"Bombs and Bytes"
Anustup Basu, metamute
Fascism without a Fuhrer? During the build up of support for the war
on Iraq, no functionary of the US government publically stated that
Saddam Hussein had an active role in the devastation of September 11,
2001. Nevertheless, an alarming number of Americans believed that the
Iraqi despot was involved in the conspiracy and its execution.
Anustup Basu looks beyond the big lie, to show how information itself
short-circuits knowledge.
INTRODUCTION
During the publicity drive towards building up domestic and international
support for the 2003 war on Iraq, no functionary of the United States
government actually made a public statement to the effect that Saddam Hussein
had an active part to play in the devastation of September 11, 2001.
Nevertheless, it was subsequently noted in the opinion polls that an alarming
number of American people believed that the Iraqi despot was involved in the
conspiracy and its execution. Hence the two propositions -– Saddam the evil
one, and 9/11, the horrible crime -– seem to be associated in a demographic
intelligence without having any narrative obligation to each other; that is,
without being part of the same ‘story’. The outcome, it seems, was achieved by
a mathematical chain of chance, by which two disparate postulates, in being
publicised with adequate proximity, frequency, and density, gravitate towards
each other in an inhuman plane of massified thought. They, in other words, are
bits and bytes of newspeak which have come to share what I will call
an ‘informatic’ affinity with each other, without being organically conjoined
by constitutive knowledge. The formation of the latter entity is of course
something we are prone to consider a primary task of the philosophical human
subject, who is also the modern citizen with rights and responsibilities.