-Caveat Lector-
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. post-paleolithic) 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 practised (and still practise, as
amongst the Yanomamo) 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".) WWII 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 hon-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 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 patterning 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 Modern 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 plays 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 the 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 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 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 farm-workers 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 hovever 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 "guerilla 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 pre-history 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 prism11
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. These tentative conclusions constitute the
shifting and marshy ground of our "theory". The TAZ wants all information
and all bodily pleasure in a great complex confusion of sweet data and sweet
dates - facts and feasts - wisdom and wealth. This is our economy - and our
war.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1. The new "life" sciences offer some dialectical opposition here, or could
do so if they worked and through certain paradigms. Chaos theory seems to
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.
2. Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society, Stephan A. Hoeller (Wheaton,IL:
Quest, 1992), 229-230.
3. Ibid., p. 164.
4. Like Pavlov's dogs salivating at the dinner bell rather than the dinner -
a perfect illustration of what I mean by "abstraction".
5. 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 coincide 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 optimistic
analysis of the cognitive function of information technology. It is not the
neural system alone which will achieve autonomy, but the entire body.
8. Issue #6, Nothing is True, Box 175, Liverpool L69 8DX, UK
9. Indeed, the whole "poetic terrorism" project has been proposed only as a
strategy in this very war.
10. "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.
11. 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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hakim Bey is best known for his zine-publications that were collected under
the title T.A.Z., The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism, published by Autonomedia, New York, and more recently,
Immediatism (Edinburgh/San Francisco: AK Press). For Bey there is no
disappearance without reappearance.
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