Theo Honohan on Tue, 7 Apr 2009 13:43:06 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> 6 april movement & factory occupations |
2009/4/6 jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>: > there are times when, for as much as we have heard and seen in the > past few years and predictably going to see more, military > intelligence had to strike the situation to an end. i just wonder how > it is going to happen today, when the most powerful intelligence is > media. > > and most importantly, how long it all has to occur before we can > represent the state of things? the Epiphany of a Catastrophe? > > where are thou Orson Wells! with your martians to make us humble??! It's a fallacy to assume that military intelligence (on an international level) isn't aware of the dynamics of the situation. Very smart people work for "the government", certainly, for example, in the field of mathematics (this is confirmed by past discoveries which have been disclosed), and presumably in other, less taxing, fields as well, and these organizations have a store of accumulated knowledge. Without going into detail (and I couldn't, anyway), the question of how they intervene in society to exercise power is extremely obscure. While it suggests that a single individual is somehow culpable, the recent film "Il Divo" illustrates the extent and the complexity I am talking about. If the media is the most powerful element of social control, It is naive to assume that it has not been infiltrated by "military intelligence". Or perhaps some other opportunistic entryist organization. But infiltration is a two-way street, so basically we can just talk about "intelligence". Or even, intelligence without quotes. Who are you working for? The scenario of the leading character in "Il Divo", Andreotti, repeatedly answering judicial questions with "I don't remember", recalls the analogous situation of Bill Gates answering questions about the conduct of Microsoft against Netscape with "I don't remember". Join the dots. The idea of the strategy of tension in Italian politics corresponds to a kind of fear of death... that if tension is removed, the world will end, desire will cease to function. The rope will break. The elastic will burn. A real catastrophe. Consider the activities of the Dictionary of War project, http://dictionaryofwar.org/. This represents some of the most conscious contemporary articulations and defenses of the idea of "life as war", I guess derived from Heraclitus. This concept is transformed into various expressions of life as a state of war. But this is an arbitrary closure. I use the term closure in the sense defined by the philosopher Hilary Lawson -- a conscious but necessarily arbitrary determination that two things are the same. It is a subjective choice to define life as war. A choice that Heraclitus made... or at least, wrote about. But we could equally define life as process, as evolution, as geometrical transformation, as growth, even as love, etc. Sadly for its victims, the idea of the strategy of tension is a sadomasochistic one. It is predicated on the requirement that a central controlling entity exists to maintain order. This entity must, necessarily (because tension is not guaranteed), coerce the people through fear or actual violence in order to maintain a particular pattern of behaviour. At the same time, the controlling entity is confined by its inability to release control. The figure of Andreotti in "Il Divo" presents a Dracula-like example of this pathology. Ultimately, of course, the problem is that some level of control is required, because people aren't all going to play nice all the time. In other words, there must be some police. William Burroughs was well aware of this problem, and distinguished between the generally coercive and occasionally violent police as they currently exist and an ideal kind of police who played a much less intrusive role. Who did their job and then left. As the rapper KRS-One puts it, "It's the sound of the Police... It's the sound of the Beast". While KRS-One may have had institutional racism foremost in mind, as well as other negative factors, there is tremendous ambiguity in this reference, given the ambiguous status of satanism in relation to existentialism (i.e. sanity). What exactly is it that we want from the police? To be an amplification of ourselves to counter attacks from the other? The alternative, in any case, is anarchy in the worst, popular, sense of the word -- chaos. Theo Footnote: Recall that Orson Welles saw the process of making a film as a huge train set for him to play with. Not exactly a recipe for an egalitarian society. # 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: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org