Piers (no)Morgan
Out of context: Reply #3
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- Kuz0
I read an interesting article in the May 2004 Issue of the New Left Review about the state's and capitalisms extensive contol of the media and "the image" in creating societies of the spectacle - it's a bit over intellectual but interesting: -
AFFLICTED POWERS
The State, the Spectacle and September 11
-The current global conjuncture as a collision between brute imperial interests and blunders in hegemonic control of the image-world. State power and "spectacle" warfare after September 11-
.....the state in the twentieth century had been dragged into full collaboration in the micro-management of everyday life. The market’s necessity became the state’s obsession. (Slowly, and in a sense against the state’s better judgement, because always there existed a tension between the modern state’s armoured other-directedness—its raison d’être as a war machine—and capital’s insistence that the state come to its aid in the great work of internal policing and packaging. This tension has again been visible over the past three years. We believe it is one key to the obvious incoherence of the state’s recent actions.) Second, this deeper and deeper involvement of the state in the day-to-day instrumentation of consumer obedience meant that increasingly it came to live or die by its investment in, and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ of which TV was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute. This world of images had long been a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them; but by the late twentieth century it had given rise to a specific polity.
The modern state, we would argue, has come to need weak citizenship. It depends more and more on maintaining an impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of an older, more idiosyncratic civil society live on. It has adjusted profoundly to its economic master’s requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four. Weak citizenship, but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention—an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, ‘individually’) into a deadly simulacrum of community.
At times, the first writers to confront this nightmare seemed to despair in the face of it:
"There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . The States UNASWERABLE lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . The states power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other...To this list of the triumphs of power we should add, however, one result which has proved negative: once the running of the state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically"
The spectacular state is obliged, we are saying, to devise an answer to the defeat of September 11. And it seems it cannot. Of course many of the things it has tried out over the past three years have ordinary military, neo-colonial, grossly economic logics underlying them. The invasion of Iraq is the obvious case in point. We too take seriously the idea that factions within the US administration had long thought the impasse of ‘sanctions’ intolerable, had thirsted for oil, had dreamt of a new bridgehead in an increasingly anti-American region, and so on. But at the very least it can be said that the manner in which these policies were finally acted on—they had been the pipedreams of the ultra-Right in Washington for more than a decade—has been a barely credible mixture of blunder, gullibility, over-reach, lip-smacking callousness (hardly bothering to disguise its lack of concern at the ‘stuff happening’ in the streets of Kandahar or Baghdad), unfathomable ignorance and wishful thinking, and constant entrapment in the day-to-day, hour-by-hour temporality of the sound bite and the suicide bomb. And where, in the end, is the image the war machine has been looking for—the one to put paid to the September haunting? Toppling statues, Presidents in jump suits, Saddam saying ‘Aah’ . . . wake us (wake the whole world of couch potatoes) when it’s over.
The state has behaved like a maddened beast. This does not mean it is on the path to real strategic failure, necessarily, or that it will prove incapable of pulling back from the imperatives of the image-war and slowly, relentlessly accommodating itself to the needs of a new round of primitive accumulation. The hatchet men and torture brigades are being recruited again as we write. ‘Road maps’ are to be thrown in the dustbin. Failed states become weak states once more. ‘Democracy’ proves unexportable. Iran and Syria join the comity of nations. Exit Wolfowitz and Makiya, mumbling.
States can behave like maddened beasts, in other words, and still get their way. They regularly do. But the present madness is singular: the dimension of spectacle (contolling media discourse) has never before interfered so palpably, so insistently, with the business of keeping one’s areas of control in order. And never before have spectacular politics been conducted in the shadow—the ‘historical knowledge’—of defeat. It remains to be seen what new mutation of the military-industrial-entertainmen... complex emerges from the shambles.