Digital Aesthetics and 9/11
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary code and those that don't."
"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists"
When the CD emerged and began to replace magnetic audio tape as the dominant music medium, Neil Young reportedly complained that whereas listening to a tape was a like being caressed by a warm ocean wave, digital sound was like being pushed over by a pile of ice cubes. Neil Young has never struck me as one with a particularly tuned ear, but his statement begins to address the digital aesthetic. What he heard - or thought he heard (the difference?) - were jagged clouds of binary pairs, of on-offs, of cold shoulders. In the digital realm, there is no jerry-rigging. The entire ritual of retracking the tape, winding with pencils, and hiding it from your neodymium speaker magnets is gone. There are no gray areas, no fudging. The information is either present or not. We might ride Neil Young's train of thought and argue that we are losing our pliability, our fleshiness, to the brittle world of silicon.
When digital goes wrong, it goes big. Some of the most inhumane sounds emanate from my speakers when the CD skips or when the digital player fumbles. The perfection of digital audio is only matched by its irredeemability when it goes wrong. Paul Virilio argues that every technology has built within it a catastrophe. To find out if this is true, one only has to follow the general use of the word "crash." The word has come to be almost exclusively associated with our machines of commuting and communication - cars and computers. Computers don't just falter or lose step. They crash. The specter of the Y2K bug was the anticipation of this idea coming to fruition on a grand scale - a general "system crash."
Whereas the digital aesthetic early on was one of perfection, now it has become sufficiently complex enough to contain dirt. The computer virus, for example, is a symptom of this complexity. But what does the aesthetic look like? It is violent. It contains big crashes (system failures) and little ones (dropped film frames and jagged discontinuities, pixellation, screeching mutations). The digital aesthetic longs for the golden days of static, the noise component of analog media. Static is fetishized in the digital aesthetic. Static is humane and forgiving. The digital aesthetic is intolerant of any aberration.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze talks about the "control society" emerging out of "disciplinary society." That is, the modes of social control are moving from their linguistic and institutional bases to cybernetic, pharmaceutical, and military ones. Think of the control society as a high-tech, decentrallized, crystallization of the social field. Terry Gilliam's film Brazil is a great illustration. While the social field of Brazil looks more like a low-tech 1960's Soviet Bloc country, it has a number of features of the control society. The inhabitants of this world never see the face of the master, and they can never see beyond immediate orders. There are explosions everywhere - at the restaurant, at work. The "terrorists" are hard at work. People have grown accustomed to the seemingly random violence that it doesn't even demand a second look.
The control society is the digital aesthetic applied to the political field. Another word for this is the War on Terror. The politics of fear, on the domestic end, along with a cocktail of antidepressants, are what the global managerial society needs to remain solvent. The managerial machine needs to remain in tension, like the integrated circuit. The energy that pulses through it needs to be stabilized. All the errant libidos are tamed with Zoloft and soothed with Nexium. The aesthetics of the Terror War are either clean (as in the clean desert TV wars) or unconscionably bloody and senseless - as in the case of the sudden, shocking, still unexplained collapse of the Twin Towers, not undone by an outside rocket, but by the confounding of its internal machinery. The War on Terror is as brittle and smooth as silicon itself, punctuated with the most violent ruptures. The explanation for this is as mystifying as the the computer message "Error: 0048485923LL4" - only decipherable by the most specialized technocrats of state who "do not negotiate with terrorists." Even the towers themselves seemed to imitate the ones and zeros of binary code.
One could argue that 9/11 was only an early episode in the progress of the control society; that as the digital age complexifies, the big crash will diffuse through the system; that these microcrashes will really constitute the mutant genes of social-technological life; that the space for free movement will be potentialized in the catastrophic fragility of everything. This is why the modes of social enforcement are moving away from a discourse of "defense" to one of "security," as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note in their Multitudes. The new paradigm is also showing up in the combination of military and police forces on domestic streets. As the image of "black bloc" protest violence advances, so does the security state and the emphasis on the development of the less-than-lethal weaponry of domestic crowd control. "System crashes," will perhaps themselves "network out." By this time, of course, it will be meaningless to talk of a "digital aesthetic."
"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists"
When the CD emerged and began to replace magnetic audio tape as the dominant music medium, Neil Young reportedly complained that whereas listening to a tape was a like being caressed by a warm ocean wave, digital sound was like being pushed over by a pile of ice cubes. Neil Young has never struck me as one with a particularly tuned ear, but his statement begins to address the digital aesthetic. What he heard - or thought he heard (the difference?) - were jagged clouds of binary pairs, of on-offs, of cold shoulders. In the digital realm, there is no jerry-rigging. The entire ritual of retracking the tape, winding with pencils, and hiding it from your neodymium speaker magnets is gone. There are no gray areas, no fudging. The information is either present or not. We might ride Neil Young's train of thought and argue that we are losing our pliability, our fleshiness, to the brittle world of silicon.
When digital goes wrong, it goes big. Some of the most inhumane sounds emanate from my speakers when the CD skips or when the digital player fumbles. The perfection of digital audio is only matched by its irredeemability when it goes wrong. Paul Virilio argues that every technology has built within it a catastrophe. To find out if this is true, one only has to follow the general use of the word "crash." The word has come to be almost exclusively associated with our machines of commuting and communication - cars and computers. Computers don't just falter or lose step. They crash. The specter of the Y2K bug was the anticipation of this idea coming to fruition on a grand scale - a general "system crash."
Whereas the digital aesthetic early on was one of perfection, now it has become sufficiently complex enough to contain dirt. The computer virus, for example, is a symptom of this complexity. But what does the aesthetic look like? It is violent. It contains big crashes (system failures) and little ones (dropped film frames and jagged discontinuities, pixellation, screeching mutations). The digital aesthetic longs for the golden days of static, the noise component of analog media. Static is fetishized in the digital aesthetic. Static is humane and forgiving. The digital aesthetic is intolerant of any aberration.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze talks about the "control society" emerging out of "disciplinary society." That is, the modes of social control are moving from their linguistic and institutional bases to cybernetic, pharmaceutical, and military ones. Think of the control society as a high-tech, decentrallized, crystallization of the social field. Terry Gilliam's film Brazil is a great illustration. While the social field of Brazil looks more like a low-tech 1960's Soviet Bloc country, it has a number of features of the control society. The inhabitants of this world never see the face of the master, and they can never see beyond immediate orders. There are explosions everywhere - at the restaurant, at work. The "terrorists" are hard at work. People have grown accustomed to the seemingly random violence that it doesn't even demand a second look.
The control society is the digital aesthetic applied to the political field. Another word for this is the War on Terror. The politics of fear, on the domestic end, along with a cocktail of antidepressants, are what the global managerial society needs to remain solvent. The managerial machine needs to remain in tension, like the integrated circuit. The energy that pulses through it needs to be stabilized. All the errant libidos are tamed with Zoloft and soothed with Nexium. The aesthetics of the Terror War are either clean (as in the clean desert TV wars) or unconscionably bloody and senseless - as in the case of the sudden, shocking, still unexplained collapse of the Twin Towers, not undone by an outside rocket, but by the confounding of its internal machinery. The War on Terror is as brittle and smooth as silicon itself, punctuated with the most violent ruptures. The explanation for this is as mystifying as the the computer message "Error: 0048485923LL4" - only decipherable by the most specialized technocrats of state who "do not negotiate with terrorists." Even the towers themselves seemed to imitate the ones and zeros of binary code.
One could argue that 9/11 was only an early episode in the progress of the control society; that as the digital age complexifies, the big crash will diffuse through the system; that these microcrashes will really constitute the mutant genes of social-technological life; that the space for free movement will be potentialized in the catastrophic fragility of everything. This is why the modes of social enforcement are moving away from a discourse of "defense" to one of "security," as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note in their Multitudes. The new paradigm is also showing up in the combination of military and police forces on domestic streets. As the image of "black bloc" protest violence advances, so does the security state and the emphasis on the development of the less-than-lethal weaponry of domestic crowd control. "System crashes," will perhaps themselves "network out." By this time, of course, it will be meaningless to talk of a "digital aesthetic."
posted by thebaffler at 7:40 AM
1 Comments:
My name is John Diamond and i would like to show you my personal experience with Nexium.
I am 58 years old. I have bee taking Nexium on and off for 2 years. For the last 3 months I have been taking 1-40mg daily. I have been cycling for 10 years riding avg. of 150 miles a week. I noticed this year I had no energy. Was riding 4 to 5 times a week and could hardly go. A fellow rider told me last week about the vitimin B absorbtion problem and other side effects he had from Nexium. I quit the Nexium last week and I could really tell the differance in my energy level. I was riding regularly and watching what I ate but could not see a weight loss. Now I see that others are having the same problems. I had never had the itchy rectum problem in my life untill a couple of months ago, when I started back on the Nexium on a regular basis.
I have experienced some of these side effects-
Fatigue, weight gain, itchy rectum
I hope this information will be useful to others,
John Diamond
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