[Nettime-bold] D r e a m t i m e

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

d r e a m t i m e 


Osamar bin Laden as Video Artist 
Cunning. Very Cunning. 

Islam in its fifteenth century exercises an 
easy dominance over the twenty-first century 
Western aestheticised activism. 

'Wounded wired with explosives in 
hospital ward' exceeds 'room with a 
light bulb' in its stark commentary upon 
Belief and a digital age. 

It's important, however, to remember that 
whatever, or whoever, the source for the 
'eventscenes' in New York and Washington 
that the geopolitics of terror are so convoluted 
that the production, reproduction and 
dissemination of terror are not so easily 
assigned to the influence of a single Arabian 
Sheik. No matter how charismatic, no 
matter how elusive. No matter how Hot. 

A militant and corporate Islam, where 'all 
are in command, yet all are under command' 
and whose organisation, training and mission 
focussed motivation where was scripted by 
the Central Intelligence Agency, anxious 
to meet Allah, communing via dreams, 
routing around the damage wrought by 
our techno-fascist West with something 
called 'Belief', mediated by metaphors 
of everyday culture and spiritual striving, or 
'jihad', dreams of soccer games and 
shoulder-bourn planes, each swerving shot 
received rapturously by the world... but, 
oh the anxiety, that too many people 
dreaming the same dream may alert the 
enemy, and the anxiety that the act meets 
the will of Allah? 

Microsoft Flight Simulator, Manhattan. 
On replay in Cairo. On replay in London, 
on replay in Santiago, on replay in Jameson 
St, in Parkdale Toronto, the machine 
contains the script of its own disaster. 

By bringing a Global War between the West 
and the Rest that has been waged hotly for a 
decade, and interminably for five hundred 
years home to America - home to a City 
that didn't expect the Great American Disaster? 
- any parallel with Pearl Harbour is misleading. 
Any reaction invoking unpreparedness, 
surprise or ethical rage in place of justice is 
not prudent. You were shafting the world from 
the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and 
from the Pentagon and asking the world to thank 
you for it. In the struggle between the forces of 
globalisation and world forces, the 
Iriquois performed a highly successful raid. 
America man's the stockade and sends 
the Colorado militia to Sand Creek. I mix 
my images of America freely. 

The outcome for the West, unless we permit 
ourselves NOT to be intimidated by dreams 
and fantasies of mastery and domination 
local to the West - the perennial internal 
witch-hunt America embarks upon to discipline 
its others, and the recurring nightmares Imperial 
Europe favours in its perverted science exercised 
upon the Rest - is assured. The outcome if not 
intention (since dreams are days residues not 
their anticipation) will be a Coup. 
Dreamtime in Salem. Unreasonable 
Reason exorcising the Unutterable? America 
will perform dissolution of all that 
was enviable about it of its own accord. 
America, you don't want to go there again. 
These are the noughties, not the fifties. 

There is a better way. To learn about the 
other from the place of the other. Derrida 
and Said in Iran, to learn or to lecture? 
Or simply to assert that thing we first 
learnt from Islam. We share knowledge 
and ways of knowing. We do so in particular 
places where respect for ones positionality 
is assured, where research is protected and 
not run amok, books are not destroyed, 
archives not erased, and where the work of 
knowledge is also the work of the world. 
Islam and the West need to relearn this 
from each other. 

We have entered a 'dreamtime' through 
a pomo/material cultural caesura of 
what was the most unexpected millennial 
event, the West's Petit-Apocalypse. 
An Armageddon off Broadway. The 
least likely Rapture Messianic Christendom 
imagined. The Saints and Jack van Impe 
are confused, has the thousand year reign 
begun, or are we to expect another? 

Be thankful for small mercies. 


Lachlan Brown 
Toronto


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