Democracy of Emotion

Democracy of Emotion" seems almost eerily apt in the wake of the global disaster that occurred around the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004.1Now known as "the Asia Tsunami", the series of tsunamis that were thrown up by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra represent a global accident by anyone's definition.An ecological accident, though, and not one of the Chernobyl kind, which was entirely man-made, but an act of God. That makes it an interesting kind of "test case" for Virilio's pivotal notion of how the electronic relaying of our reality has hijacked democracy in a mediatized, claustrophobic world in which we all see the same images at the same time on the screens that have become our ubiquitous horizon and accordingly feel the same emotions – instantly, and with panic dominant among them.With close to 300,000 dead – the exact toll will never be known – the "Asian tsunami" was of a magnitude of approximately one hundred times that of September 11. It was on an intercontinental scale, directly hitting Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, parts of western Africa and sundry islands scattered about the Indian Ocean. It also directly hit the world at large, as the many thousands of locals going about their business were joined, as victims, by international travelers enjoying the resort life offered by some of the poorest tropical paradises on the planet.Indirectly, as per Virilio, the entire "global village" gasped, as print media and television relayed images of every phase of what looked like a Biblical curse unfolding, from the sucking back of the seas on beaches suddenly frozen in time, to the onslaught of the roilng waves, with people flailing about in the foam, many of them soon to disappear, and rivers of shattered building materials, cars, white goods – the flotsam and jetsam of civilized life – surging through reconfigured landscapes to end in a limbo of mud that answers perfectly to the kind of "expressionism" Virilio describes here.Such images were relayed on a loop, a panic replay, reminiscent of the WTC sequence that has never stopped popping up since that terrorist attack – though with much greater restraint as befitting a humanitarian crisis so excessive as to be unfathomable – and this televisual notion of a repeat has been joined by an actual physical repeat, three months down the track, with a fresh earthquake not far from the last killing, to date, at least 1500 people, nine of them Australian rescue workers whose "Sea King" helicopter went down during a mission.Such sudden and shocking loss of life, in "natural" or man-made terror, has become so commonplace, so much a part of our mental landscape, that Australian surfers have evolved their own mourning rituals, involving the observance of silence by boardriders in ring formation out on the water.What kind of democracy such acts might represent is hard to define and clearly not all gloomy. But the line between orchestration of emotion – for a specific campaign – and synchronization of emotion – as a condition of reality – is a very fine one, easily swamped, when everything is spectacle. Was the global relief effort the tsunami devastation spawned one of the most heartening expressions of solidarity and compassion we have seen recently? Or was it a large-scale manifestation of the administration of "humanitarian" aid from the haves to the voiceless have-nots, reinforcing that divide? It was no doubt democratic, but in the vacant sense of a cheerful consensuality overcoming, for perhaps only a moment, a denial of humanity that has become a general rule as the democratic stage is transformed into a humanitarian stage.It is also political despite such a shift and we have yet to see where the fallout leaves us. And just as Virilio has always flagged the negative side of innovation in all things, "the shipwreck in the invention of the ship", as he puts it, so too he sounded a note of salutary caution about the aftermath of the catastrophe, right as the panic it induced was promoting outraged calls for early-warning systems. This mechanical antidote to sitting duck syndrome got short shrift from Virilio. At home in La Rochelle, he told me, "They always want The Machine to solve the problem. The warning system is within."Conjuring up an image of the elephants and ruminants and other animals that fled disaster sites hours before the tsunamis struck, this notion is, in fact, critical – to Virilio" work in general and to City of Panic in particular. For Virilio does not leave you high and dry, without hope, no matter how impossible a more original globalization might seem; and it is in defining the havoc wreaked on our representative political systems by demagogic media representation – presentation – that a positive notion of what is thereby lost strikes with such a charge. It is the evacuation of both the personal and the political, the abandonment of authenticity that Virilio decries in the extract that follows, from the notion of "creating an event" as sheer disruption, through the person-less "celebrity" of the age, to the reigning mechanism of crowd control as rule-by-terror.Such phenomena are created by, and create, a situation in which, according to Virilio, civilian populations have never stopped being the targets of terror for the past hundred years – since the modern city, as we know it, took shape. The terror he is talking about, the terror that induces maximum panic for maximum effect is a political device of the technological age whose workings Virilio lucidly defines. It remains to be seen how the latest awesome "act of God" will be processed by that device in the soul wars and the wars of state currently being waged. Whatever the fit, it is certain that now public life is calibrated in advance as a series of potentially disastrous events regardless of any actual outcome. Have we not just witnessed the biggest "social" event in history, in which 200 heads of state and up to 4 million civilians and clergy were said to present the single greatest potential terrorist target yet, at the funeral of Pope Jean-Paul II in the "Eternal City"? Nothing happened, of course, but a security helicopter hovering overhead managed to drown out the angelic voices of the Vatican choir.The tool Virilio holds out below in describing this emptiness, where the loss of the real and synchronized emotion meet, goes some way to countering it.* * *"Events wash over events, waves wash over waves, the fact floats on always, intact, without discontinuity, without change and without letup," wrote Victor Hugo in 1842, regarding the accident that cost the duc d'Orléans his life.2A hundred and sixty years later, in the age of media conformism, the standardisation of opinion is at its peak and exemplariness has taken over from celebrity to the point where the expression "to create an event" no longer corresponds to reality, a reality falsified by a multitude of props, audiovisual and otherwise.To be exemplary now means to create without any creation, most often, in fact, by simple subtraction of the work. Whence the resounding success, in the course of the twentieth century, of the art scandal – as well as the political attack. Whence, also, the discreet discrediting of the celebrity of the producer (the craftsman, the worker ...) from the beginning of the nineteenth century, as well as the creator (the artist, the poet ...) over the course of the century that followed. And this has only served to promote this "angel of the banal" that has joined the angel of the bizarre celebrated by Edgar Allan Poe with the (media) success we're all familiar with, from LOFT STORY to STAR ACADEMY.Today, when all examples are followed in real time by the hyper-powerful mass media, an event is exclusively a break in continuity, an untimely accident, that crops up and breaks up the monotony of a society in which synchronisation of opinion cunningly finishes off the job of standardisation of production."Being known is inhuman," the actor, John Malkovich, recently lamented. Such a denunciation of contemporary celebrity in the age of globalisation goes hand in glove with the threat that now menaces copyright, the sheer authenticity of a signature.Now you can be dispossessed, by contract, of your own name once it has become a "brand name" along the lines of what has happened to Inès de la Fressange or Yves Saint Laurent. All that now counts is the logotype and its promotional logomachy – the semantic argument behind it.Note that this logic of contemporary MODELLING, of INTERNATIONAL INTEGRATION, which is suicidal in the long run for all true creation, also entails the overkill of the accident for accident's sake, that form of postmodern "art for art's sake" that takes us from the local accident – of the kind involved in the Challenger space shuttle or the Concorde supersonic – to the global accident involving ecology – of the Chernobyl kind. And this merely portends the fatal confusion between "terrorist attack" and "accident" – of the kind involved in the explosion at the fertilizer factory in Toulouse – uncertainty then becoming a feature of the accident in knowledge and no longer solely in the incriminated substance.To create an accident rather than an event now ... to snap the chain of causality that so perfectly characterises everyday reality, is a kind of expressionism now universally sought, as much by "terrorists" as by "artists" and all the contemporary activists of the age of planetary globalisation.Note also how, opposing this, a whole host of literary and scientific bigwigs play on dissimulation,3 not to say the most total anonymity. I'm thinking of Henri Michaux in days gone by or Thomas Pynchon today, writers who refuse to grant any interviews whatsoever to the press and who systematically refuse to be photographed ... Note also those "sleeping" terrorists who have infiltrated daily life in all its banality and who no longer even claim paternity for their acts though they do manage, on the other hand, to spawn imitators, numberless epigones.When it comes down to it, there is a certain pyromania in this thirst for exemplariness without real celebrity.4We were talking about creating an event ... But isn't an accident an indirect kind of œuvre, a consequence of substance? The airliner innovates the crash on the ground or against the Twin Towers, every bit as much as lift-off from an airport ... The ship or ocean liner invents its shipwreck at the same time as its launch. Since this is nothing short of obvious, why the feigned surprise in 1912 when the Titanic, the ocean liner that was unsinkable according to the advertising spiel of the White Star line, sank?An accident is in fact an attack on the humbleness of substance, an unveiling of its nakedness, of the poverty of whoever is confronted by what happens unexpectedly – to a person as much as to their creations.This is why this issue of the major event is so topical at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At an hour when all-out mediatisation is cobbling creation in all its forms, what remains of the notion of the œuvre, when the whole notion of the "chef-d'œuvre" has long since gone west along with the notion of apprenticeship? What remains of the parallel notion of the author, the creator, once God is dead, according to the equally promotional spiel of Frederick Nietzsche?Today, when Karl Heinz Stockhausen can say of Satan and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center: "It's the greatest work of art ever made," he lends credence to the notion of a return of the tragic and also of the abandoned masterpiece, that chef-d'œuvre in negative, by subtraction, as we were saying earlier, which, like the accident, is only ever a miracle in reverse – in a word, a lay miracle.5Proof, if proof were needed after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, of the birth of philofolly and of the aesthetics of disappearance that has marked the whole of the past century.And so, the crisis in the "work in clarity" and the return, the eternal return, of the work in black,6 usher in the crisis in traditional and substantial celebrity based on actual production, on some concrete creation, promoting instead an exemplariness that is purely accidental. The terrorism of September 2001 is one of the ultimate manifestations of this – only, a panic-driven manifestation whose counterpart is the pathetic attack at Tampa.It's worth recalling the circumstances of that anti-event. On January 5, 2002, Charles Bishop, a fifteen year old adolescent who cleaned tourist planes in exchange for a few flying lessons, took off without authorisation from Tampa airport on board a Cessna 142.Pursued in vain by two F15 fighter planes and a coast guard helicopter, Bishop flew with impunity over MacDill Air Force Base, which houses the US Air Force Central Command for Afghanistan, before ending his flight by crashing into the twenty-eighth floor of the Bank of America tower. On his body a letter would be found revealing that he subscribed to the tenets of Osama Bin Laden."He didn't really support Bin Laden," according to Emerson, a friend of the apprentice kamikaze pilot of Tampa. "He just wrote that to bignote himself. Maybe he only wanted to top himself so that he would be remembered."Pitiful pyromania! The suicide of a young kid puts in its place the "martyrdom" of the kamikaze pilots of New York and Washington. As Hugo went on to say: "The wisecracks that a misdemeanor gives rise to are much more alarming than the act itself. Nothing is more abhorrent than a crime that can't keep a straight face."7Miserable miracle of Tampa, where exemplariness struck once again and so much so that the press shot of the Cessna's tiny cabin, clinging desperately to the intact facade of the Bank of America, is, you have to admit, the perfect companion piece to the spectacular collapse of the Twin Towers.Let's not forget that, if mimetism is of the of the mass media, it is a of of the of art for art's sake" that, with the of is currently to the standardisation of what is to the synchronisation of "to create an event" means all with with promotional the kind of that will and which is, without a the most form of we are And it is a form of that is no longer ecological but as well as the globalisation of we like it or to create an event now means to an a time in when the (the out down over both the and the an event is no longer It is of or the thinking of the of global create an event is to is now nothing more than of a shift from the of to the of the create an event is to a kind of thinking that is to the of a to this of emotions of the age that has to off the job of the of of the of the was not so much strikes as the of images and and were television was the into a with and fresh on the thereby defining the of a in which of and of their to of mass to ... to it more the of mass is to the of a form of mass that it in every way – the audiovisual real by a long through its the of be too far down the before a that from the of its and the with its in an state of since the of a kind of that no longer even the mass of since its system is by the of mass back on the proof among of the of is by the of the of victims, for in are in the traditional were the an international was clearly from a – the of against But every of the name is a the that the will be nothing than a rather than a local and this will no longer and but their offered up to in a point out at this that, just like has three and of has one of with the mass of and as well as the mass of the and of on the of and and other as a to and and then the of the of and planes and of the and intercontinental of of the it is the – and in a – that the with and its Whence the sudden in which the not only as a of but as a a of the sense of reality in which the of mass is to the of mass or so, after like and of the the suddenly the up of reality creating a that our sense of in other our of the his return from on the of on the threat of the is no way to such an might be in it is of in and in a terrorist and you just to this by the not forget that we are not we are not at with the people but with terrorist such are this is there is a that any will to – not only in and but in the whole of the and any about this, a "They our we their place is any no no are now It is – there are no there are no is talking about is a without And with mass the is a lost in you all you have to do is at the on the ground of the last two such in by in with the of and the of the disastrous of the in the regarding the you so far as to say that is a terrorist way of which we have since the beginning of the twentieth fact, the of mass terrorism the political form of which is in has more has actual the of suicide and the of of of those to the of political is As once again the a simple to up in But with people or people from the are up in to ... say nothing of this same tragic of the year Thomas a of the of in America, went so far as to out that the was a political in so that the of and to said or the of the in the of and between in the America of the Thomas have even more about the purely that was being for with the on the of opinion over between and the for during a of that body in he between to be by public there is an of out of is not saying much when the issue is one of the major of the twenty-first century and when the globalisation of public opinion has recently taken an into a kind of that is more to the – just as for as any of the or of some the of the all-out is it to against opinion for any of The is we are with is no longer the threat of a democracy of opinion that would the representative democracy of political are with the threat of a true And this means at once and the for which well be some kind of the familiar havoc wreaked by the democracy of opinion and the of one of the latest of which is the of to the of of it is all too to what this of public since it public as though by promoting instead a kind of emotion that have been every bit as much as or in this will to the kind of political once by the of – at the or the in ... This is to say nothing of the of the – as far as the of by in the time of will be as of an whose the have public opinion suddenly into a kind of emotion on the of this "global is to what is to we are with the of political since political in the of promoting and simple the long of the standardisation of public opinion in the age of the and its systems of we are the age of the synchronisation of with the no longer promoting the old of but what we might mass The is apt since it is and every one of one by one, that is to mass media in the very same This is a effect in which the image the tool of the of physical reality, on the one hand, and of reality on the have to this what currently in no way the event as But it does to it – to the point of the exemplariness of what crops it comes to there is no right of or right of but only the right of wrote in an with the revealing La would a we are not talking about the at work in the of the we are talking about the right of a by the media in which and this is the of the of waves without which the globalisation of would like a the of the the that is the as well as international political or the of audiovisual control it would the of the democratic As are a in which you to an opinion the same way you a forget about the on the every for himself. what in the thereby the of being a This is all of a piece with the one that democratic systems as a the in the we were familiar with the of created by of the course, in the way the past at with the audiovisual we are in of Whence the confusion not only of our but of our mental images and so in that of the that our as well as the democratic representation of our on on the in and on a of and the of we are on our few in the of have the of home for us the of the it is an that now to the of the and the reality of a world now note that if that of is at the same time and reality, it is also the for an a that will soon a major accident in the of the of the past will out to have been a of what was to a certain the now for what it really no longer but since it to the of a this of what to say when he was us that in "the is the of strikes us as a from the that is no longer but is no longer a of to the It is a of mass of the reality of the – the aftermath of the in after Hiroshima, us the of an of sixty years we a this This is the of a sudden of reality in which our scientific are against us and where certain are to an accident in the real at any cost – this that will reality and other the of will be or of of or ... The of is out to be before an of Jean-Paul II to the of in other the of knowledge ... Since September we have into the of a form of of for the has taken to the of that once over the through the of no since it is now a matter of the of the real and thereby and every one of or to our of the true and the of the just and the the real and the in a fatal of as of images that to the up of this very last – which is to for America, for the collapse of the World Trade we of such at what the whose we have the US to without their up any kind of a and the world and I'm talking about the of the – the of – and the of a disaster that the of the in which was by the and against which Victor Hugo himself so, after the of and the of the of this for what it a against an to our not so much against this or that as against this that just or not for those who to rule not the as with "the of but the the eternal present of the and of the real time of leaves time as it the saying goes ... The of that no longer even leaves us

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