Alan Sondheim on Fri, 20 Sep 2002 05:01:26 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> The Coward |
The Coward Last night I replugged into the dying power-grid, charging cell-phone, nicads for the digital camera, this laptop. The phone depends on a secondary grid of towers and antennas; the camera reproduces nothing without downloading; the laptop connects to a third grid, internetwork- ing. Generators operate in New York City, across the country; the generator complex I've seen near Niagara is the largest confluence of machinery I know. There is an indescribable silence of people, men and women, behind the scenes, who have designed and built and tested the grids and technology; these are people of the disappearances to come, the war already glistening on the horizon. The cell-phone conveys personal and political pessimisms across country and countries, one unstable nation-state to another. The digital camera bears witness, still, to nothing, a reproductive emphasis mainstreamed into 3d animations and other explorations of language, sexuality, body. When the war comes, the camera will be there, recording yet another collapse, perhaps the final one, as humanity has already blasted and slaughtered its way through much of the ecosphere. And the computer, on its dying batteries, will repeatedly attempt to connect on the broken copper-wire phone-grid; the heroics of the Net in other wars will reduced to mute and brutal silence as screens flicker out for the last time. But now the computer conveys otherwise, analysis after analysis, exposing our government and their government, our evil ruling class, and theirs, and their intermixing and interbreeding, and their back-handing deals and kickbacks, and their unconcern for populations of men, women, and children, as they slide back down into the game of war. The analysis, like Freud's, is interminable, repetitious, necessary, and depressing. It is necessary because it enables us to recognize, perhaps for the last time, the evil humans are capable of. It is interminable because new facts and situations come to light, as nations move closer to war, to intolerance, to the right. And it is repetitious, because we have witnessed all of this before - the duplicity, the violence of language tending towards material violence, the impending holocaust-to-come. The question repeatedly returns - what is to be done - beyond the talk and protest and organizing; the one movement-moment of four hijacked planes turned the world upside-down, more than any analysis or mass-movement has ever done. It is not that empire has collapsed; it is that empire has turned ever more hideous, paranoid, and closed-off, closed-down, taking its armies and weapons with it. It is not that speech and analysis are curtailed; it is that speech and analysis are rendered useless, irrelevant. So it is clear, just as it was in Imperial Rome, that what is to be done, is being done-for-us; that it is already in motion, that protest and accuracy and resistance are as futile as the turning-back of regimes intent on conflagration. If one thinks back to Imperial Rome - it was Lucan who died, not Nero; analysis terminable and interminable would not have stayed the course of events. What we are working on is the accuracy of our vision, our witnessing, as if there were a transcendence to truth, as if truth were part and parcel of natural or instrumental reason. If our analysis stops at the gate of hopelessness, it does so because, beyond, is nothing but erasure, and that is already done-for-us - from the internal violence of transnational corporations, to the enormous lies of power that must, in order to maintain itself, deceive. I am well aware that I am contributing nothing here, that I have nothing to contribute. At the very least, we need barricades, more and more barricades; onslaught is slowed by stones and wood... === # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net