<nettime> The weird global media event and the tactical intellectual 2/4

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical
Intellectual  2/4

McKenzie Wark [version 3.0]


2. Media Spaces

Where do events come from? Do they fall from the
sky? Yes they do. From the comsat angels in orbit
overhead, or thrown from a truck onto the ground
in front of your local news stand. Robert McChesney
points out that these vectors from whence we get the
information to form an ongoing map of the world
and its histories becomes increasingly concentrated in
fewer and fewer corporate hands. These corporate
owners are increasingly integrating diverse media
holdings to more profitably co-ordinate print and
audio-visual flows.  No matter how many channels
we can get, our main news feed comes from few
hands indeed.

Herbert Schiller once argued that the growth of
transnational corporations, who seek rich offshore
markets and cheap offshore labor forces, necessitates
an internationalization of media vectors. The
deregulation of economic flows during the Reagan
years went hand-in-hand with a deregulation of
information flows and attacks on public control and
access to information.  The media that feed us are
not only more and more concentrated, but
increasingly global in both ownership and extent.
Since business consumes a vast amount of media
information, and business is increasingly global, so
too are the information providers. Three
developments come together: the globalization of
business communication, the communication of global
business and the business of global communication.

The global media vector does not connect us with just
anywhere. It connects us most frequently, rapidly
and economically with those parts of the world which
are well integrated into the major hubs of the vector.
It comes as no surprise that New York is a major
media hub, as it is a major business hub, but so too is
the Middle East. Hamid Mowlana points out that the
Middle East has a long history of integration into the
international media vector. At the turn of century,
Lord Curzon described British interests in the Persian
Gulf as "commercial, political, strategical and
telegraphic."  Some of the world's first international
telegraph lines passed through there. British
communications with India flowed along this route.
With the recognition of the strategic value of oil for
propelling the mechanized vectors of war from 1914
on, the region became important in its own right.

An event that connects an expatriate Saudi to New
York so spectacularly is then not surprisingly an
event that punctures the time of everyday life with a
major impact. One should, however, add Tariq Ali's
caveat: "To accept that the appalling deaths of over
3,000 people in the USA are more morally abhorrent
than the 20,000 lives destroyed by Putin when he
razed Grosny or the daily casualties in Palestine and
Iraq is obscene."  In proposing that September 11 is a
weird global media event, I am not assuming that the
violence of that moment somehow trumps these other
instances of violence. The point is rather that the
globalization of media flows is subject to very uneven
development. One of the characteristics of the event
is precisely to reveal the uneven topography of the
vectoral landscape along which media messages
speed.

One of the striking things about September 11 is that
the event happened in a major node in the media
network, and hence was rapidly and thoroughly
reported, thus provoking remarkably different
responses around the world. Ali records some of the
range of responses: "In the Nicaraguan capital,
Mangua, people hugged each other in silence....
There were celebrations in the streets of Bolivia... In
Greece the government suppressed the publication of
opinion polls that showed a large majority actually in
favor of the hits... In Beijing the news came too late in
the night for anything more than a few celebratory
fireworks."  The centralization and concentration of
media has some effect on what events may spark
across the vector field of time and space, but does
not necessarily determine how they may be
interpreted, which still depends on the tempos of
everyday life and of local media envelopes. The
people make meaning, but not with the media of their
own choosing.

The 'global village' is a fractious and contentious
place, particularly when the lightning strike of an
event gives way to the thunder of a thousand
pundits explaining it away. Local interpretive
strategies and authorities invariably script the event
in terms which make it appear as if it were meant to
make sense within the dominant local framework.
John Hartley suggests that "news includes stories on
a daily basis which enable everyone to recognize a
larger unity or community than their own immediate
contacts, and to identify with the news outlet as 'our'
storyteller."  The protocols of everyday life appear
here as the imagined categories of a far more vast
and unevenly global terrain of what I call telesthesia,
of perception at a distance. This world of telesthesia
is organized temporally in terms of "visible, distant
visions of order," but where these are highlighted
negatively by "the fundamental test of
newsworthiness," namely, "disorder — deviation
from any supposed steady state."  Telesthesia is
organized spatially by what Hartley calls Theydom.
"Individuals in Theydom are treated as being all the
same; their identity consists in being 'unlike us', so
they are 'like each other'.

Slavoj Zizek and Edward Said offer a general and a
specific theory respectively that may help us
reconstruct, after the event, our own narrative about
how the narrative of Theydom works. To start with
the specific theory: Said proposes the category of
Orientalism to account for the doubling of an Wedom
with a Theydom, in which the defining characteristics
of Wedom come into focus against the background of
a Theydom. The opening up of the Middle East to
European trade, conquest and most importantly
communication opens up a vector field in which
information may flow across boundaries for the
purpose of commerce or colonization, but where that
flow produces an anxious desire for a sense of
border or boundary. That boundary is defined by
Orientalism, a discourse by, for and secretly about
Wedom, sustained by the image of a Theydom, in
which it is axiomatic that the "attributes of being
Oriental overrode any countervailing instance."

For Zizek, the Orientalist image of Theydom might
count as a local and specific variant on a general
structure: "We always impute to the 'other' an
excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our
enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has
access to some secret, perverse enjoyment."   As if to
illustrate such a theory, one of the more popular
images to circulate via email shortly after September
11 was a Photoshop collage of Osama Bin Laden
sodomizing President George W Bush. For Zizek, the
other is dangerous because Theydom either pursue
enjoyment too much, or too little. In the construction
of a Theydom in the wake of September 11, the focus
is usually on terrorist as denier of pleasure, as a
fanatic, a militant. But curiously, this image keeps
flipping over into its other. The terrorist is also the
one panting after the 70 virgins promised in paradise,
or putting liquor and lapdances on the al-Qaida credit
card.

So far we have two things defining the space of
September 11. One is the presence of a vector from
where the World Trade Center is to wherever you
are. The other is a set of everyday conventions
operating to make the fate of its victims, who belong
to Wedom, the subject of sympathy or mourning, and
an evil Theydom. There is a connection and a
convention, in time and space, making those fatal
flights fall from the sky into our lives.

Whatever the virtues of the work of Said and Zizek,
neither really offers a narrative of the dialectic of
Wedom and Theydom that takes full account of the
role of the time of the event in creating and
recreating the boundaries, nor do they highlight the
role of telesthesia in the formation of Wedom and
Theydom on a global scale. The weird global media
event is more than an anomaly in the 'normal'
functioning of culture; it is the moment which disrupts
its normal functioning, and in the wake of which a
new norm will be created.

How then can such a weird global media event be
conceptualized? The event as I define it is something
that unfolds within the movement of telesthesia along
media vectors. These media vectors connect the site
at which a crisis appears with the sites of image
management and interpretation. Vectors then
disseminate the flows of images processed at those
managerial sites to the terminal sites of the process,
so they fall from the sky into our lives. In this
instance the vector connects a bewildering array of
places: New York, Managua, Beijing. Into the vision
mix went images hauled off the global satellite feed,
showing us file footage of Osama Bin Laden one
second and live footage of Mayor Giuliani the next,
as if the Mayor were responding to that absent
figure. The vector creates the space of telesthesia
where one can appear quite 'naturally' to respond to
the other, in the blink of an edit. We witnessed the
montaging of familiar and surprising sites into the
seamless space and staccato time of the media vector.
The terminal site of the vector is the radio, television
or internet terminal within reach -- directly or
indirectly -- of almost everyone almost everywhere.



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