Re: <nettime> 6 april movement & factory occupations

[Theo Honohan <theo.honohan@gmail.com>]

2009/4/6 jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>:

> there are  times when, for as  much as we  have heard and seen  in the
> past  few   years  and  predictably   going  to  see   more,  military
> intelligence had to strike the situation  to an end. i just wonder how
> it is  going to happen today,  when the most  powerful intelligence is
> media.
>
> and  most importantly,  how long  it all  has to  occur before  we can
> represent the state of things?  the Epiphany of a Catastrophe?
>
>  where are thou Orson Wells! with your martians to make us humble??!

It's a fallacy to assume that military intelligence (on an
international level) isn't aware of the dynamics of the situation.
Very smart people work for "the government", certainly, for example,
in the field of mathematics (this is confirmed by past discoveries
which have been disclosed), and presumably in other, less taxing,
fields as well, and these organizations have a store of accumulated
knowledge.  Without going into detail (and I couldn't, anyway), the
question of how they intervene in society to exercise power is
extremely obscure.

While it suggests that a single individual is somehow culpable, the
recent film "Il Divo" illustrates the extent and the complexity I am
talking about.  If the media is the most powerful element of social
control, It is naive to assume that it has not been infiltrated by
"military intelligence".  Or perhaps some other opportunistic entryist
organization.  But infiltration is a two-way street, so basically we
can just talk about "intelligence".  Or even, intelligence without
quotes.  Who are you working for?

The scenario of the leading character in "Il Divo", Andreotti,
repeatedly answering judicial questions with "I don't remember",
recalls the analogous situation of Bill Gates answering questions
about the conduct of Microsoft against Netscape with "I don't
remember".  Join the dots.

The idea of the strategy of tension in Italian politics corresponds to
a kind of fear of death... that if tension is removed, the world will
end, desire will cease to function.  The rope will break. The elastic
will burn.  A real catastrophe.

Consider the activities of the Dictionary of War project,
http://dictionaryofwar.org/.  This represents some of the most
conscious contemporary articulations and defenses of the idea of "life
as war", I guess derived from Heraclitus.  This concept is transformed
into various expressions of life as a state of war.  But this is an
arbitrary closure.  I use the term closure in the sense defined by
the philosopher Hilary Lawson -- a conscious but necessarily arbitrary
determination that two things are the same.  It is a subjective choice
to define life as war.  A choice that Heraclitus made... or at least,
wrote about.  But we could equally define life as process, as
evolution, as geometrical transformation, as growth, even as love,
etc.

Sadly for its victims, the idea of the strategy of tension is a
sadomasochistic one.  It is predicated on the requirement that a
central controlling entity exists to maintain order.  This entity
must, necessarily (because tension is not guaranteed), coerce the
people through fear or actual violence in order to maintain a
particular pattern of behaviour.  At the same time, the controlling
entity is confined by its inability to release control.  The figure of
Andreotti in "Il Divo" presents a Dracula-like example of this
pathology.

Ultimately, of course, the problem is that some level of control is
required, because people aren't all going to play nice all the time.
In other words, there must be some police.  William Burroughs was well
aware of this problem, and distinguished between the generally
coercive and occasionally violent police as they currently exist and
an ideal kind of police who played a much less intrusive role.  Who
did their job and then left.

As the rapper KRS-One puts it, "It's the sound of the Police...  It's
the sound of the Beast".

While KRS-One may have had institutional racism foremost in mind, as
well as other negative factors, there is tremendous ambiguity in this
reference, given the ambiguous status of satanism in relation to
existentialism (i.e. sanity).  What exactly is it that we want from
the police?  To be an amplification of ourselves to counter attacks
from the other?

The alternative, in any case, is anarchy in the worst, popular, sense
of the word -- chaos.

Theo


Footnote: Recall that Orson Welles saw the process of making a film as
a huge train set for him to play with.  Not exactly a recipe for an
egalitarian society.


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