<nettime> Tactical Media and the Tectical Intellectual 3/4

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

Tactical Media and the Tectical Intellectual
version 3
part 3/4

Mckenzie Wark


3. Vectors and antipodes

A word on this word vector. I've adapted it from the
writings of Paul Virilio. It describes the aspect of the
development of technology that interests him most
and the style of writing he employs to capture that
aspect. It is a term from geometry meaning a line of
fixed length and direction but having no fixed
position. Virilio employs it to mean any trajectory
along which bodies, information or warheads can
potentially pass. The satellite technology used to
beam images from Afghanistan to America can be
thought of as a vector. This technology could link
almost any two such sites, and relay video and audio
information of a certain quality along those points at
a given speed and at a certain cost. It could just have
easily linked Copenhagen to Chiapas, or quite a few
other combinations of points. Yet in each case the
speed of transmission and its quality could be
essentially the same. (That it often is not points to the
politics and economics that shape the infrastructure
of the vector field, but which it in turn also shapes).

This is the sense in which any particular media
technology can be thought of as a vector. Media
vectors have fixed properties, like the length of a line
in the geometric concept of vector. Yet that vector
has no necessary position: it can link almost any
points together. This is the paradox of the media
vector. The technical properties are hard and fast
and fixed, but it can connect enormously vast and
vaguely defined spaces together and move images,
and sounds, words and furies between them.

In every weird global media event, new dimensions
to the vector field are 'discovered', and new technical
properties of the vector implemented. After
September 11, the Western world discovered --as if
for the first time -- the significance of al-Jazeera
satellite television.  During the Gulf War, most of the
Middle East was more or less effectively contained
within state controlled national media envelopes, at
least as far as television was concerned. Al-Jazeera
changed all that. Or to take a more poignant instance:
it seems that while people all over the world knew
that one of the WTC towers had collapsed, the
firefighters in the other tower did not know it, as the
vectors along which information might pass to them
was disrupted by the collapse of the tower itself.
Telesthesia failed at the point where it was most
pressingly required.

In the analysis of the weird global media event, a
theoretical approach that highlights the technical,
such as the concept of the vector, is crucial, but must
be handled as a critical tool. Everyone marvels at
what the latest media technologies make possible in
the moment of the event. It is one of the most
immediate ways of constructing a narrative for it. But
then the material means by which the space in which
the event happens is constructed tends to be pushed
to the background. The knowledge of the vector
that the event highlights passes imperceptibly into an
unacknowledged part of the information landscape
we take for granted. Victor Shklovsky one said that
the real reveals itself in culture in much the same way
as gravity reveals itself to the inhabitants of a
structure when its ceiling caves in on them.  That
might stand as a good emblem for the event.

It is not only media technologies that have this
vectoral aspect. The highjacked 767s were also a
vector. So too are the bombs and missiles rained
down on Afghanistan in what Ali calls the "lightly
disguised war of revenge."  All if these vectors had
certain fixed technical properties: payload, range and
accuracy. Yet they could be launched at any point
within a given radius. On the other hand, one could
think of the entire US invasion force that mobilized
for what President Bush initially called Operation
Infinite Justice as a vector too. The fixed properties
here have to do with the length of time it takes to
deploy a force of a given size. Yet that force could be
deployed almost anywhere. Indeed, in an age of
proliferating media vectors, perhaps the public
spectacle of a threat to the interests of imperial
powers will provoke the deployment of this other
kind of vector. The alternative, something we also
saw on TV during the war in Afghanistan, is the
vector of diplomacy: diplomats can shuttle between
any series of points negotiating an apparently limitless
range of demands with seemingly limited results. The
time pressures introduced by the military and media
vectors pose a serious problem for the tactful tempo
of diplomacy.

The beauty of Virilio's concept of vector is that it
grasps the dynamic, historical tendency of weird
global media events, but it is not a concept limited to
media technologies alone. It also provides a way of
thinking about the other aspects of such events.
Virilio homes in on the apparent tendencies that seem
to result from the relentless, competitive development
of vectors. For instance, the tendency towards a
homogenization of the space of the globe. Its
tendency to become an abstract, geometric space
across which powerful vectors can play freely,
producing new differentials of Wedom and
Theydom.

Virilio grasps the novel kinds of crisis this seems to
engender: "An imperceptible movement on a
computer keyboard, or one made by a 'skyjacker'
brandishing a cookie box covered with masking tape,
can lead to catastrophic chains of events that until
recently were inconceivable. We are too willing to
ignore the threat of proliferation resulting from the
acquisition of nuclear explosives by irresponsible
parties. We are even more willing to ignore the
proliferating threat resulting from the vectors that
cause those who own or borrow them to become just
as irresponsible."

There is a limit to the way Virilio conceptualizes the
vector, in that he doesn't distinguish the vectors of
telesthesia, which move information, from those that
move bodies and things, labor and commodities,
subjects and objects. Thus he loses focus on the way
telesthesia creates a space for the logistical tracking of
objects and subjects in movement, and for ordering
that movement. The second nature of labor and
commodities, of work and leisure, of private and
public worlds, is traversed by an emergent space
composed of vectors capable of moving information
more quickly than people or things can move. Just as
second nature is built out of the historical
transformation of the raw materials of nature, so too
a third nature arise, built out of the historical
transformation of second nature by the vectors of
telesthesia.

Perhaps it is worth hitting the video pause-button at
this point in the replay, just as the image of the 767
hitting the WTC comes into view. Here we have a
vector of second nature, the ubiquitous passage of
the 767 through the skies, which is only made
possible by the existence of a third nature, of radio
and radar and global positioning technology. And
here we have the rerouting of the aircraft, using that
same technology of telesthesia, to new coordinates,
bringing about an event in the most built up part of
second nature, New York city, which in turn disrupts
the third nature of the news media.

What bears critical attention is the way telesthesia is
part and parcel of what killed people in both New
York and subsequently in Afghanistan. The event
takes place at the level of the physical vector and the
media vector conjointly. In terms of vectoral power in
general, the media are part of the problem of power,
not merely a separate space of reportage or critique
of emergent forms of power that exist elsewhere.
Needless to say, this essay too is a part of that
problematic, and does not exist outside, in a neutral
space. It is in the worst of all possible worlds: within
the regime of power created by the media vector,
but relatively powerless there, within. What is indeed
stupefying is that the ability to think critically about
the event depends on the same vectoral power that
produces its violence.

Reading the critical coverage of September 11 and the
subsequent war in Afghanistan in journals such as
The Nation, I am struck firstly by the double bind its
correspondents found themselves in, and secondly
by the curious way that the critical response to
imperial power nevertheless participated in the same
way of seeing the world. As Michel Feher notes, the
leftist response to such events is caught between two
desires. One desire is to oppose American imperial
power, in which case it can appear to lend support to
dictatorial anti-western regimes. The other desire is
to overturn tyranny in dictatorial anti-western
regimes, in which case it ends up lending support to
American imperial power.  Either way, the rhetorical
structure of Wedom versus Theydom is reproduced,
without really addressing the vectoral power that
underlies the production of their relation in the first
place.

The massive presence in the media flow of American
stories, images, faces, voices, is sometimes all that
stabilizes the flow of meaning in third nature. Take
away America’s imaginary domination and the
domination of the imaginary of America, and meaning
would drift and eddy, caught in impossible
turbulence and glide.  Not only the instant media
coverage, but also the critical coverage relies on this
stabilization of the referents, either positively or
negatively. The frightening paradox of September 11
is how this attack on actual human lives in New York
and Afghanistan is at the same time merely an attack
on abstract signifiers of Wedom and Theydom. The
trick, if this is not to stupefy us, is to look for a way
of displacing the terms within which the event is
understood.

4. Nightly Chimeras

By starting with the appearance of the vector in
everyday life, we can trace it back to a general
problematic of the velocity of power. The 'departure
lounge' for this is not some abstract concept of
everyday life in general, not the life of others, under
the microscope, but this life, these events. A vectoral
writing strategy considers the production of events
within the media as the primary process that
nevertheless gives the appearance of merely reflecting
'naturally occurring' moments outside all such
apparatus.

This may sound a little counter-intuitive, since we all
tend to take it for granted that regardless of how
much the media constructs a particular view of an
event the media still reports something outside of
itself. While not disputing the fact that violent and
momentous conjunctures arise whether the media
report them or not, once the media takes up such
conjunctures they assume a quite different character.
A vectoral approach looks at movements of
information transgressing the boundaries between
what were once historically distinct sites. It looks at
the effect of this movement on the outcomes of
conjunctures. It looks at the event as a peculiar and
historically emergent form of communication — or
rather of non-communication.

In writing about September 11 as an event happening
in a network of global vectors, which made it that
much more instant, that much more deadly, writing
struggles to recall that we are not just spectators. The
whole thing about the media vector is that its
tendency is towards implicating the entire globe. Its
historic tendency is towards making any and every
point a possible connection — everyone and
everything is a potential object and/or subject of a
mediated relation, realized instantly. In September 11,
to see it was to be implicated in it. There is no safe
haven from which to observe, unaffected. Nor is
there a synoptic vantage point, above and beyond
the whole process for looking on in a detached and
studious manner. We are all, always, already —
there, in third nature.

As the possibility of an extensive war of revenge
increased, the media's role changed, ever so
imperceptibly. No longer did it exist in a relation to an
audience assumed to be a mass of consumers or a
public to be educated.  The event turns the media
into part of a feedback loop connecting the spectator
to the action via the vagaries of 'opinion' and the
pressures of the popular on political elites. The media
user becomes a vague and quixotic, unpredictable yet
manipulatory 'delay' in the circuit of power.

This is the curious thing about telesthesia. It can make
events that connect the most disparate sites of public
action appear simultaneously as a private drama filled
with familiar characters and moving stories. The
vector blurs the thin line between political crisis and
media sensation; it eclipses the geographical barriers
separating distinct cultural and political entities; and it
transgresses the borders between public and private
spheres both on the home front and the front line.
There is no longer a clear distinction between public
and private spaces, now that the vector transgresses
the boundaries of the private sphere.

As Donna Haraway suggests, "we are all chimeras,
theorized and fabricated hybrid of machine and
organism."  Our chimerical confusion may result from
the dissolution of the spaces which kept aspects of
the social order separate. Indeed, one of the defining
characteristics of the event is that it exposes the ironic
ability of the vector to disrupt all seemingly stable
distributions of space and the more or less water-
tight vessels that used to contain meaning in space
and time. As September 11 unfolded, the hallowed
ground bled into the profane domain — of media.
One keeps the sense of what it means to be in public
life as opposed to private life by keeping them
spatially separate. The horror of bodies jumping from
the towers -- a rare image, quickly edited out -- has a
layer to it which draws on the horror of the separate
and excluded part reappearing in the everyday
sphere of 'normality.'

The reasons why these interpretations should spring
to mind stems from another sense of separation, the
separation of such things off from Wedom and their
projection into an other. Yet here they are, returned
to haunt us, in an uncontrollable way. Here they are
in everyday life, intersected by the rays of the
screen. To adapt a line from William Burroughs, in an
incongruous yet strikingly apt context: "These things
were revealed to me in the Interzone, where East
meets West coming around the other way."  The
interzone is this space where chimerical and
monstrous images become a part of everyday life.
The interzone is the experience, in everyday life, of
the ironizing impact of the event.


The media weave a Wedom and a vast map of
Theydoms together as the light and dark strands of a
narrative distinction within the event as it of threads
its way across these other kinds of border. In
breaking down solid old boundaries, the vector
creates new distinctions. Flexible distinctions airily
flow through the story-time realm of information.
They selectively replace the heavy walls and barriers
that compartmentalized information in days when
vectors were less rapid and less effective. This cruder
narrative structure can be applied to more sudden
and diverse events to produce the same effect of
apparent narrative seamlessness. The application by
the media of simple temporal structures, in a flexible
fashion, produces more rigid and uniform stories
about events.

There are many analyses of these war-time bed-time
stories that expose the interests of capital and empire
that lie behind them.  What matters is telling
convincing stories, which show others ways to
account for the facts -- and for the way facts are
produced. Or persuasive stories, which help as many
people as possible to credit this version of the event
over other ones. The democratic forces that want to
rewrite this event as a chapter in the story of, say,
American imperialism or Orientalist racism, must learn
the tools and the tricks of the story trade — and
prevail.

But as the technology of persuasion grows more
complex, the art of telling stories in the wake of
events grows both more complex and more
instantaneous. If this essay is less concerned with
telling these alternative stories it is not because such
things are not important. It is because it is also
important to understand the nature of weird global
media events and the power field of the vector. This
is the field of becoming within which a certain kind of
power is immanent. A field in which democratic
forces need to speak, and attempt at least to make
good sense, for and with, the many against the few.
But the tools for doing so may have less to do with
the hypocritical ernestness of Wedom and more to do
with pushing the ironic spatial and temporal
displacements of vectors to the limit.


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