[iwar] FW: Zero News Datapool, PETER LAMBORN WILSON The Information War.htm
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Subject: [iwar] FW: Zero News Datapool, PETER LAMBORN WILSON The Information War.htm
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http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/infowar.htm
PETER LAMBORN WILSON
Co-Editor of Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia, author of Sacred Drift and
Scandal
This is a speech given at the opening of Public Netbase t0 on the 17th of
March 1995.
THE INFORMATION WAR
Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from
the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest
"religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a
belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. postpaleolithic) religions contain
the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and
the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans
have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy)
without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace
accumulates very gradually (like, mercury poisoning) till eventually it
turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this
disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes
what we call civilization.
A similar trajectory can be traced through the phenomenon of "war"
Hunter/gatherers practiced (and still practice, as amongst the Yanomami) a
kind of ritualized brawl (think of the Plains Indian custom of "counting
coup"). "Real" war is a continuation of religion and economics (i.e.
politics) by other means, and thus only begins historically with the
priestly invention of "scarcity" in the Neolithic, and the emergence of a
"warrior caste". (I categorically reject the theory that "war" is a
prolongation of "hunting".) WW II seems to have been the last "real" war.
Hyperreal war began in Vietnam, with the involvement of television, and
recently reached full obscene revelation in the "Gulf War" of 1991.
Hyperreal war is no longer "economic", no longer "the health of the state".
The Ritual Brawl is voluntary and non-hierarchic (war chiefs are always
temporary); real war is compulsory and hierarchic; hyperreal war is
imagistic and psychologically interiorized ("Pure War"). In the first the
body is risked; in the second, the body is sacrificed; in the third, the
body has disappeared, (See P. Clastres on "primitive warfare" as opposed to
War in Archaeology of Violence.)
Modern science also incorporates an anti-materialist bias, the dialectical
outcome of its war against Religion: -- it has in some sense become
Religion. Science as knowledge of material reality paradoxically decomposes
the materiality of the real.
Science has always been a species of priestcraft, a branch of cosmology; and
an ideology, a justification of "the way things are." The deconstruction of
the "real" in post-classical physics mirrors the vacuum of irreality which
constitutes "the state". Once the image of Heaven on Earth, the state now
consists of no more than the management of images. It is no longer a "force"
but a disembodied pattering of information. But just as Babylonian cosmology
justified Babylonian power, so too does the "finality" of modern science
serve the ends of the Terminal State, the post-nuclear state, the
"information state". Or so the New Paradigm would have it. And "everyone"
accepts the axiomatic premises of the new paradigm. The new paradigm is very
spiritual. Even the New Age with its gnostic tendencies embraces the New
Science and its increasing etherealization as a source of proof-texts for
its spiritualist world view. Meditation and cybernetics go hand in hand. Of
course the "information state" somehow requires the support of a police
force and prison system that would have stunned Nebuchadnezzar and reduced
all the priests of Moloch to paroxysms of awe. And modern science still
can't weasel out of its complicity in the very-nearly-successful "conquest
of Nature". Civilization's greatest triumph over the body. But who cares?
It's all "relative" isn't it? I guess we'll just have to "evolve" beyond the
body. Maybe we can do it in a "quantum" leap.
Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried out
through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of our
alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information
rather than direct experience. In this sense the Media serves a religious or
priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of the body by re-defining
spirit as information. The essence of information is the Image, the sacral
and iconic data-complex which usurps the primacy of the "material bodily
principle" as the vehicle of incarnation, replacing it with a fleshless
ecstasis beyond corruption. Consciousness becomes something which can be
"down-loaded", excized from the matrix of animality and immortalized as
information. No longer "ghost-in-the-machine", but machine-as-ghost, machine
as Holy Ghost, ultimate mediator, which will translate us from our
mayfly-corpses to a pleroma of Light. Virtual Reality as CyberGnosis. Jack
in, leave Mother Earth behind forever.
All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism: as in science, so in the
social. Classical physics played midwife to Capitalism, Communism, Fascism
and other Modem ideologies. Post-classical science also proposes a set of
ideas meant to be applied to the social: Relativity, Quantum "unreality",
cybernetics, information theory, etc. With some exceptions, the
post-classical tendency is towards ever greater etherealization. Some
proponents of Black Hole theory, for example, talk like pure Pauline
theologians, while some of the information-theorists are beginning to sound
like virtual Manichaeans. 1
On the level of the social these paradigms give rise to a rhetoric of
bodylessness quite worthy of a third century desert monk or a 17th century
New England Puritan -- but expressed in a language of post-Industrial
post-modern feel-good consumer frenzy. Our every conversation is infected
with certain paradigmatic assumptions which are really no more than bald
assertions, but which we take for the very fabric or urgrund of Reality
itself. For instance, since we now assume that computers represent a real
step toward "artificial intelligence", we also assume that buying a computer
makes us more intelligent. In my own field I've met dozens of writers who
sincerely believe that owning a PC has made them better (not "more
efficient", but better) writers. This is amusing; -- but the same feeling
about computers when applied to a trillion dollar military budget, churns
out Star Wars' killer robots, etc. (See Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of
Intelligent Machines on AI in modern weaponry).
An important part of this rhetoric involves the concept of an "information
economy". The post-Industrial world is now thought to be giving birth to
this new economy. One of the clearest examples of the concept can be found
in a recent book by a man who is a Libertarian, the Bishop of a Gnostic
Dualist Church in California, and a learned and respected writer for Gnosis
magazine:
The industry, of the past phase of civilization (sometimes called "low
technology") was big industry, and bigness always implies oppressiveness.
The new high technology, however, is not big in the same way. While the old
technology produced and distributed material resources, the new technology
produces and disseminates information. The resources marketed in high
technology are less about matter and more about mind. Under the impact of
high technology, the world is moving increasingly from a physical economy
into what might be called a "metaphysical economy." We are in the process of
recognizing that consciousness rather than raw materials or physical
resources constitutes wealth. 2
Modern neo-gnosticism usually lays down the old Manichaean attack on the
body for a gentler greener rhetoric. Bishop Hoeller - for instance stresses
the importance of ecology and environment (because we don't want to "foul
our nest", the Earth) -- but in his chapter on Native American spirituality
he implies that a cult of the Earth is clearly inferior to the pure Gnostic
spirit of bodylessness:
But we must not forget that the nest is not the same as bird. The exoteric
and esoteric traditions declare that earth is not the only home for human
beings, that we did not grow like weeds from the soil. While our bodies
indeed may have originated on this earth, our inner essence did may have
originated not. To think otherwise puts us outside of all of the known
spiritual traditions and separates us from the wisdom of the seers and sages
of every age. Though wise in their own ways, Native Americans have small
connection with this rich spiritual heritage. 3
In such terms, (the body = the "savage"), the Bishop's hatred and disdain
for the flesh illuminate every page of his book. In his enthusiasm for a
truly religious economy, he forgets that one cannot eat "information". "Real
wealth" can never become immaterial until humanity achieves the final
etherealization of downloaded consciousness. Information in the form of
culture can be called wealth metaphorically because it is useful and
desirable -- but it can never be wealth in precisely the same basic way that
oysters and cream, or wheat and water, are wealth in themselves.
Information is always only information about some thing. Like money,
information is not the thing itself. 'Over time we can come to think of
money as wealth (as in a delightful Taoist ritual which refers to "Water and
Money" as the two most vital principles in the universe), but in truth this
is sloppy abstract thinking. It has allowed its focus of attention to wander
from the bun to the penny which symbolizes the bun. 4
Just yesterday I cam across a quote from Derrick de Kerckhove at Serious
Chiller Lounge and it is a nice quote on information sprituality:
"The ultimate goal: Where is technology going? Its ultimate goal is to
bridge mind and matter in realtime. That is, to have no interface, no
medium. (The medium is the message - no more message no more medium.) Just
direct thought to matter (which is already experienced in Brain.Vader.) All
this is going on in very fast pace right now. If you can translate every
matter into 0 1, or into a digit, every texture, every substance, every
sensory input or output, every displayform, you are dealing with a complete
etherealization of matter. Its becoming cosubstantial with mind by
digitization. Digitization is one step beyond atomization. Atomization
remains material - digitization is spiritual atomization. Very very much the
process of 2000 years history.
Instant distribution - the net, huge computers, 20 million co-processors -
so we have instant communication everywhere and that is another
etherealization of form and it is another transmutation of mind. Completely
new associations of consciousness are going on - so that's another aspect of
this transformation. "
So says Derrick de Kerckhove.
In effect we've had an "information economy" ever since we invented money.
But we still haven't learned to digest copper. The Aesopian crudity of these
truisms embarrasses me, but I must perforce play the stupid lazy yokel
plowing a crooked furrow when all the straight thinkers around me appear to
be hallucinating. Americans and other "First World" types seem particularly
susceptible to the rhetoric of a "metaphysical economy" because we can no
longer see (or feel or smell) around us very much evidence of a physical
world. Our architecture has become symbolic, we have enclosed ourselves in
the manifestations of abstract thought (cars, apartments, offices, schools),
we work at "service"' or information-related jobs, helping in our little way
to move disembodied symbols of wealth around an abstract grid of Capital,
and we spend our leisure largely engrossed in Media rather than in direct
experience of material reality. The material world for us has come to
symbolize catastrophe, as in our amazingly hysterical reaction to storms and
hurricanes (proof that we've failed to "conquer Nature" entirely), or our
neo-Puritan fear of sexual otherness, or our taste for bland and denatured
(almost abstract) food. And yet this "First World" economy is not
self-sufficient. It depends for its position (top of the pyramid) on a vast
substructure of old-fashioned material production. Mexican farmworkers grow
and package all that "Natural" food for us so we can devote our time to
stocks, insurance, law, computers, video games. Peons in Taiwan make silicon
chips for our PCs. Towel-heads in the Middle East suffer and die for our
sins. Life? Oh, our servants do that for us. We have no life, only
"lifestyle" -- an abstraction of life, based on the sacred symbolism of the
Commodity, mediated by the priesthood of the stars, those "larger than life"
abstractions who rule our values and people our dreams -- the
mediarchetypes; or perhaps mediarchs would be a better term.
Of course this Baudrillardian dystopia doesn't really exist -- yet. 5 It's
surprising however to note how many social radicals consider it a desirable
goal, at least as long as it's called the "Information Revolution" or
something equally inspiring. Leftists talk about seizing the means of
information-production from the data-monopolists. 6 In truth, information is
everywhere -- even atom bombs can be constructed on plans available in
public libraries. As Noam Chomsky points out "one can always access
information -- provided one has a private income and a fanaticism bordering
on insanity". Universities and "think tanks" make pathetic attempts to
monopolize information - they too are dazzled by the notion of an
information economy -- but their conspiracies are laughable.
Information may not always be "free", but there's a great deal more of it
available than any one person could ever possibly use. Books on every
conceivable subject can actually still be found through inter-library loan.
7 Meanwhile someone still has to grow pears and cobble shoes. Or, even if
these "industries" can be completely mechanized, someone still has to eat
pears and wear shoes. The body is still the basis of wealth. The idea of
Images as wealth is a "spectacular delusion".
Even a radical critique of "information" can still give rise to an
over-valuation of abstraction and data. In a "pro-situ" zine from England
called NO, the following message was scrawled messily across the back cover
of a recent issue:
As you read these words, the Information Age explodes ... inside and around
you -- with the Misinformation Missiles and Propaganda bombs of outright
Information Warfare. Traditionally, war has been fought for
territory/economic gain. Information Wars are fought for the acquisition of
territory indigenous to the Information Age, i.e. the human mind
itself.....In particular, it is the faculty of the imagination that is under
the direct threat of extinction from the onslaughts of multi-media
overload....DANGER--YOUR IMAGINATION MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN...
As a culture sophisticates, it deepens its reliance on its images, icons and
symbols as a way of defining itself and communicating with other cultures.
As the accumulating mix of a culture's images floats around in its
collective psyche, certain isomorphic icons coalesce to produce and to
project an "illusion" of reality. Fads, fashions, artistic trends. U KNOW
THE SCORE. "I can take their images for reality because I believe in the
reality of their images (their image of reality)." WHOEVER CONTROLS THE
METAPHOR GOVERNS THE MIND. The conditions of total saturation are slowly
being realized -- a creeping paralysis -- from the trivialisation of
special/technical knowledge to the specialization of trivia. The INFORMATION
WAR is a war we cannot afford to lose. The result is unimaginable. 8
I find myself very much in sympathy with the author's critique of media
here, yet I also feel that a demonization of "information" has been proposed
which consists of nothing more than the mirror-image of
information-as-salvation. Again Baudrillard's vision of the Commtech
Universe is evoked, but this time as Hell rather than as the Gnostic
Hereafter. Bishop Hoeller wants everybody jacked-in and down-loaded -- the
anonymous post-situationist ranter wants you to smash your telly -- but both
of them believe in the mystic power of information. One proposes the pax
technologica, the other declares "war". Both exude a kind of Manichaean view
of Good and Evil, but can't agree on which is which.
The critical theorist swims in a sea of facts. We like to imagine it also as
our maquis , with ourselves as the "guerrilla ontologists" of its datascape.
Since the 19th century the ever-mutating "Social Sciences" have unearthed a
vast hoard of information on everything from shamanism to semiotics. Each
"discovery" feeds back into "Social Science" and changes it. We drift. We
fish for poetic facts, data which will intensify and mutate our experience
of the real. We invent new hybrid "sciences" as tools for this process:
ethnopharmacology, ethnohistory, cognitive studies, history of ideas,
subjective anthropology (anthropological poetics or ethno-poetics), "dada
epistemology", etc. We look on all this knowledge not as "good" in itself,
but valuable only inasmuch as it helps us to seize or to construct our own
happiness. In this sense we do know of "information as wealth"; nevertheless
we continue to desire wealth itself and not merely its abstract
representation as information. At the same time we also know of "information
as war" 9; nevertheless, we have not decided to embrace ignorance just
because "facts" can be used like a poison gas. Ignorance is not even an
adequate defense, much less a useful weapon in this war. We attempt neither
to fetishize nor demonize "information". Instead we try to establish a set
of values by which information can be measured and assessed. Our standard in
this process can only be the body.
According to certain mystics, spirit and body are "one". Certainly spirit
has lost its ontological solidity (since Nietzsche, anyway), while, body's
claim to "reality" has been undermined by modern science to the point of
vanishing in a cloud of "pure energy". So why not assume that spirit and
body are one, after all, and that they are twin (or dyadic) aspects of the
same underlying and inexpressible real? No body without spirit, no spirit
without body. The Gnostic Dualists are wrong, as are the vulgar "dialectical
materialists". Body and spirit together make life. If either pole is
missing, the result is death. This constitutes a fairly simple set of
values, assuming we prefer life to death. Obviously I'm avoiding any strict
definitions of either body or spirit. I'm speaking of "empirical" everyday
experiences. We experience "spirit" when we dream or create; we experience
"body" when we eat or shit (or maybe vice versa); we experience both at once
when we make love. I'm not proposing metaphysical categories here. We're
still drifting and these are ad-hoc points of reference, nothing more. We
needn't be mystics to propose this version of "one reality". We need only
point out that no other reality has yet appeared within the context of our
knowable experience. For all practical purposes, the "World" is "one". 10
Historically however, the "body" half of this unity has always received the
insults, bad press, scriptural condemnation, and economic persecution of the
"spirit"-half. The self-appointed representatives of the spirit have called
almost all the tunes in known history, leaving the body only a prehistory of
primitive disappearance, and a few spasms of failed insurrectionary
futility. Spirit has ruled -- hence we scarcely even know how to speak the
language of the body. When we use the word "information" we reify it because
we have always reified abstractions -- ever since God appeared as a burning
bush. (Information as the catastrophic decorporealization of "brute"
matter). We would now like to propose the identification of self with body.
We're not denying that "the body is also spirit", but we wish to restore
some balance to the historical equation. We calculate all body-hatred and
world-slander as our "evil". We insist on the revival (and mutation) of
"pagan" values concerning the relation of body and spirit. We fail to feel
any great enthusiasm for the "information economy" because we see it as yet
another mask for body-hatred. We can't quite believe in the "information
war", since it also hypostatizes information but labels it "evil".
In this sense, "information" would appear to be neutral. But we also
distrust this third position as a lukewarm cop-out and a failure of
theoretical vision. Every "fact" takes different meanings as we run it
through our dialectical prism 11 and study its gleam and shadows. The "fact"
is never inert or "neutral.", but it can be both "good" and "evil" (or
beyond them) in countless variations and combinations. We, finally, are the
artists of this immeasurable discourse. We create values. We do this because
we are alive. Information is as big a "mess" as the material world it
reflects and transforms. We embrace the mess, all of it. It's all life. But
within the vast chaos of the alive, certain information and certain material
things begin to coalesce into a poetics or a way-of-knowing or a
way-of-acting. We can draw certain pro-tem "conclusions", as long as we
don't plaster them over and set them up on altars.
Neither "information" nor indeed any one "fact" constitutes a
thing-in-itself. The very word "information" implies an ideology, or rather
a paradigm, rooted in unconscious fear of the "silence" of matter and of the
universe. "Information" is a substitute for certainty, a left-over fetish of
dogmatics, a super-stitio , a spook. "Poetic facts" are not assimilable to
the doctrine of "information". "Knowledge is freedom" is true only when
freedom is understood as a psycho-kinetic skill. "Information" is a chaos;
knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing
of the wave of that spontaneity.
NOTES
The new "life" sciences offer some dialectical opposition here, or could do
so if they worked with and through certain paradigms. Chaos theory seems to
potentially deal with the material world in positive ways, as does Gaia
theory, morphogenetic theory, and various other "soft" and "neo-hermetic"
disciplines. Elsewhere I"ve attempted to incorporate these philosophical
implications into a "festal" synthesis. The point is not to abandon all
thought about the material world, but to realize that all science has
philosophical and political implications, and that science is a way of
thinking, not a dogmatic structure of incontrovertible Truth. Of course
quantum, relativity, and information theory are all "true" in some way and
can be given a positive interpretation. I've already done that in several
essays. Now I want to explore the negative aspects.
Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society, Stephan A. Hoeller (Quest,
Wheaton, IL, 1992), 229-230.
Ibid., p. 164.
Like Pavlov's dogs salivating at the dinner bell rather than the dinner: --
a perfect illustration of what I mean by "abstraction".
Although some might say that it already "virtually" exists. I just heard
from a friend in California of a new scheme for "universal prisons":
offenders will be allowed to live at home and go to work but will be
electronically monitored at all times, like Winston Smith in 1984. The
universal panopticon now potentially coincides one-to-one with the whole of
reality; life and work will take the place of outdated physical
incarceration: -- the Prison Society will merge with "electronic democracy"
to form a Surveillance State or information totality, with all time and
space compacted beneath the unsleeping gaze of RoboCop. On the level of pure
tech, at least, it would seem that we have at last arrived at "the future".
"Honest citizens" of course will have nothing to fear; hence terror will
reign unchallenged and Order will triumph like the Universal Ice. Our only
hope may lie in the "chaotic perturbation" of massively-linked computers,
and in the venal stupidity or boredom of those who program and monitor the
system.
I will always remember with pleasure being addressed, by a Bulgarian
delegate to a conference I once attended as a "fellow worker in philosophy".
Perhaps the capitalist version would be "entrepreneur in philosophy", as if
one bought ideas like apples at roadside stands.
Of course information may sometimes be "occult" as in Conspiracy Theory.
Information may be "disinformation". Spies and propagandists make up a kind
of shadow "information economy", to be sure. Hackers who believe in "freedom
of information" have my sympathy, especially since they've been picked as
the latest enemies of the Spectacular State, and subjected to its spasms of
control-by-terror. But hackers have yet to "liberate" a single bit of
information useful in our struggle. Their impotence, and their fascination
with Imagery, make them ideal victims of the "Information State", which
itself is based on pure simulation. One needn't steal data from the
post-military-industrial complex to know, in general, what it's up to. We
understand enough to form our critique. More information by itself will
never take the place of the actions we have failed to carry out; data by
itself will never reach critical mass. Despite my loving debt to thinkers
like Robert Anton Wilson and T. Leary I cannot agree with their optimist
analysis of the cognitive function of information technology. It is not the
neural system alone which will achieve autonomy, but the entire body.
Issue #6, "Nothing is True", box 175, Liverpool L69 8DX, UK
Indeed, the whole "poetic terrorism" project has been proposed only as a
strategy in this very war.
"The 'World' is 'one'"can be and has been used to justify a totality, a
metaphysical ordering of "reality" with a "center" or "apex": one God, one
King, etc., etc. This is the monism of orthodoxy, which naturally opposes
Dualism and its other source of power ("evil") -- orthodoxy also presupposes
that the One occupies a higher ontological position than the Many, that
transcendence takes precedence over immanence. What I call radical (or
heretical) monism demands unity of one and Many on the level of immanence;
hence it is seen by Orthodoxy as a turning-upside-down or saturnalia which
proposes that every "one" is equally "divine". Radical monism is "on the
side of" the Many -which explains why it seems to lie at the heart of pagan
polytheism and shamanism, as well as extreme forms of monotheism such as
Ismailism or Ranterism, based on "inner light" teachings. "All is one",
therefore can be spoken by any kind of monist or anti-dualist and can mean
many different things.
A proposal: the new theory of taoist dialectics. Think of the yin/yang disc,
with a spot of black in the white lozenge, and vice versa -- separated not
by a straight line but an S-curve. Amiri Baraka says that dialectics is just
"separating out the good from the bad" but the taoist is "beyond good and
evil". The dialectic is supple, but the taoist dialectic is downright
sinuous. For example, making use of the taoist dialectic, we can re-evaluate
Gnosis once again. True, it presents a negative view of the body and of
becoming. But also true that it has played the role of the eternal rebel
against all orthodoxy, and this makes it interesting. In its libertine and
revolutionary manifestations the Gnosis possesses many secrets, some of
which are actually worth knowing. The organizational forms of Gnosis -- the
crackpot cult, the secret society -- seem pregnant with possibilities for
the TAZ/Immediatist project. Of course, as I've pointed out elsewhere, not
all Gnosis is Dualistic. There also exists a monist gnostic tradition, which
sometimes borrows heavily from Dualism and is often confused with it. Monist
gnosis is anti-eschatological, using religious language to describe this
world, not Heaven or the Gnostic Pleroma. Shamanism, certain "crazy" forms
of Taoism and Tantra and Zen, heterodox sufism and Ismailism, Christian
antinomians such as the Ranters, etc. -- share a conviction of the holiness
of the "inner spirit", and of the actually real, the "world". These are our
"spiritual ancestors."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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