple local or regional versions – e.g. North Korean,
Albanian, Yugoslavian, Indonesian, Nicaraguan) are dead and their followers are
unable to provide a launching pad for a critique of neo-liberal ideologies.
Visions of “life after capitalism” and “participatory economics” are based on
anti-globalist sentiments and on a belief that “capitalist globalization
produces poverty, ill health, shortened life spans, reduced quality of life,
and ecological collapse”.(Albert,2004,4). In short, alternative visions of
social order are based on a critique of the present corporate and political
elites and their disenfranchisement of the world’s masses. Their authors assume
that it is a structural deficit of the present, ‘really existing’ market democracy,
which is unable to overcome a reproduction of inequality and repression. Hence
a search for an alternative, which will offer a way out of disenfranchisement
and poverty of “the multitudes”. Empower and include – are the slogans of the
new left ideologues. This is the way, in which a critique of the tuxedoed
guests of Davos summits invented and announced by the jeans and T-shirts
wearing participants of Porto Alegre counter-summits (World Social Forum)
emerges in the media. This critique does not have a fixed political address
among established political parties, although it is sometimes labeled as the
social democratic or European alternative to the Washington Consensus (hence
Brazilian president’s preference for the European Union as opposed to NAFTA as
a model for regional integration). However, the victory of open, democratic,
market-oriented societies does not herald the end of history.
·
The replacement
of the idea of a “Blitzkrieg” conducted by military forces with a concept of a
hostile take-over and re-engineering of the entire environment of targeted
populations and societies. There is no single battlefield - all resources and
reserves can be targeted and large-scale manipulation of the very conditions of
enemy lives implemented (this is the bio-power Foucault warned against). The
environmental contamination with poisonous gas or newer weapons of mass
destruction (as Sloterdijk has pointed out) knocks the entire population of
targeted area out – and so does a middle-class-focused consumer-driven
standardization of social environment;
and
·
The
proliferation of multimedia systems of virtual realities, which imprison us in
a “hegemonic fantasy of a global and perpetual communication” (Baudrillard,
2000, 69). The media became the message and ruled happily ever after. This is
the transformation, many critics from Marshall McLuhan to Hal Foster, Yannis
Gabriel, George Ritzer or Zygmunt Bauman had
been warning against by pointing out the role of the simulation and “the
murder of the real” in contemporary culture of advanced consumer societies. Their
members are knocked out due to their tacit consent to participate in engineered
multimedia spectacle, in which they are both actors and viewers and their
identities become more fluid and changeable(1);
Both the new concept of warfare as total environmental
control and the advances in “global and perpetual communication” signal a
return of the “games” (as in “panem et circenses” or “bread and games”, a
slogan of the Roman plebeians demanding both from political elites in return
for support) as means of control. Real blood spilled under watchful eyes of
virtual media introduce human sacrifice into the political spectacle of the 21st
century.
Decontamination
of the media
With the introduction of the poisonous gas as a
weapon against the French troops in 1915, a German Nobel prize winner, Fritz
Haber, has changed the rules of the military game much more thoroughly than
military pilots and submarine crews. Attacking the enemy with weapons of mass
destruction does not only kill the combatants. Poisonous gases or nuclear
weapons “re-design” the space, in which they had been used. They pollute and
contaminate. They close off the entire area, in which the enemy had been
assaulted, to human beings (at least for some time, for instance, until
radiation levels fall down). In words of contemporary German philosopher, Peter
Sloterdijk, they generate an “airquake” (“Luftbeben”), which terrorizes the
enemy population, re-designs this population’s living space and contributes to
the artificial, profound manipulation and re-modeling of the entire
environment. The air-, water- and
earthquake also have cultural consequences – if entire material environments
can be switched into uninhabitable areas, closed off for the enemy, then also
entire cultural environments, habitats, subcultures can be subjected to the
requirements of psychological warfare. They can be designed, coordinated and
managed by state bureaucracies, operating from war propaganda offices or
through embedded journalists. Nuclear explosion destroyed only two cities -
Ironic slogan – “nuke the whales”
demonstrates self-reflexive and critical attitude of the left, a response of
free citizens to an onslaught of animal protection rights propaganda. As long
as such slogans are possible – and call attention to the responsibilities of
the state, cultural environment has not become uninhabitable for free
citizenry. This slogan is a case in point of a critique of mediated, virtual
reason, which is badly needed (and has been postulated by the “situationists”
and Debord in the late sixties and by Baudrillard in the seventies and
eighties) Critique of the virtual reason – following critique of pure and
instrumental, theoretical and pragmatic, religious and secularized, ideological
and technocratic, iconic and linguistic reason – should help us “decontaminate”
and reconstruct the cultural environment of a society. This is what the Serbian
anti-Milosevic protestors invented in their peaceful mass demonstrations on the
streets of Belgrade – they had symbolically “decontaminated” their language and
symbols from poisonous manipulation by war propaganda issued and disseminated
by the nationalists-controlled state television (seen from this point of view,
the decision of the NATO military planners to bomb TV studio, appears less
arbitrary than had been assumed). Decontamination makes it possible to detect
and destroy deadly viruses of war propaganda and psychological manipulation.
“Even Mona Lisa smiles differently after Duchamp had painted her a moustache”.
(Sloterdijk, 2002, 109)
However, when designing a decontamination project for
the media, we have to bear in mind that the mediascape offers both
opportunities and threats for prospective de-contaminators;
·
Opportunities:
contemporary interactive multimedia – especially the individualized and mobile
devices (laptops, palmtops, mobile phones) increase the penetration of the
consumer market (we can be reached by commercial advertising everywhere all the
time) - but by the same token and at the same time also provide windows of
opportunity for counter-penetration of the communication channels by interest
groups, counter-mobilization within virtual space by alternative social
movements and the construction of a political alternative (successful cases
include the Zapatistas in Mexico, the protesters in Seattle and the
“orange” mobilization against electoral
fraud in the Ukraine);
and
·
Threats:
contemporary multimedia have incorporated critical reflection, incorporating
and recycling it to increase the virtual and tacit consensus and defusing even
the most extreme critique by feeding it back into the continuous spectacle of
communicated consumption. Virtual but immediately and persuasively communicable
“hyperreality” replaces the actual one. Daniel Cohn-Bendit participates in
panel discussions on multicultural society, Regis Debray writes on mediascapes
and advises presidents, and Abbie Hoffman was a business consultant helping
corporations spot the emergent countercultures. Baudrillard speaks of ecstasy
of the social (the masses appear more social than the social), ecstasy of
information (simulation appears truer than true) and “ecstasy of violence;
terror. More violent than violence…”(Baudrillard, 2000, 46)
How is “decontamination” of mediated
communications possible? How can we avoid, to paraphrase Baudrillard, losing
our identification with historically formed communities in the void of
information (with media offering us the illusion of instant communication and
thus replacing “experienced” community with a virtual, mediated, easily
consumable individually customized experience)?
How can decontamination help us preserve our ability to undertake
meaningful, responsible action? Do we need a historical pull of bloody
sacrifices and historical push of immediately communicated terror to
decontaminate our cultural environments? To make them compatible with
sustainable cybercommunities reinforcing the open society, from which they
emerge? Most of the experts agree that:
For democracy to thrive, at least four prerequisites
must be satisfied. Numerous studies have shown that the two key prerequisites,
sharing information and voting, are quite feasible on the Internet. The third
prerequisite, deliberation, has been much less often explored, but(…) it seems
to pose no insurmountable difficulties, once Internet designers put their minds
to fashioning of the software needed for deliberation in cyberspace. The same
holds true for the fourth prerequisite, representation. (Etzioni, 2003,
93)
At the same time, however, experts agree that the
present developments in media, including the new, more interactive Internet,
often replace citizen’s vote with consumer’s choice, which promises trouble in future
(and more difficulties with decontamination campaigns). In commenting upon Ira
Magaziner’s (president
Consumers make private choices about their private
needs and wants. Citizens make choices about the public needs and the public
goods of the nation.(…) You can’t turn over civic public choices to private
consumers. That’s why we have public institutions. That’s why we have
government; precisely to make the tough choices about and deal with the social
consequences of private choices.(…) The liberty we have in private to make
consumer choices is always choice without power. (Barber,2003, 130-131)
Will the emotional appeal of real blood in virtual
media and commercialized infotainment prevail over more rational,
multiculturally balanced and inclusion-friendly forms of individualized mass
communications fit for sustainable, democratic, open society? Does contemporary
version of “bread and games” have to include human sacrifices?
Human
sacrifices, media and terror
Ritual murders of rank and file, of famous
politicians and media celebrities on the one hand and of innocent, random
victims on the other, became a standard in contemporary societies of spectacle.
Presidents (Kennedy, Reagan), Popes (John Paul II), pop singers (John Lennon)
are targeted and sometimes killed. So are randomly selected individuals, whose
death is designed by the terrorist to “send a message” to the other party and to
public opinion at large. What “message” was the crashing of two passenger jets
into the twin towers of World Trade Center in New York City designed to send to
the US government, to segments of American society and to a world public
opinion at large? If political targets of terrorists included the polarization
of the
What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” (in
terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse and so on) of the
“bin Laden effect” is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the
disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in techno-capitalist modernity
for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is above all, the fact that
such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no
future. If we are to put faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the
world juridico-political scene, of the “world” itself (…) I would take the side
of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to
perfectibility in the name of the “political”, democracy, international law,
international institutions, and so on. (Borradori, 2003)
However, terrorist attacks against US embassy in
Kenya and US warship in the Middle East, against a discotheque in Bali
frequented by Australian, US American and European tourists have also carried
another message – they used contemporary media to have a free ride on
broadcasting powers and to announce their willingness to revert to ritual human
sacrifices in the service of a vigorously re-engineered subculture of politically re-invented and
militarily implemented Islam. After broadcasting videotapes of hostage
executions contemporary media found themselves in the role of ancient Indian
pyramids in contemporary Mexico, serving as highly visible public altars, on
which hearts of prisoners of war had been torn out of their chests under watchful
eyes of captive mass audiences, or as arenas of ancient Rome, on which helpless
Christians have been thrown to the hungry lions. Assessment of the effects of
real blood in virtual world of mediated communications vary, but there appears
to be a consensus that these human sacrifices failed to influence the
combatants and did not significantly alter the views of a majority of members
of western audiences. With the exception of the government of the
However, the terrorist microstorias,
illustrated with the “punchlines” of hostage executions, fail to lock onto the
media-promoted grand narratives of globalization and socio-economic and
politico-ideological change. The attempt to lock onto the grand narrative of
the clash of civilizations failed, since dates like 1453 (the fall of Christian
Constantinopol to Muslim forces), 1683 (the defeat inflicted by the Polish king
Jan III Sobieski upon Turks besieging Vienna) and 1798 (Napoleon’s conquest of
Egypt) are not – pace Huntington – a frame of reference for a majority of
either Christians or Muslims. No Christian community lays claims to the
re-“christening” of Istanbul (the pope speaks of “ecumenization” not
“conversion to Christianity”), Turkish Republic aspires to membership in the
European Union, of which both Austria and Poland are members, and Egypt is an
ally of the USA, playing a moderator role in negotiations between the
representatives of the Palestinian Autonomy and the Israeli government.
Moreover, religiously inspired pre-amble to the European constitution, which
would explicitly state that Europeans are homogeneous from a religious point of
view since they share Christian background and uphold Christian values, has
been voted down in the European Parliament. The terrorist microstorias designed
to reinforce the fundamentalist vision of the clash of civilizations fail to
“lock onto” the audiences’ frames of reference and fail to create a social
movement within the Islamic communities in western societies.
Interestingly enough, much smaller
incidents within western societies, strongly embedded in local context and
picked up by the media of open societies as problems without a preprogrammed
solution, exerted a much stronger influence upon both virtual reality of media
communications and real blood of actual political interactions and designs. The
murder of a Dutch film director, Theo van Gogh and an accidental death of a
petty Dutch criminal of Moroccan origin, Ali B. are cases in point. They also
illustrate an interesting dynamic of real blood in virtual media; a
possibility, already demonstrated in the times of a Benetton/Sears affair in
the
A.
A case of
de-“martyrdomization” of a terrorist microstoria. A 26 years old, Dutch-born, well integrated Mohamed
B. of Moroccan origin underwent a religious conversion and started associating
with radical Islamic preachers and illegal terrorist groups. Having decided
that a short film “Submission” directed by a scandalizing Dutch film director,
Theo van Gogh (and scripted by a Dutch member of parliament, a former Muslim,
Ayan Hirsi Ali, originally of
Ironically enough, it was Theo van Gogh, who had
publicly defended fundamentalist imams, when the latter had compared
homosexuals to dirty pigs in their sermons. Van Gogh had said that he did not
agree with imams, that their view was offensive to him, but he valued freedom
of expression much more highly than his freedom from being offended and
therefore granted imams a right to pronounce publicly their views without prior
censorship, which would have prevented them from offending him. Had his
murderer, Mohamed B., acquired a martyr status, the open space of the public
discussion would have been “contaminated” by an exceptional status offered to a
single religion, namely Islam. It would then be “fencing” the public space in
order to prevent “blasphemy” as offensive to members of their religious
community. It would also legitimize privatization of violence – Mohamed B. did
not wait until imams or ayatollahs pronounced an ideological condemnation of
either a film or film’s authors. He “privatized” violence.
Privatization of violence failed to inspire followers
(radical group had been arrested), free ride on media coverage failed to lock
this private microstoria on to a grand narrative of Muslim communities in
Western Europe (the government had introduced special courses for Muslim imams
in the Netherlands), and real blood in virtual media failed to earn Mohamed B.
a status of a martyr (his terror act had been disowned by representatives of
Muslim communities and he has been classified as subnormally deviant by the
authorities).
B.
The
acquisition of the status of a martyr has also been attempted in an unlikely
case of a petty criminal from Amsterdam East, a ghetto of unemployed and
undereducated Dutch Moroccans. The
incident in question would normally be left out from most media coverage in the
The media have focused on the necessity
to prevent the emergence of the underclass of undereducated, underemployed
young “allochtones” (the microstoria of Ali B. locks onto a grand narrative of
integration as a difficult but attainable and manageable task, though the
sentence in court case of the victim who incidentally killed her robber will
probably be followed with certain interest by accomplices of the
deceased).(2) Had the participants in
the mourning march been recognized by some of their neighbours as legitimate
spokespersons for the lower classes stigmatized as racially, religiously and
class-wise “different”, their successful media marketing of the incidental
death might have contaminated the media and subsequent discourse about
integration.
Real media,
virtual blood and participation in a political spectacle
Deficits of democracy are not as frequently reported
in real media as violent clashes and bloodshed. Hidden injuries deficits of
democracy inflict upon communities do not cost blood – until reflection and
analysis makes it possible to see the linkl between the deficit of democracy
and the bloody incident. Communication may be instant, virtual and universal,
but decision to notice the link between deficit of democracy and violent death
must be made in the minds of beholders, who and expressed in public. Mohamed B.
drew real blood and Ali B. lost real blood, but the blood they spilled remains
virtual as long as the real media prefer a dominant narrative about single
deranged fanatics and petty criminals and about successful integration of a
majority of minority members into open societies. This preference, if shared by
citizens, involves a tacit rejection of an attempt to shape a new, alternative
community with religious background and terrorist tactic. It also involves a
tacit rejection of an alternative type of transnational citizenship, for
instance a religiously or racially, or sexually defined one (of which both
incidents might be manifestations).
Blood on a screen of TV sets becomes real
blood only if individuals actually decide to organize and undertake action in
order to respond to the blood’s reality. If a social movement succeeds in
constructing a counter-narrative, an alternative ideology, and lock onto the
real media – virtual blood becomes real human sacrifice, very much as blood of
industrial workers killed in political demonstrations fortified their social
movements, trade unions and political parties in late 19th and early
20th century. If almost all working class movements could be
incorporated and integrated – so goes the reasoning of social and political
scientists, of politicians and intellectuals of activists and media
professionals – then the present lower class movements (even if they are
burdened with additional, religious and racial differences) also have to be
manageable. Hence the optimism of European intellectuals, who claim that we
should work towards the establishment of:
…an open,
nonexclusive framework that would nevertheless be sufficiently binding in geographical and historical (and therefore
cultural) terms.(…) No preexisting
community based on traditional membership and “roots” can play this
historic role, but only a community of alliances that is instituted with a view towards favouring this kind of
recognition. (Balibar, 2004,230)(3)
Needless to say, this is the definition of a
citizenship in an open society, which opens up to a global civil society and
thus recognizes bonds beyond the political institutions connected to
nation-states. Both
…new social movements, internet activism and
transnational policy networks. Conventional indicators may blind us to the fact
that critical citizens may be becoming less loyalist and deferential in
orientation towards mass-branch parties, which evolved in the 19th century with
the spread of the mass franchise and European democracy, at the same time that
they are becoming more actively engaged via alternative mechanisms of political
expression. (Norris, 2002, 222)
Are contemporary media spectacles (“circenses” – i.e.
“games”) conducive to the emergence of a new historical form of an open society
capable of offering meaningful participation to individuals with many cultural backgrounds,
transnational loyalties and shifting choices? What is the shape of the new
democratic, open societies and do they need real blood in virtual media in
order to develop new, transnational, international, multicultural, cosmopolitan
“forms” (institutions, networks, organizations, platforms, ideologies)? Three
developments appear to have exerted the most significant influence upon the
shaping of the open societies in the early 21st century;
·
first, the
increasing professionalization of the media specialists and intellectuals, as
distinct profession specializing in communicative construction of social
realities;
·
second, the
emergence of political economy of “attention” and “cultural industries”, and
the subsequent re-evaluation of “shock” and “blood links” as attractors of
scarce attention in media suffused social reality;
·
third, the
concomitant de-skilling with respect to traditional verbal skills and a
parallel re-skilling in image processing and performative skills (both on the
level of masses at large and on a level of professionalizing minorities:
subversive artists, critical intellectuals and alternative social movements).
Professionalization
of media and blood links in open societies
The shape of contemporary societies is being
determined to a large extent by the professionalization of journalism and media
intellectuals, who are relying heavily on the earlier historical examples of
the development of the medical, legal, academic, political and consulting
professions. Emergence of professions and their development has provided
increasingly significant social and cultural (ideological) underpinning for the
domination of middle classes in market democracies, at the expense of the
extremes of the social hierarchy, whose extremist visions and mutually
exclusive interests had thus been tempered into manageability within the
political institutions. Professionalization turned out to be an important
component of a successful attempt at legitimizing and neutralizing the
inequalities of complex societies, including the class differences. The
ideology of professional community:
…contained, therefore, elements of legitimation of
class structure. (…) At the core of the professional project, we find the
fusion of antithetical ideological structures and a potential for permanent
tension between ‘civilizing function’ and market orientation, between the
‘protection of society’ and the securing of the market, between intrinsic and
extrinsic values of work. The profession embodied both leveling and
differentiating principles of social organization; while standardizing the
‘production of producers’ and the conditions of entry, on the one hand,
professionals sought, on the other, to attain by these means legitimate but
unequal status positions. (Larson, 1977,62-3)
Professionalization of the media specialists is no
exception. Journalists and other media professionals have already been labeled
as “the fourth power” – and added to the three powers distinguished by
Montesquieu; the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. The argument
that media are replacing all three – conducting investigation instead of the
police, interpreting laws as they see fit and leveling verdicts long before the
courts had their say – are voiced often enough to raise concerns about legal and
other regulations around the increasingly significant profession. Changes in
degree, level and phase of professionalization coincide with transformations of
the preconditions for democracy and “openness” of open societies. Max Weber was
the first one to notice this phenomenon in his essays on politics and science
as “professions” (as opposed to mere individual “jobs” or collectively
sanctioned “vocations”). Rapid development of the academic profession in the 20th
century contributed to further growth of the practice of “credentialism” in
regulating job market and to the parallel development of two ideologies either
legitimizing success or neutralizing failure to achieve higher status. Thus we
are dealing with the ideologies of “meritocracy” on the one hand (elites and
sub-elites of hierarchic bureaucracies legitimize themselves with merit rather
than unfair class advantage) and with the ideologies of the reconciliation with
the lower levels of a social ladder (“games”, which are provided to the masses
in the form of the spectacle of consumption, in which they can selectively and
- preferably passively - participate). Larson based her analyses predominantly
on empirical studies of the medical profession, but she would have found
similar developments within the academic profession, since both health care and
education have become significant “industries”, with growing penetration of
society, increasing numbers of large institutional bureaucracies and rapidly
growing ranks of hierarchically organized but ideologically “equal”
professionals.(5) Medical and academic professionals find themselves challenged
by the newcomers to the professionalizing game – the media specialists, whose
common label so far has been mostly the one of “journalism” (sometimes with
adjectives – “investigative”, “new”, “embedded”, “multimedia”). The latter,
however, face the same challenges that all other professionals in more mature
professions also have to face – namely the increasing self-organization of
non-professionals and spontaneous (though aided by quick development of new
technologies) activities aimed at undermining the monopolies of competence,
often expressed as distrust of experts. In Harald MacMillan’s famous words from
the
The red line of social dynamics based on
challenging the professional monopoly of competence and criticizing it as an
uncertain privilege rather than indispensable protection of intrinsic qualities
can be traced in European history to the successful challenge to the Catholic
Church’s multinational bureaucracy. Church monopoly on disseminating,
interpreting and implementing the Bible in social and political life has been broken
by the twin forces of Reformation and the invention of a subversive technique
of print. Printing press in hands of dissenting Protestants broke a monopoly of
a single bureaucracy – the Catholic Church found it impossible to control
cheaply produced and disseminated texts, and to prevent ideologies critical of
its monopoly from gaining popularity and mobilizing political support. Both the
First, they make ample use of the
ideological imagery of a brilliant inventor, who breaks through the established
monopoly of the old guild-like profession and opens it up by politically
successful employment of new, yet untested technologies. The modern
rags-to-riches story of a lonely inventor in a small garage constructing an
“Apple” computer from bits and pieces finds its newest version in the story of
Matt Drudge, who triggered the Lewinsky media-quake:
At the time he created the Drudge report, Matt Drudge
was a convenience-store clerk working out of his tiny
The conclusion drawn from a success of Drudge’s media
guerilla links his breakthrough to the exposure of an institutional monopoly of
journalist professionals on “manufacturing of the news”:
Drudge indirectly exposed journalism’s secret, internal
methods to public scrutiny. Once the ‘news’, which journalism traditionally
presents as the objective truth, was revealed to be a manufactured product – a
product manufactured, moreover, by methods that seemed cynical and manipulative
to many outsiders – the knowledge hegemony of journalism began to show cracks.
(Walsh, 2003, 369)
Second, they point out – following Kuhn’s analysis of
the “structure of scientific revolutions” – that shifts and dramatic changes in
“expert paradigms”, or the internal rules governing the production of
legitimate knowledge, do not follow any decipherable sequence, not can any
universal logic of their change with time be deduced from the analysis of
historical changes and paradigmatic revolutions. Social control and relative
power, legitimized monopoly and sufficient social status matter more than
universal ideal of abstract truth.
Challenges to this monopoly, often aided by technology, which is not
immediately chained by powers that be (print, Internet) are thus questioned
much more fiercely than the ideological questions of media “content”, which can
always be framed and accommodated, contained and neutralized, no matter how
rebellious they seem and sound:
The Web is like a new sense in some ways, but it must
be added to the others – the others must not be subtracted from it, as in some
horrible parody of the mystic trance. Without the Web, the full realization of
the Temporary Autonomous Zone complex would be impossible. But the Web is not
the end in itself. It’s a weapon.(…) Liberation is realized struggle – this is
the essence of Nietzsche’s ‘self-overcoming’.(…) Let us study invisibility,
webworking, psychic nomadism – and who knows what we might attain? (Bey, 2001,
433-434)
The above manifesto has been originally pasted on the
website, but it had also been reprinted in a traditional printed medium – a
scholarly publication by a prestigious university (with credentials issued by
academic professionals) involved in an avant-garde research project on the new
media and the emergent class of media professionals. The medium (traditional
book) turns out, indeed, to have been the message. The message is – Internet is
ripe for canonization. A new medium – Internet – becomes canonized by reflexive
analysis and “endorsed” by serious analysts in printed book. Such references to
traditional media are consciously “massaged” and managed by media
professionals, who recognize their road to upward mobility and increasing
status, power and influence in an open society. Napster has been recognized as
a threat to a professional control – and it had been duly subdued. The story of
Monica Lewinsky could not be stopped in time – so the media joined a lonely
inventor, further massaging the message and allowing it to grow into an
avalanche, a media-engineered reality with moral, political, social and
international consequences. Ironic twist of fate caused hundreds of media
professionals, who had already disembarked in
The ethical alibi building in above case
originally assumed the form of a punitive action by a professional community
against the innovators, like Matt Drudge. In his case it was the “Newsweek”’s
reporter, Michael Isikoff, who performed this ritual function by accusing
Drudge of breaking the professional ethics, the rules of journalist profession,
by disseminating indiscriminately unverified reporting. Isikoff clearly defined
Drudge as an “outsider” (opposed to the “insiders” or responsible and
professionally embedded journalists), questioned the rules the outsider had
followed, announced his ritual condemnation in major media (“The New York
Times”, “The Washington Post”, “CNN”) and accused Drudge of ignoring the
legitimate paradigm for assembling journalistic body of knowledge. The ideology
of professionally manufactured news “fit to print” turned out to be vulnerable
to guerilla attack from the point of view considering if news is “fit to
Internet”. The attention-attracting value of this particular amateur news
product and the effect it created, pointed out that the media have reached the
level of social significance, which makes media professionals serious partners
of political, economic and ideological professionals and valuable allies of
communities in conflict with the others. Two types of influence merit special
attention:
·
first, the
attractively “open” nature of a message composed primarily of images (“every
picture tells a story” – but media professionals have to facilitate the story’s
reception) as opposed to a message composed primarily of words (and relatively,
but only relatively more “closed”),
·
second, the
shock value of human sacrifice (real blood) in political economy of attention
(search for these bloody attractors of audiences’ attention forms the blood
links of media professionals as representatives of the “fourth power”).
The first type of influence is linked to the density
of images and their role in symbolic replacement or ideological abbreviation of
verbal argumentation. This type of influence is exercised by the mass media,
which increasingly suffused social life becoming “crucial fields for the
definition of social meaning”(Gitlin, 2003, 292) and mixing with the cultural
industries in order to sustain ideological hegemony of the elites by managing
and containing cultural resistance “to tame it to use as commodity and to tame
and isolate intractable movements and ideas”(ibid.). According to Yannis
Gabriel, the increasingly image-focused media have de-skilled some traditional
professionals, whose expertise relied on verbal fluency and hermeneutics of
texts or on processing of the printed word, while at the same time the
increased frequency and sophistication of image-focused media messages had
actually “re-skilled” the masses in image-processing, enhancing the status of
image-processing professionals, usually the media specialists (Gabriel, 2005).
This re-skilling enhances both the power of branding and relevance of the logo
(opening new sub-specializations among media professionals) and at the same
time makes a more effective opposition (“no logo”, “buy nothing day”) and
alternative community possible. Re-skilling through the media’s “school of
seeing” opens the field of political and ideological chances for the critical,
subversive, alternative social movements. The latter also tend to mobilize and
organize around instantly communicable images (the logo of Polish “Solidarity”,
or anti-globalists disguised as Ninja turtles in
However, what attracted attention of
broader public and drew more media to the Seattle or Genoa clashes between
emerging anti-globalist movement and supranational organizations governing
global processes (e.g. WTO) was live reporting from police charges, during
which real blood was shed, and protesters had been arrested, beaten up, wounded
or even killed. The shock value of human
sacrifice, both as a result of a natural disaster (tsunami wave in Sri Lanka,
Thailand and Indonesian on second Christmas day in 2004), an accident (princess
Diana’s death in a Paris tunnel) and as a result of a human activity (terrorist
explosion of bombs in commuter trains in Madrid, police killing protesting
students at the Kent university campus in the USA or on Mexico City’s Mayan
Square) far surpasses the values of other attractors compared in the political
economy of attention required by mass media dispensing information, communicating
news and entertaining (6) – for instance the status of a celebrity. Perhaps
this high value of real blood in virtual media, the ability of real individual
lives being lost to attract attention and to organize our perception around
themselves, is the consequence of assumed irreversibility and empirical
verifiability, of witnessing a point of no return (death) of individual human
beings not as an element of a manipulated narrative (as in a horror or in a
thriller, in which we assume that actors playing dead bodies will get up and
return to their work after camera shuts off). In case of hostage execution by
the terrorists we do indeed acquire empirical confirmation of veracity – since
bodies and heads of their victims are usually discarded after the event, to be
found and to confirm authenticity of the videotaped executions. Is virtually
mediated but presumably real blood the ultimate attractor to multimedia “games”
offered to citizens, consumers and netizens alike? Does the shock of witnessing
actual death of a human individual provide for a temporary “unification” of our
disunited, cracked, disjointed personalities and roles in a single, morally and
aesthetically moved individual human beings? Or is it perhaps the tacitly
supplied frame of ritualistic reference, a “frame” for ritualistic measurement
of the accuracy of virtual image of reality communicated by the media?
Instead of
a conclusion: blood and rituals
“Blood links” - persistent presence of violence and
physical destruction of human life in virtual media – can thus have two
sources. The first is psychological and rests firmly in the eye and heart of
the beholder, who experiences human sacrifice as a cathartic shock, which
enables him or her to glimpse his or her entire personality momentarily and
briefly “united” in a single reaction of moral and aesthetic outrage. The
second is sociological and explains the persistence of publicly displayed human
sacrifices in mass-media linked “global village” as ritual theatres of
ceremony, power, authority, order and violence. As anthropologists remind us,
ritual worlds are the ones in which you cannot separate ‘real’ power and
domination from its ‘symbolic’ expression and ritual enactment: “The British,
in the early 19th century, endeavored to stamp out the practice of
human sacrifice among kings and chiefs in the Kondo Hills – they did it in part
by punitive expedition and a public display of the bodies. Claims to power can
very commonly be recast into claims to the ultimate right to control life and
death.”(James, 2005, 275-276)(7)
The answer to the question about
persistence of blood links in digitally recorded, satellite-linked and globally
accessible individualized mass communications should thus refer to both psychological
attractiveness (disparate selves and roles – unite!) and sociological uses and
functions (collective ritual, confirming and legitimizing power relations or
announcing challenge to them). Which of
the two is more important? Both appear indispensable for understanding why an
individual does not ignore ritual violence including human sacrifice and why
society at large establishes large scale institutional networks to secure
permanent communication flows. Our choice depends on the focus of our inquiry,
but preferably both aspects should be accounted for. An interesting possibility
of linking the two can be found in studies of religious rituals, whose authors
distinguish two “modes” of religiosity, namely the doctrinal and the imagistic
one (cf. Whitehouse,2000). A conceptual dichotomy, which has been developed in
order to study two different modes of religiosity, might possibly be applied to
analyze a transition from a print-related to a digital multimedia related “mode
of ritual sociability”. Intellectual persuasion and verbalized doctrine would
gradually drift away from “print”-centered sacred books (Bibles,
Constitutions), as transition towards multimedia progresses, giving
increasingly way to emotional and sensual stimulation (total immersion in
virtual reality, the medium is the message) and iconic imagery (every picture
tells a story, actions speak louder than words). Since the “performance
frequency” (cf. McCauley, Lawson,
2002,105) dramatically increased with global media broadcasting non-stop all
the time in all places – and since “cognitive processing” (by members of the
“captive” audiences) and “styles of codification” (by media professionals) also
shift, it is quite plausible that the re-emergence of human sacrifices after a
period of attempted “taming” of the media with bureaucratically imposed “codes”
and socially acceptable censorship signals a new way of managing “emotional and
sensory stimulation” of individualized mass audiences with virtual
multimedia.(8) Analogy between the conceptual framework developed by cognitive
scientists to study religious rituals and conceptual frameworks needed to
understand contemporary media hinges, interestingly enough, on demands on
individual memory (less memory had been needed to participate in written
communications than in oral ones, and less in Internet links than in epistolary
contacts) or, as we would rephrase it, on manageability of cultural competence
necessary to participate meaningfully in social and political rituals:
“Whitehouse argues (Whitehouse, 1992, 789) that ‘messages are cultivated,
structured and transmitted by two contrasting techniques… these techniques
constitute particular adaptations to differences in frequency of reproduction
and hence in demands made on memory’.”(McCauley, Lawson, 2002, 106)
Perhaps, then, the re-emergence of human
sacrifices in new, electronically mediated public broadcasts (hostage
executions by terrorist groups, corpses of war victims shown by independent war
reporting), and its parallel “cosmetic” removal from mainstream reports about
violent warfare (bowdlerization of embedded war journalism and censorship of
disaster reporting) signals emergence of new – mass media mediated - rituals of
power, empowerment and power struggle. Perhaps blood links of the new media –
through a cognitive shock - open a new platform for a contest of legitimization
of political and ideological violence, create the space for alternatives to the
seamless web of commercial and political rituals of domination.
This might explain, in part, the return
of the interest in Carl Schmitt’s theory of political institutions and rituals,
linking them to the bureaucratic traditions of the Catholic Church on the one
hand and to the clear distinctions and “fault lines” between “included” friends
versus “excluded” foes. It might also explain the search for an alternative to
a “globalization from top down” by inventing new institutions and new rituals.
As Balibar states it conceptualizing the new political form exemplified by the
European Union: “Clearly, the idea of a “Euro-Mediterranean ensemble (or
alliance) expresses the exactly opposite axiom; it does not say that there are
no ‘fault lines’, no vested hostilities around them, but it does say that
political institutions (the ‘polity’ and the ‘civility’) precisely arise when
hostility becomes a focal point for the elaboration of common interests and
historic compromises.”(Balibar, 2004, 231)
It might also explain the return of the dream of
restoring unity to an individual self atomized, split and isolated in virtual
cage of multimedia with their continuous communications flow. Dictatorship of
the despotic eye, criticized on the example of television infotainment by Neil
Postman (cf. Postman, 1986), immobilizing our bodies in front of TV sets and entrancing
our minds by locking our eyes can be countered and media used to break out of
Plato’s cave, not to chain us even more compellingly than before:
The images of television are not mere spectacles.
They are spoken images, oracular insights, emotional visions. (…) Television
might be the means by which the poet is restored to the polis. Such a
restoration would bring in its wake a re-membrance of the body’s participation
in vision, a re-minder which would restore a sense of limits to a vision, which
, detached from a body, developed a singular, fixed devotion to the infinite,
pursued in a linear, active, willful fashion. (Romanyshyn, 1993,
358-359)(9)
Future projects of social change in an open society
and of reducing democratic deficit thus require both the awareness of the
necessity to construct new rituals and institutions and the ability to develop
more participative, interactive, “friendly” multimedia. Will the shock of human
sacrifices in contemporary media increase controls exercised by markets and
states or will it prompt facilitating broader access to participative media by
communities, NGOs and “quangos”?
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, April 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes
(1)
Hal Foster noted
that “cynical reason” enables contemporary populations subjected to the media
spectacle to both enjoy the recognition of real conflicts and remain passive
(“relinquish agency”) – “as if agency were a small price to pay for the shield
that cynicism might provide, for the immunity that ambivalence might secure”.
He quotes the spectacles of Clarence Thomas hearings, the Rodney King case and
the O.J. Simpson trial, which “involved extreme violations and difficult
contradictions of difference – racial, sexual and social. As such, they were
events of deep divisions, but they were also events around which impossible
identifications became possible”. (Foster, 1996,223) His solution – expressed
in a book devoted to the artistic avant-garde at the end of the 20th
century – was to evoke the concept of a critical distance, a relevant
perspective and to rephrase a question of Nietzsche from “The Genealogy of
Morals” – “whether criticism can ever be free of distinctions on the noble side
and resentments on the base side” (ibid.,225)
(2)
The only
dissenting voice in media coverage came from a German Islamic scholar of Syrian
origin, Bassam Tibi, who had been lecturing in the
(3)
Balibar clearly
realizes that the reinvention of transnational citizenship, comparable with the
EU-membership, would echo the political invention of the nation-state, which at
the time of its emergence formed “a non-existing
solution for the problems of religious, feudal and regional conflicts, but at a
different scale and following procedures, which are now obsolete”(Balibar,2004,230-231)
(4)
Balibar does not
stand alone. He quotes Umberto Eco, who formulated the idea that the only
genuine idiom of
(5)
“In our society,
the reality of class and exploitation is deflected and concealed by the
contradictions of a self that is shaped by class; ideology, indeed transforms
structure into personality” – writes Larson commenting upon monopolies of
competence and bourgeois ideology – “The hierarchy of competence is presented
and lived, from early childhood on, as coincident with moral hierarchy of
intelligence, effort, dignity and freedom. (…) Ideology makers men and women
put the burden of their ‘failures’ on themselves first, it holds in front of
them the possibility of purely personal and individual solution, and thus
prevents them from even conceiving that there may be collective and cooperative
ways of challenging the very structure of social inequality”.(Larson,1977,241)
(6)
Franck points
our attention to the increasing role of reputation at the expense of money in
professionalized society. “Reputation is more important than money. Reputation
is the consolidated income of collectively attracted attention”.(Franck, 1998,
38) and remarks that scarcity of attention and difficulties in accumulating it
far outdistance the scarcity of money and difficulties in accumulating it.
Power supposedly pales next to fame, wealth next to celebrity.
(7)
James quotes a
study by Felix Padel devoted to the Orissa region: cf. Padel,1995
(8)
It is not only
the question of violence and human death depicted by the media. It is also a
question of the media gradually broadening the range of their uncensored
activities and breaking the codes imposed by social, political and religious
bodies – as is for instance the case with the systematic legalization of
pornography, which is still clearly labeled and handled in a way, which makes
it possible for adults to prevent children from exposure, but regularly offered
as part and parcel of cable or hotel services. In a sense, pornography in
multimedia is also linked to a human sacrifice –offering a ritual of sexual
intercourse performed by selected individuals in public. This steady progress
of pornography on its way to be recognized as legitimate genre of cultural
production (French novels, Austrian and British drama, cosmopolitan
performances - in the wake of the US film industry) is also partly linked to a
more general transition: “with the growing influence of television in the last
half of the 20th century, popular culture, including journalism,
becomes a form of spectacle, in which aestheticized images replace narrative as
the dominant form of communication” (Compton, 2004, 4)
(9)
The case of
Benetton’s advertising campaign with Oliviero Toscani’s photographs of death
row inmates in the USA and the subsequent protests inside the Sears chain
stores (where Benetton’s boutiques opened) offers an interesting example of a
significant and successful social mobilization organized by families of the
victims of photographed convicts and a showcase of misunderstanding of blood
links The message of the protesters’ action, which found social support and
forced Sears to close Benetton’s boutiques down, was that blood of their family
members was shed by convicts’ illegitimate violence, while Toscani’s
photographs questioned legitimacy of death sentence to be executed in state
prisons and were thus offensive by downplaying significance of victims blood
and upgrading significance of criminals’ sacrifice on the altar of
justice.
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