Nettime — Wark — Securing Security
Topic(s): "War on Terror" | Comments Off on Nettime — Wark — Securing SecuritySecuring Security
[Presented at Transmediale 05 http://www.transmediale.de]
McKenzie Wark http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
1. How one forgets. What was the ideology for which allies supposedly fought
in world war two? Who remembers the four freedoms? They were these:
Freedom of religion Freedom of speech Freedom from want Freedom from fear
02. Only now, in what was formerly the United States, perhaps the demand
could be for four new freedoms: Freedom from religion Freedom from speeches
Freedom to desire Freedom from security
03. Of these four demands, I will talk only of the last. What is the
basis of security? What secures security? Its absence. Insecurity secures
the necessity for security. The threat to security is ˆ oddly enough ˆ
security itself. We have nothing to secure but security itself.
04. States act in the name of security ˆ but what could be more
Orwellian? The security state is an engine of violence. What secures the
state is the production of insecurity. Preferably of a kind that is
manageable.
05. Insecurity getting out of hand every now and then is not the worst
thing. For the state, its good for business. As the American GIs used to
say: “death is our business, and business is good.”[1]
06. What is really threatening to the security state is the prospect of
peace. From this point of view, the implosion of the Soviet bloc is a
disaster. People really started to think about dismantling the security
apparatus in the United States. There was talk of a “peace dividend”.
07. Thankfully, insecurity has returned to the scene and all is well for
the stock holders of the military entertainment complex. Threats appear to
abound, and their existence creates the appearance of necessity for the
military apparatus, and the necessity of appearances for the entertainment
apparatus.
08. The military entertainment complex is not quite the same as the
former military industrial complex. Its infrastructure is not so much
mechanical as digital. Everything we see here at transmediale is in part its
progeny.
09. Where did the military entertainment complex come from? The military
industrial complex produced ever faster, ever more complex machines for
human warfare and welfare; so fast and so complex that they called into
being whole new problems in surveillance and logistics, planning and
command.
10. The military industrial complex struggled to secure for itself a
second nature. It transformed nature into second nature, into a world that
could act as the object of an instrument, a Œstanding reserve‚. But this act
of transforming the world piecemeal into object creates a supplementary
problem ˆ the problem of the relationships of these instruments ton each
other.
11. Work on this problems calls into being, initially as a supplement,
the digital as a technological effect. Computing meets communication and
simulation. But eventually, these technologies no longer supplement the
world of the machine; they control every aspect of it. Thus, not a military
industrial but a military entertainment complex, not the world as made over
as a second nature but the world made over as a third nature.
12. The digital embraces not just logistics and command, but the fantasy
and creation of threats to security and means to secure. The work of the
military entertainment complex is two sided. It has its rational, logistical
side; but it also has its romantic, imaginative side. The latter invents
reasons for the former to exist. Insecurities cannot simply be taken as
given. That‚s no way to build a growth industry! They have to be fabricated
out of whole cloth. Becker: “With hindsight, whole empires could turn out to
be the product of cultural engineering.”[2]
13. The rise of the military entertainment complex is the mark of a
society in decline. What was once the United States is no longer a sovereign
state. It has been cannibalized by its own ruling class. They are stripping
its social fabric bare. They have allowed its once mighty industrial complex
to crumble. There‚s nothing left but to loot the state, abolish taxes on
capital and move all essential components of the production process
elsewhere.
14. From now on, what was once the United States lives on whatever rents
it can extract from an unwilling world. It has only two exports: guns and
information. It has declared all invention, all creation, to be its private
property. Your culture does not belong to you. You will have to rent back
your own unconscious.
15. Unable to compete with others in an open market, what was once the
United States finds itself reliant on force and the threat of force to find
new ways to expand. Iraq may be in part about oil, but it is also about the
contracts to rebuild everything destroyed by the last decade of sanctions
and war.
16. In short, the military entertainment complex has entered into a
vicious cycle. It imagines threats so that violence may be unleashed against
them, thereby producing the cause after the fact. Which came first: security
or insecurity? Which came first: the chicken or the egg? McLuhan: “from the
egg‚s point of view, a chicken is just a way to get more eggs.”[3] We might
similarly say that from security‚s point of view, insecurity is just a way
to produce more security. Really, its just a way-station in the
self-reproduction of security.
17. Yes, I know: the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center were
real. And so is Osama Bin Laden. But who called him into being, and why?
Perhaps it was the Pakistani secret police, perhaps it was the CIA, perhaps
it was Saudi Wahabbis. He was an agent for the subversion of Soviet control
of Afghanistan. But imagined that this was a threat to American interests
and why? Did the image of insecurity produce the real security that produced
this real security that has, in turn produced the image of insecurity on
which the security state now rests? Trying to uncover the real behind the
image here only leads to bad infinity.
18. Debord: “The goal of the integrated spectacle is to turn
revolutionaries into secret agents and secret agents into
revolutionaries.”[4] This prophetic statement tells us a lot about what
transpired around the year 1989, not least in East Germany. It may even
apply to events in the Ukraine in 2004.[5] It perfectly describes Allawi,
Chalabi, and various other talking heads that now populate the chat show
formerly known as CNN. The integrated spectacle, or what I would call the
military entertainment complex is a producer of a continuous, non-
dialectical relation between security and insecurity. They are essentially
the same concept. Security produces sameness out of itself.
19. But there is a complication. What security really fears is the people
it claims to secure. It fears their desire for peace. Security has to
produce insecurity without to secure its own interior. Harvey: “The evil
enemy without became the prime force through which to exorcise or tame the
devils lurking within.” [6] And so, the Iraqi‚s charade, where, on second
thoughts we might update and amend Debord. The goal of the military
entertainment complex is to turn mercenaries into patriots and patriots into
mercenaries.
20. The devil lurking within the United States is if anything a people
completely indifferent to the security state that rules over them. After the
end of the cold war, people began to question its necessity. That this
questioning was best expressed by Newt Gingrich (and his successors) is if
anything an index of how compromised the Democratic Party was by the
military entertainment complex and the manufacture of insecurity for
security‚s sake.
21. I hesitate to call this people and their desire for peace a
Œmultitude‚. There is an abandoning of the thread of class analysis in Hardt
and Negri. The concepts of ŒEmpire‚ and ŒMultitude‚ grow out of, and
transform the anti-imperialist side of critical thinking; not the
anti-capitalist side. Yet what we see most clearly in the United States is a
sharpening, not a lessening, of what the Republicans themselves describe as
Œclass war‚.
22. The difficulty for thinking through class in America is that the
classes have changed. The ruling class is itself split. A new ruling class
is being born. Where a capitalist class depended on a certain stability
within the space of the United States, where it held costly long term
investments in plant and infrastructure, the new ruling class, what I call a
vectoralist class, has few such commitments. It rules not by controlling the
material but the immaterial. It controls the production process through the
ownership of information and the means to realize its value.
23. The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk: we talk now of Œhomeland security‚
precisely because it is disappearing in the most basic political-economic
sense. Its no so much that one‚s job is now in India or China, but that it
could be. The power of the vectoralist class is a power of logistics, of
imagining and ordering a world of information ˆ a third nature ˆ which
orders a world of things ˆ a second nature ˆ which orders what was once a
natural world ˆ somewhere.
24. What is the relation between the rise of the vectoralist class and
the transformation of the military industrial complex into the military
entertainment complex? It is both agent and beneficiary. One notices, even
while the United States is using an old fashioned army to occupy a country
that the so-called Œrevolution in military affairs‚ is proceeding apace.
Every ruling class imagines military power in its own image. The vectoralist
class is no exception. It imagines warfare as third nature, as a video game
of data management in realtime.
25. And so: we confront a rising form of power, based on a new class
formation, which nevertheless is a decadent one. How is one to confront it?
Or perhaps better, escape it. If the example of Critical Art Ensemble tells
us anything, it is that we cannot avoid the problem, but that prudence may
be the better part of valor. Agamben: “In the final analysis the state can
recognize any claim for identity? But what the state cannot tolerate in any
way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity,
that human beings co- belong without a representable condition of
belonging.”[7] That perhaps might describe a strategy for tactical media, in
the age of third nature, under the reign of the military entertainment
complex, animated by the power of the vectoralist class, under cover of the
ideology of Œsecurity‚.
[1] Phil Kline, Zippo Songs: Airs of War and Lunacy, Cataloupe Music, New
York, 2004
[2] Konrad Becker, Tactical Reality Dictionary, editions selene, Vienna,
2002, p10
[3] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1994,
p12
[4] Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Verso, London,
1998
[5] CJ Chivers, ŒThe Orange Revolution: Ukraine‚s Inner Battle‚, New York
Times Multimedia, 9th February 2005.
[6] David Harvey, New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, 2003, p17
[7] Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p87
***
McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard University Press,
2004 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
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