warpunk-dept. writes:
"Warporn Warpunk!
Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime"
Matteo Pasquinelli
Warpunk is a squadron of B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the heart of the Western imagery.
Grinning Monkeys
How do you think you
can stop war without weapons? The anti-war public opinion that fills squares
worldwide and the cosmetic democracy of International Courts stand powerless in
front of the raging US military. Against the animal instincts of a superpower
reason cannot prevail: a homicidal force can be arrested only by another,
stronger force. Everyday we witness such a Darwinian show: history repeating
itself through a cruel confrontation of forces, whilst what rests is freedom of
speech exercised in drawing-rooms. Pacifists too are accomplices of instinctive
forces, because animal aggressiveness is inside us all. How do we express that
bestiality for which we condemn armies? Underneath the surface of the self-censorship belonging to the
radical left (not only to the conformist majority), it should be admitted
publicly that watching Abu Ghraib pictures of pornographic tortures does not
scandalize us, on the contrary, it rather excites us, in exactly the same way
as the obsessive voyeurism that draws us to videos of 9/11 videos. Through such
images we feel the expression of repressed instincts, the pleasure rising again
after narcotized by consumerism, technologies, goods and images. We show our
teeth as monkeys do, when their aggressive grin looks dreadfully like the human
smile. Contemporary thinkers like Baudrillard and Zizek acknowledge the dark
side inside Western culture. If 9/11 has been a shock for Western
consciousness, Baudrillard puts forward a more shocking thesis: we westerners
were to desire 9/11, as the death drive of a superpower that having reached its
natural limits, knows and desires nothing more than self-destruction and war.
The indignation is hypocrisy; there is always an animal talking behind a video
screen.