"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.Attaining knowledge by reading the world is how we are supposed to self-
consciously exercise reason, form views, and partake in an enlightened project
of democratic consensus and legislation. Hence, insofar as these much hallowed
protocols of liberal democracy are concerned, this 9/11 opinion poll poses
some disconcerting questions:

1. How does one account for the fact that what is, at face value, the most
sophisticated technological assemblage for worldly communication and
dissemination of ‘truth’, should sublimate what, in Kantian terms, must be
called an unscientific belief or dogma?

2. To be mediatised literally means to lose one’s rights. Hence, what happens
to the idea of government by the people and for the people if the ‘false’ is
produced as a third relation which is not the synthetic union of two ideas in
the conscious mind of the citizen or the general intellect of the organic
community, but is a statistical coming together of variables?

3. If the ‘false’ is merely a moment in an overall control and management of
an information environment and its electronic herd, that is, if it is simply a
matter of manipulated distribution and saturation of facts in order to get a
desired feedback in terms of public perception, what consequences does that
have in terms of human politics? How is the cynical intelligence of power that
calls this into being to be configured?

4. Lastly, this distillation of the false as ‘informatic’ perception requires
money. In other words, it requires a tremendous amount of wealth in order to
not only bring the variables Saddam Hussein and 9/11 into a state of
associative frequency, but also to minimise and regulate the appearance of
other variables from appearing in the scenario. For instance, in this case, to
reduce, for the time being, the frequency of the proper name Osama. Hence, the
obvious question -– what is the role of money in the purportedly post-modern,
increasingly technologised, sphere of communicative action?

These are not new questions. They are a continuation of what a long line of
western thinkers, from Antonio Gramsci to Giorgio Agamben, have been asking
from various philosophical standpoints: how was it that modern technologies of
reproduction of the art work and electrification of the public sphere should
produce European fascism as one of its first, grotesque spectacles? In a way,
this anxious query seems to resonate, in a particular context, the old
Pascalian question posed at the very gestative period of a godless modern
world: how does one protect the interests of abstract justice from the real,
material interests of power in the world?

WHAT IS INFORMATION

The paradox, qua modern publicity and communication, as it is expressed in
Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay, can be outlined as follows: from the
perspective of the enlightenment humanist one could say that mechanised mass
culture in the 20th century was supposed to ‘de-auratise’ the work of art and
make it more democratically available; but what Benjamin notices in his time
is a disturbing incursion of aesthetics into politics, rather than the
politicisation of art that could have been possible. This, for him,
constitutes a ‘violation’ of the technologies of mass culture, by which
the ‘Fuhrer cult’ produces its ritual values of aestheticising war and
destruction. Benjamin formulates the problem as belonging to a society not
yet ‘mature’ enough to ‘incorporate technology as its organ’. In Benjamin’s
essay, ‘The Storyteller’, we can see this problem being articulated as a
situation in which forms of storytelling (which are at once educative and
exemplary to the citizen for his cosmopolitan education, and also amenable to
his freedom of critical interpretation and judgement) are replaced by a new
form of communication which he calls information. The first characteristic of
information is its erasure of distance -– its near-at-hand-ness grants
information the ‘readiest hearing’ and makes it appear ‘understandable in
itself’. The dissemination and reception of information is thus predicated on
the production of the event as ‘local’, as ‘already being shot through with
explanation.’’ For the conscious subject, this also entails the disappearance
of a temporal interval required for movement within the faculties, from
cognition to understanding and then finally to knowledge. Information is that
which is accompanied by the entropic violence brought about by a supercession
of the commonplace, and a reduction of language into clichÈs. It is in the
ruins of a constitutive or legislative language that the instantaneous circuit
of the commonsensical comes into being. In this case therefore, the
establishment of Saddam’s crimes does not remain a matter of old
jurisprudence, following normative rules of argumentation, proof, and
deduction; it becomes an absolute movement of the commonsensical as
the ‘already explained’.

WHAT IS FACISM?

Fascism is the common name we accord to totalitarian power. However, we often
do it irresponsibly or ahistorically, categorically identifying the concept
with limited, sociologistic understandings of the German or Italian scenarios
around the great wars, or confining it to grotesque figurations of human
agency, like that of Mussolini or Hitler. If the concept is to have any
critical valence whatsoever in our global, neoliberal occasion, it needs to be
unpacked and re-articulated before we begin to transpose it here and there.
Gilles Deleuze has re-articulated Benjamin’s argument by transposing it from
its organicist parabasis into a sub-human, molecular-pragmatic one. According
to Deleuze, the discourses of fascism, as dominant myths in our time,
establish themselves by an imperial-linguistic takeover of a whole social body
of expressive potentialities. There are different forms of life and expressive
energies in any situation of the historical which are capable of generating
multiple instances of thought, imaginative actions, and wills to art. Fascism
destroys such pre-signifying and pre-linguistic energies of the world,
extinguishes pluralities, and replaces them with a monologue of power that
saturates space with, and only with, the immanent will of the dictator. This
is the moment in which the language system sponsored by the sovereign is at
its most violent; it seeks to efface historical memory by denying its
constitutive or legislative relation with non-linguistic social energies; it
casts itself and its unilateral doctrine as absolute and natural. For Deleuze,
this is a psychomechanical production of social reality more than an
organicity of community torn asunder by human alienation and the incursion of
reactionary ideologies, false consciousnesses, and agents. Not that the latter
do not exist, or are unimportant components in this matter, but that this
technology of power cannot be simply seen as a neutral arrangement of tools
misused by evil ones. The figure of the dictator is therefore not that of the
aberrant individual madman, but a psychological automaton that becomes
insidiously present in all, in the technology of massification itself. The
images and objects that mass hallucination, somnambulism, and trance produce
are attributes of this immanent will to power.[1] The hypnotic, fascinating
drive of fascism is thus seen to paradoxically operate below the radar of a
moral and voluntaristic consciousness of the human subject; fascism becomes a
political reality when knowledge based exchanges between entities of
intelligence give way to a technologism of informatics.

Thinking, knowledge, or communicability (which is different from this or that
technologism of communication) becomes foreclosed in such an order of power
because one cannot really say anything that the social habit does not
designate as something already thought of and pre-judged by the dictator. The
publicity of fascism is one where friend and foe alike are seen to be engaged
in tauto-talk, repeating what the dictator has already said or warned about.
Benjamin calls this an eclipse of the order of cosmological mystery and
secular miracles that the European humanist sciences of self and nature, and
an enlightened novelisation of the arts sought to delineate and solve. There
can be neither secrecies in fascism, nor anything unknown.

Conspiracies in
that sense can only be manifestations of what is already foretold and waiting
to be confessed. The SS can of course procure and store ‘classified
information’, but it can never say anything that the Fuhrer does not know
better. Information therefore becomes an incessant and emphatic localisation
of the global will of the dictator; in its seriality and movement, it can only
keep repeating, illustrating, and reporting the self-evident truth of the
dictatorial monologue.[2]

For Deleuze, it is in this immanence of dictatorial
will that Hitler becomes information itself. Also, it is precisely because of
this that one cannot wage a battle against Hitlerism by embarking on a battle
of truth and falsehood without questioning, and taking for granted, the very
parabasis of information and its social relations of production. ‘No
information, whatever it might be, is sufficient to defeat Hitler’.

Hence, like any other individual, Adolf the Aryan anti-semite does not exhaust
the figure of Hitler. Informatics has not ceased after the death of Adolf and
his propaganda machine, or the passing away of the particular discourse of the
Adolphic oracle and its immediate historical context. As a figural diagram, as
a special shorthand for a particular technology of power, Hitler subsequently
must have only become stronger, that is, if indeed we are to still account for
him as an immanent will to information that invests modern societies. But how
can one conceptualise him without the formalist baggage, in other words,
without the grotesque, arborescent institutions of repression, like the secret
police or the concentration camps, which constitute a historicist definition
of fascism? If one were to put the question differently, that is, occasion it
in terms of a present global order of neo-liberalism, marked by American style
individualism, consumer choices, democracy, and free markets that supposedly
come to us after the agonistic struggles of liberation in the modern era are
already settled, how can one enfigure the dead and buried tyrant in our midst
in such an ‘untimely’ manner? How is Hitler possible in a liberal
constitution? The question is a complicated one, because if we go back to the
example we began our essay with, we will see that it actually satisfies the
conditions of democratic accountability in terms of the human lie (the
President never said this). Besides, it is also not the result of the state,
as collective capitalist, monopolising the public sphere for propaganda
purposes.

Perhaps one has to begin by not trying to enfigure Hitler in the contours of
the human, as the irrational apex of the suicidal state, or the pathological
Goebbelsian liar who perverted the tools of human communication into mass
propaganda machines. Hitler in that sense, would not simply be the mediocre
and grotesque madman who uses or abuses technology. He would still be a proper
name for technologism itself, but in his latest neoliberal incarnation, he
would not be one who simply imprisons the human in enclosed spaces like the
death camp or exercises a Faustian domination over him through arborescent
structures like the Nazi war/propaganda machine. The ‘postmodern’ technology
of information that we are talking about qua Hitler is neither external nor
internal to the human; it is one that is a part of the latter’s self-making as
well as that of the bio-anthropological environment he lives in. Hitler enters
us through a socialisation of life itself, through a technology of habituation
that involves our willingness to be informed. It is a diffuse modality of
power that perpetually communicates between the inside and the outside,
erasing distance between the home and the world. It is in this context that
Deleuze’s statement, that there is a Hitler inside us, modern abjects of
capital, becomes particularly significant. Hitler, as per this formulation,
becomes an immanent form of sovereignty that is biopolitically present,
percolating individuals and communities in an osmotic manner. Hitler as
information, as socially immanent micro-fascisms, is not the addresser who
speaks to us while we listen. It was only Adolf who did that in the old days,
as the anachronistic caricature of the sovereign who had not yet had his head
cut off, but had simply ‘lost it’. Information on the other hand, is a
metropolitan habit of instant signification; it is an administered social
automaton that does not presume a contract between the speaker and the hearer.
Since it has no point of origin other than the person informed, the instance
of information is thus always one where the self listens to the commonsensical
within the self itself, to the point where the two become indistinguishable.
Hence, it is neither a lying President who says that Saddam Hussein had
something to do with 9/11, nor was such a sublimation the result of unilateral
state propaganda in the style of old Adolf or old Stalin. Information in this
sense, is indeed a commodified effect -– a compact of words and images that is
called into being by a non-linear and inhuman intelligence that, amongst other
things, produces the human caricature or the icon of the Dictator himself.

Informatisation therefore, evades the legal question altogether, by creating a
situation where the commonsensical relation between Saddam Hussein and Al
Qaida is established not by the word of the sovereign (which can always be
produced as evidence and contested in tribunals of justice) but by a manifest
immanence of an inhuman sovereign will.

It is only when we understand the cult of information as a social mode of
production that we can understand that the problem of mediatisation that we
have been talking about does not concern the agency of the individual human at
all. To put it blandly, this is not about a conspiracy of a cabal of
capitalists and money mongers who manufacture truth in a determined manner.
That is, Hitler in an anthropomorphic form who arbitrates what should be said
and what should not. We are also not simply talking about representational
intentions (what Karl Rove really wanted us to believe) or prejudices about
representational capabilities (Americans, as a people, need to mature in order
to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff). The effort, on the other
hand, is to understand a situation where screen time is money time, where one
has to have money, or be sponsored by corporate interests of money, in order
to be able to exercise one’s right to ‘self representation’. The fact that we
are mediatised, hence bereft of rights, thus applies only differentially -– all
of us are Hitlers who command attention, or nigger-infants (the Greek
etymology of the word infant, as in in-fans, refers to the being without
language) who listen without speaking, but only in differential degrees of
hierarchised mediation. Without old Adolf’s old dividing walls, everyone can
speak, blessed with the freedom of speech. Nominally, everyone can play the
game of representations, since everyone has money. It is a different matter
altogether, one that has not much to do with the language games of neo-liberal
economics and ideology, that some have a lot more of it than others.

CONCLUSION

A new form of political thinking has to begin by taking into account vast
amounts of energies in the world that are antagonistic to capital. This has to
be done in terms other than those pertaining to the figure of the human
citizen and his charter of rights. It is part of the transcendental stupidity
of the cult of information to impart such energies with a catalogue of
profiles: the criminal, the delinquent, the madman, the negro, the woman, the
child, the African AIDS victim, the poor, the unemployed, the illegal
immigrant, or the terrorist. Informatics is about the reporting of the state’s
pharmacopic action on these bodies, as objects of charity, aid, medication,
schooling, or military action. This is why the unspeakable antagonism of
living labour in the world is never ‘visible’ on CNN, Fox or any other
corporate geo-televisual schema of metropolitan representation. The latter can
discern only the ontology of money and its coalitionary interests –- that which
perpetually makes screen time money time. Humans, who are merely refugees
great and small, can only climb into one or many of the designated profiles of
massification. The centralising, perspectivist drive of CNN ­­ as commentary of
the world, as a repetitive human psychodrama of development (birth pangs of
modernity in the frontier, subjugated and freed consumer desires) -– overlooks
the energy from the margins of the frame in trying to fit entire crowds into
the telegenic face. This is why populations can be categorically divided into
simple binaries like ‘with us’ or ‘against us’. Labour and its multiple wills
to antagonism (of which various narratives of resistance are only partial but
undeniably important molar expressions) are thus un-representable precisely
because they lack a ‘human’ face, or rather the face of the future American
consumer. Global antagonisms to capital are at once utopic (as in ‘non-place’
since the logic of globalisation cannot posit an ‘outside’) and pantopic; they
are, in multiple forms, and in different degrees of sublimation, nowhere and
everywhere. It is a complex, political understanding of such matters -– like
linking insurrectionary violence in different corners of the world to unfair
and imbalanced trade practices like agricultural subsidiaries, dumping, and
tariff walls by first world countries –- that spectacular informatisation
removes or minimises from the public sphere. Politics therefore is replaced by
symbiotic exchanges between peace and terror, and fear and security;
communication likewise, is overwritten by a great monologue of global
managerial-elite interests, in which power speaks to itself.

A judgement of the panorama of expressions of this global antagonistic will on
the lines of good and bad can take place only as an afterthought; political
thinking in our occasion can begin only with the acknowledgement of these
energies as eventful, and not subject to essential categories of a state
language that has become global. In other words, thinking has to proceed
acutely, from an awareness of that very point of danger, where the state fails
to ‘translate’ such affective hostilities into repetitive instances of its own
already explained story. It must be remembered that informatics, as a form of
social production of consent, is able to attain a normative power precisely
because it is accompanied by an epistemic presumption of the end of the
historical process altogether.[3]

Stories therefore cannot be seen to be
teaching us anything new in terms of constitutive politics because in the new
world order of a globally rampant neoliberalism, there can be nothing new to
narrate at all, in terms of alternative destinies and potentials of the world.
They can only be local instances of crisis and management, in a grand
chronicle of financialisation of the globe that is already foretold. It is
this dire poverty of political language that the neo-liberal state tries to
cover up with violence dictated in a situation of ‘emergency’ that is
legitimised by an emotionalist, folksy rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Here I
must strongly clarify that I am not registering support for either the
undeniably tyrannical Saddam Hussein, or a statist ideology of violence like
that of Al Qaida. These two totalitarian entities, like some of their western
counterparts, merely capture and mobilise some of these antagonistic energies.
As far as the latter is concerned, it is not difficult to see how informatics
peddles the worst cliches of neo-liberalism in trying to enframe antagonism
through a host of good and evil profile doublets according to which a
population is invented and managed, or policed and fed -– the model minority
contra the inner city delinquent, the healthy contra the mad, the peaceful
Arab contra the Islamic bigot. In terms of spectacle and violence, it thus
falls perfectly within the logic of war/information to have the yellow cluster
bomb be interspersed with the yellow food packet during the recent war in
Afghanistan. The global state of surveillance and security today violently
tries to foreclose the political by informatising complex insurrectionary
potentialities in terms of a simplistic, self-evident, and bipolar logic of
peace and terror. The latter thus becomes a generic term to reductively
describe a multiplicity of forces -– from Latin American guerilla movements, to
African tribal formations, to Islamic militancy in the Middle-East to Maoist
rebellion in Nepal. The freedom of choice offered by the globally rampant
North Atlantic machine of war and informatics is no longer between dwelling as
a poet or as an assassin, but between a statistic or a terrorist.

[1] See Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 263-69

[2] In this context see Hannah Arendt’s useful elaborations in The Origins of
Totalitarianism

[3] I am of course alluding to Francis Fukuyama’s Kojevian-Hegelian thesis in
The End of History and the Last Man

Works Cited:

Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harvest, 1973 ||

Benjamin, Walter ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’
in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt ed., Trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1973,
pp. 83-107 ||

Benjamin, Walter ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ in Illuminations, pp. 211-244 ||

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The
Time Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1989 ||

Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last
Man, New York: Avon Books, 1992

[Anustup Basu is Cultural Studies Fellow at the University
of Pittsburgh’s Department of English.]