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TERRORISM/PROPAGANDA/DEMOGRAPHICS

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terrorism: The systematic use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end.

If Archimedes had had a point to stand on outside the world, he would have been able not only to lift up our sphere, as he boasted that he could do, but to make it fall back again into the abyss, like a cracked shell... Marguerite Yourcenar/The Abyss


This, I realized, was the very esence of terror--that ghastly, paralyzing fear of nothing at all, of something devoid of form, that yet eats into the very boundaries of ones thought.
 Gustav Meyrink/The Golem


We all collude in the anticipation of a fatal outcome, even if we are emotionally affected or shaken when it occurs. [...] what no police [can] ever guard against is the sort of fascination, of mass appeal, exercised by the terrorist model.
 Jean Baudrillard/The Mirror of Terrorism








(Terrorism, as a function of periphery versus center, whether state- sponsored or it's contrary, now seems to be a subset of those twin affections of the twentieth century [as at least martin Heidegger had it]: boredom and terror. As such they seem to be intimately tied to the telematic presence which now circles the globe, the grip of which tightens daily. Terror is now almost fully a spectacular statistical entity, almost sublime in its large-numbers ability to numb the brain with a fog-like insistence, obscuring and highlighting features at the same time. Systematicity and hyperproduction themselves seem to have almost as a side effect, terror, if not outright terrorism [small(!) example: there are 100 million land mines distributed over 64 countries; 200,000 are destroyed every year while 2.5 million are produced every year.])

Any consideration of terror (and concomitantly horror) today would have to take into consideration a complex triangulation with two of the governing aspects of modern life: the connection of mass movements with statistical phenomena and the conceptual apparatus necessary to process that information (demographics) AND to put it into circulation (propaganda), communication and methodology combined into a demographic 'machine' for inducing and controlling flows in a docile population. The overwhelming sense is of processes beyond oneÕs individual control, said processes gaining steam through enlightenment/ modernism. What are the processes of modernism and what are its connections to terrorism and the following affects ofexhileration/exhaustion? Perhaps the first hint of the full power of the terror of modernism, the first moment it pulled on its battle regalia was with National Socialism and fascism in ww 2. The almost continual, now, examination and re-examination of nazism, the Heidegger Affair, the demise of communism and the rise of the Demographic State lends even greater urgency to the theme of Modernism and Terrorism. The simultaneous expansion (explosion might be more like it) of exteriorities via global transnationalism and communication and the implosion of interiorities of place (or dis-place), ethnicities, racialisms, etc. lends an increasing sense of urgency to such questions, questions which we find it increasingly hard to formulate, as the enthusiams for faster communicational strategies, data transfer, ever more rapid rates of technological advance reach a fervor and complexity unknown in previous "enthusiasms". (And unlike previous religious enthusiams, the new excitement has a material payoff and feedback...which is both ominous and deeply satisfying, depending on which level of the demotic one occupies.)

To quote Stephen Ungar, "We might prefer to believe otherwise, but admitting fascism and/or National Socialism as integral to certain conceptions of recent modernity is one of our big cultural nightmares. It is not just that we might be implicated indirectly at a remove of time and place. We are always contaminated in advance..." and that addressing those questions is difficult because of "the resistance imposed by liberal biases that fail to contend with the full implications of what it means to associate fascism with modernity. This means taking a longer and harder look at our cultural past than many of us are willing to do." (p 59, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930)


terrorists: "sending a message"...receiving them thru the fillings of the teeth?

the lineaments of terrorism:
  • paranoia

  • incommensurateness of analysis and praxis

  • the non-"domestic" (under the sign of the recovery of the "domestic"/aka "national")

  • overcoding of the symbolic realm with no ability to "de-flux" the resulting ambiguity other than by a practical sign of effectivity-- violence [but a violence which the terrorist must, nevertheless, carry out in the symbolic realm of mass communication] which, in the mobiated loops of of modern teleculture can only act to increase the -ism-ic aspect of terrorism (ie, itÕs generalizable, viral-like aspects)

  • analeptic "leap" --like that moment when the body is falling into sleep but consciousness has not yet crossed over into rem mode and giving rise to an involuntary jerk as 'body' finds itself falling from 'mind' and tries to re-store itself, the terrorist finds himself caught in a prolonged, perhaps almost involuntary, start of consciousness, a last refusal to succumb to a certain state (tho perhaps we should say "un"-certain state

    propaganda -- The systematic propagation of a given doctrine or of
    allegations reflecting its views and interests...

    prop -- a device used to shore something up

    propagate -- multiply, breed; to transmit from one generation to another;
    to make known, to publicize; to cause to move thru a medium
    propaedeutic-providing introductory instruction

    "Today we are appalled to see that the progress of our scientific enlightenment has now stockpiled on our planet a nuclear arsenal capable of annihilating a Hiroshima-sized city every day for the next 550 years. With our reason we have delivered into our hands the power to consign the whole of our species to extinction--indeed to annihilate definitively all life on this, the sole planet upon which life is known to exist. This power is not only the final and fullest extension of every cruelty and viciousness, it is the power to annihilate every possibility of justification or condemnation. We have also come to recognize, to our horror, that if the existing arsenal should be destroyed through international agreement, and all the industries capable of manufacturing such weapons dismantled, and all the blueprints for such industries burned, the power to re-create them, the power to bring extinction upon the species, could never be extirpated from the planet as long as the fundamental principles of rational science are at large in the minds of men. In the reasons with which we allowed ourselves to be persuaded of those principles was there not from the first a clandestine force of seduction at work, by which the ternimal power of the absolutely antihuman came to infect irradicably all our human forces? Henceforth in every society formed by contract, when we falter and look to our brother, is it not Sade we see?"

    Alfonso Lingis, introduction to Sade, My Neighbor, Pierre Klossowski

    "Through our bombings we hope to promote social insatability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encourage to those who hate the industrial system."
     excerpt from the Unabomber's letter to The New York Times.

    The "industrial system," as Lingis points out, is not so easy to pin down however. Terrorism itself is a subaltern position in that system, deriving its rage perhaps from an imposition over subjectivity of an infolded and concatenated 'systematicity' (a propaedeuctic--Kantian even?--before the actual advent of, Taylorization, for example) prior to its manifestation in industrial productions (yet dependent on them for its force). Terrorism is the resistance point of the contact of the general and the specific, of the individual and systematicity, (and the peripheral and the central, always keeping in mind that these are are not absolute dichotiomies but shaded gradations of effect and affect, the end points--the "extremes" being simply catastrophic mobiations, droppingandfoldingback in on themselves) wherein the general (the colonial, the "system", "mainstream" culture, the technological itself) is resisted by using its industrial force (explosives, transportation and communication sytems, the widespread availablity of industrial products readily capable of being detourned) against itself. Like rumour, the resistance (and terror) seems to be a shadow movement indelibly etched into the very surface of "progress" itself, its relief (and releve, aufhebung) casting shadows and obscuring the entire landscape; so much so, that the view seems to be mostly, at certain times of the historical day, shrouded in darkness. (at the 'high noon' of scientific illumination it appears not to exist, requiring a different incidence of attack for the corruscated surface to appear.)

    demographics- using the study of the characteristics of
    human populations..., esp. to identify consumer markets
    The "individual" is now most useful as a place-holder in larger economic concerns. That singularity is most effective, does its most 'work', as a cross-roads of traits, tendencies, objects consumed/interacted with ('effectivity' and 'work' are not traits of singularities but rather a relation with a larger system of production, broadly defined; the more effective a process, the more fully the energies by which that process utilizes itself disappears from view--the most effective advertisement is one that does not announce its mechanisms of leveraging, but rather 'naturalizes' them). The most effective way of naturalizing mechanisms of leveraging and control is trough demographics, studying the traits of human populations to the end of identifying certain densitites, localities. identity pockets, of those traits and then fine tuning the marketing mechanisms to elicit/create desires based on objects available/to be created., the whole structure being basically an expropriation of the psychology of the fetish. [for archaic peoples the awe surrounding objects, fetishishes was of a supernatural quality, having the aura of a deity; the aura surrounding contemporary objects which move them into fetish is of a sexual nature. But one is reminded also of a certain foreshadowing aura which prefigures catastrophe, e.g., the visible aura around objects that preceeds a migraine headache. In a postindustrial culturesÕs framework that visibility is a precursor to evacuation and relocation (as is the case now with sexuality and gender and which is rapidly becoming the case with ethnicity, nationalisms, identities...), the collapse and reorientation of previous identity formations. One might ask what are the further consequences of such increasingly frenetic interrogations /efflorescences / evacuations / relocations (always questons of boundaries, foreign bodies, migrations, immigrations--wherein the foreigner carries her demographic with her, hybridizing it in a new locality--contaminations.

    And underlying it all, the questions of monstrosities and the Land of the Dead. The horizons of both tend to blend (the dead can often appear monstrous- -yet safely "on the other side"--and the monstrous can appear dead and hence even more threatening. One could say there is always a dead quality about the monstrous, or at the very least a narcoleptic or apathetic quality. From a structural point of view, the system of marketing works best by the Sadean "apathetic reiteration of the act": (basically: media + advertising) in the further service of a Sadean "integral monstrosity" (which may be read as the system of capital formation). [further parenthetically, this would seem to be precisely where the current theoretical concern with abjection comes into play, abjection being a counterpart to this "integral monstrosity". )


    According to Pierre Klossowski, "Monstrosity is the zone of this being outside of oneself, outside of conscience; the monster can maintain himself in this zone only by the reiteration of the same act." (32) Abjection would be the inability to fully attain this monstrosity, to fully drop all notions of species integrity (reproduction) and normative behavior (based on species). A demographic relies on both aspects but relies on both in a monstrous way: by a ruthless combinatory of possibilities (as in any passage by Sade) the net effect of which is a final denigration of said norms as they abrade away through such combinatorics. The furthest outpost of abjection/monstrosity /demographics/repeal of species-bodily imperatives is in the discourses which might be called the "cyber-" Marketing forces are moving into the realm of virtual marketing/advertising with great rapidity. Although this should not come as a surprise to anyone, it often does, along with concerns about erosion of privacy (that game has long been lost to credit agencies). Internet marketing is the dream of demographics come true for now traits and intensities can be monitored on a virtually (sic) instantaneous basis and fetishization can occur on a temporal basis as well as spatial. "Time" itself as a fetishized entity (object bsed, clock time) becomes an abraded effect linking with the affect of abjection (one loses the norm of bodily time, hooked to a different time zone). It's tempting to think of this as a "return to the primitive" (which becomes another marketing scheme of course, witness the proliferation of magazines around the concept)--but that is simply the new level of 'naturalization' which demographics and technology require for its most effective functioning. And the most effective fine-tuning efforts of the the apparatus come from any critico-reflective approach, becoming simply another demographic trait to be serviced.

    (the most - paradoxically- effective way in which I can make such a statement about effectivity is thru the system of rationality and reason)

    "For Der Derian, the limits of the speed of analysis also mark the moment of terror. When information processing and decoding no longer keep pace with the production of information, intelligence itself becomes terror. In Lyotard's terms, the postmodern condition is that state of affairs which arises from an interruption of legitimizing reference to the "master narratives" of Western civilization. The information technologies of our time insure that legitimizing practices are far behind the movement of information which they pretend to regulate. Diplomacy in a traditional sense cannot mediate security in the postmodern scene. "Antidiplomacy" studies the emergence of the danger, the threat of the other from within. Terror is the moment of ubiquitous danger, the insight that no wall is high enough to provide protection from the other, that security itself is predicated upon insecurity. In order to confront and identify terrorism according to traditional (diplomatic) models, it must first be defined, domesticated, reduce to legitimizable, recognizable concepts which permit its identification, isolation and criminalization. And terrorism enacts a mode which resists domestication. The counter-strategy must be deployed at the level of the sign and of the episteme. Terrorism relies on symbolic power. Der Derian's point of departure is the notion that the response to terrorism must be archival. It must begin its search in a genealogy of knowledge.Ó

    from review of: James Der Derian, _Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War_, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ~J. Peter Burgess~ in Ctheory

    daemonic demography

    "Welcome, then, to the survey citizen. The survey citizen has become the afterimage of the thinking, rational subject - a replacement for the economic individual refashioned now into the well-behaved ideal citizen - however, a creature that shows increasing signs of being out of control. Initially a technology used to manipulate the political calculus by the politicians, the scanning techniques have clearly turned, in part, against the stasis of the political elites. The use of the survey citizen has created a parasitical loop both outside of the formal political institutional structures which continue to lose speed and outside the calculus of the rational political voter. The appearance of parasites within the body politics creates the cancerous dimension of electorate feeding off the political class that feeds off of the electorate. A symbiotic, as Goya suggested, that puts reason to sleep and creates monsters."
    CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 18, NO 1-2 Event-Scene 16 95/06/07 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker The 1995 French Presidential Election "One more time Frenchman if you wish to be Republican" ~David Cook~

    ..............

    "...those who live in glas(s) houses."

    "Everything to come stands under the banner of transparency." Walter Benjamin

    To the early (utopian) architects of the twentieth century, glass was a dream come true. Glass was a placeholder, a sign for the whole system of 'transparent' life to come in the future: openness, transparency, accessibility, paricipation, de-mystification. Transparency was to be the next move in the new order of overtness. Allied with functionality, it meant the demise of ornamentation, an unbreakable alliance of form with function which would severe the cord with the past and allow the blazing (cleansing?) light of the future, illuminating not only the architectural recesses but also those of the psyche. Such optimism was not to last long and for a number of reasons. But what concerns us most directly at this historical moment is the potential of transparency for survellance, glass as shrapnel, the quality of openness which can instantly be transformed into 'openness' with a certain amount of debris underfoot as seismic events (whether natural or human) turn the curtain wall into the leading edge of a huge cannister bomb. The interiority and expression that glassness had attempted to efface now returns with a vengence.

    And "the public space"! What a lovely transparent ideal, so glass-like and now--also like glass--so dangerous, so susceptible to the schrapnel effect and so vulnerable to a dingy, debris-like quality if even a minimum of maintenance is not attempted (Benjamin's angel being blown backwards into the future might well be facing a pile of silicon, in both forms of shattered piles of glass and computer chips which have been discarded for upgrade; and perhaps at some point the beach of an endless ocean). The early attempts to impose transparency onto a population suffered occasionally from a certain blunt crudeness: "The European has to be torn away from his comfortable intimacy. When all intimacy has ceased, man begins to breathe." (Adolf Behne, quoted in Glass Architecture in Passages, 158) The terroristic quality of that statement apparently would only become visible were a glass shard to severe Behne's carotid artery, thus easing his comfortable intimacy with life. The terrorism of the glass age, of modernism as it succumbs to global totalization, as the post/age mounts up with every tick of the clock-like scale, the final, conquering densification of time turned into material --'time is money'--relayed through corporate satellites: transparency as evisceration. A body without organs: either evidence of attempts at embalming or propaedeutic for re- animation, installing new works in the empty shell. But perhaps the ruins of the body/mind nexus provide fertile ground for the emergence of new scaffolding--or new contaminants (like certain spores which sprout from, and through, the heads and bodies of some chinese insects, releasing its future through the dead body -- how wonderful those husks must look to the spore children! What nostalgia it must evoke!)