The End of Holographic Politics as We Know It - Masahide T. Kato

                             “Don’t support the phony; support the real.”

                                                           – Tupac Amaru Shakur       

On April 15^th, 2012, Tupac Shakur resurrected himself at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, and performed two songs with Snoop Dogg.  Or did he?  As it turns out, it was Dr. Dre who “genetically” engineered the return of Shakur as a hologram,working closely with the Hollywood digital media companies. Dre’s association with Tupac goes back to the time when he was a cofounder of Death Row Records that bailed Tupac out of jail for 1.4 million dollars in 1995.  Though Dre pulled himself out of Death Records shortly before the untimely death of Shakur, this holographic reunion of Snoop, Dre, and Pac was a reminiscence of the “gangsta rap” culture that Dre has projected as his public image since his days with N.W.A.  The holographic representation of their reunion, therefore, is a perfect tribute not so much to Tupac Shakur as to Dr. Dre’s image commodity or his “intellectual property rights,” which lacks real life experience of being a “gangsta” or “thug.” 
          

Upon viewing the holographic Tupac, I was reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulacra.”  In his book entitled Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard analyzes the social construction of “reality” in the age of global capitalism where “reality” as such is taken over by the power of simulation.  What I gleaned from Baudrillard’s work is that the relationship between our existence or being and our perception is increasingly destabilized by the corporate mediation of reality through manufactured imagery.  Consequently, our experience of the reality becomes less autonomous or less “sovereign” in the sense that it is largely structured by the consumption of simulacra as a commodity.

During the first war on Iraq in 1991, Baudrillard stirred up a controversy by publishing three part short essays entitled the “The Gulf War will not take place,” “The Gulf War is not taking place,” and “The Gulf War did not take place” in Libération, a daily French newspaper.  In the age of globalization, war as such gets detached from the realm of our experience as an “event” or “truth.”  War has become an act of mindless observation.  This was so both for those who observed the war at home through the mass media’s representation of war as a “surgical operation” and those who actually participated in the war as a soldier.  The latter’s perspective was captured in the film called Jarhead (2006) directed by ex-marine Sam Mendez.  In this testimonial film of the Gulf War, there is no combat in a classic sense of the term.  The combat is replaced by the massive aerial bombardment that incinerates all matters, organic or otherwise.  The only trace of combat is the film (within a film), Apocalypse Now, which marines watch festively at the base immediately preceding their deployment to Kuwait.  

            The dominance of simulacra in the age of globalization emanates from the heart of its engine, the global economy.  The impetus that drove the global financial market in the early 2000s and landed on a catastrophic global meltdown in 2008 was “sub prime mortgages.”  The banks and mortgage companies aggressively marketed loans to those who couldn’t normally afford homes.  The massive debts with limited prospects of redemption were then bundled together as “securities” to be traded on the Wall Street and global financial markets.  The “toxic” products have eventually induced a global financial haemorrhage in 2008.  Just recently, one of the largest global banks , J. P. Morgan declared that it lost $2 billion in the first quarter forinvesting in its “synthetic credit portfolio,” a complex financial product based on the bond investment and default insurance.  

Both “sub prime mortgages” and “synthetic credit portfolio” are essentially marketing “debt.”  Similar to carbon trading, global financial institutions have been marketing hazards.  Whereas carbon trading still has pollution as its substance, marketing debt doesn’t have a substance until there is redemption: It is a pure simulacrum or theoretical existence, and hence, ontologically deficient.  Even though the privatized central bank could pump up the currency to reconstitute an appearance of substance, the trillions dollars in bail out and the quantitative easing (i.e., debt monetization) have completely wiped out the last vestige of ontology and sovereignty from the global currency; the global currency has thus become holographic.

While global financial institutions have been engaged in trading phantoms, millions have lost their jobs and homes and the manufacturing of actual goods and substances have moved to sweat shops and prisons.  The factory-prison system in turn has decimated the basis of nature and sustenance economies.  In the light of this catastrophe created by the global holographic economy, the rise of popular sovereignty in Europe, Middle East, Asia and the US is not simply about the economic disparity but also about the demise of the “real.”  “How do you live in a hologram?”  “How can you eat simulacra?”

Repulsed by the holographic Tupac, I was compelled to revisit his real life history as a second generation descendant of the Black Panther Party.  In the process, I bumped into a manifesto entitled “Code’s [sic] of the Thug Life,” which Tupac wrote with Mutulu Shakur in 1992.  It cautions how the thug life that can be the basis of autonomous economy and politics has turned into the very tool of auto-genocide:

The thug life is a tool of the enemy as it exists today, it must change.  Outside forces and methods whose interests are being served by the hustlers, the crews have no dignity, they have no honor – and this must be corrected.  A counsel must be called put a code to the thug life.

We accept that the game will go on until our liberation.  What we won’t accept is that the game will destroy us from within before we get another chance and rebuild.  We will not allow ourselves to be played by the covert operations, cointelpro, and law intensity warfare waged by the United States government.[1]

Particularly towards the end of his life after his release from the prison, Shakur has taken on a more politically strategic path as his alias Makaveli (he named himself after Niccolo Machiavelli during his imprisonment) might suggest.  In the above manifesto, Shakur is giving a new meaning to the “thug life” as an alternative to the polis.  In lieu of the modern polis as a gated community for the 1%, the “thug life” posits a communal alternative for the ghetto masses.  

Tupac’s Black Panther genealogy, real life experiences of poverty, street, and thug, and his artistic talent were all about to coalesce into a political platform to organize the downtrodden youth in the ghetto.  Fred Hampton organized the gangs in Chicago into a revolutionary force until his assassination.  Hip Hop transformed the gang rivalry in the Bronx into a sustainable force of creativity, artistic innovation, and conviviality.  Accordingly, Tupac was about to launch an organizing effort to turn the ghetto existential condition into a positive force for social change with global outreach potential.  Perhaps the time wasn't ripe yet for the politicization of “thug life” in the middle of 1990s when a big wave of globalization started to engulf the world with the power of simulation.  But now the global masses are getting mobilized for the real, for the global “thug life.”  In that sense, the apparition of holographic Tupac in 2012 may be a sign that the simulated reality that has colonized our perception since the advent of post-industrialism is coming to its logical end.

Tupac Shakur at the '94 House of Blues Show (later recreated for Coachella)

- Masahide T. Kato is a Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Hawai'i Manoa and author of Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture (State Univ. of New York Press, 2007)

______________

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994). 


---, “Les cibles de Baudrillard dans Libération,” Libération, March 7^th, 2007.

http://www.liberation.fr/evenement/010195957-les-cibles-de-baudrillard-dans-liberation (accessed on May 12, 2012)

 

[1] Tupac Shakur, Tupac: Resurrection, 1971 – 1996, eds. Jacob Hoye and Karolyn Ali (New York: Arita Books, 2003), pp. 16 – 17.



Mission Accomplished and the Specter of Terror

Mission Accomplished.

An ambiguous phrase that should be not only be met with a passive skepticism but an aggressive negativity. What was the mission. Have the last ten* years been about one man, one spirit, the singular manifestation of all our angst. The War on Terror is an equally as ambiguous term. A war against Terror, radicalism, against all negativity, and Evil inherent in our dualistic world. Usāmah bin Muḥammad bin ʿAwaḍ bin Lādin was the first target of this undeclared war. As the alleged leader of the attacks on the World Trade Center Usama became the "face" of the War on Terror. A picture supplanted in the masses to give the ambiguous "War on Terror" an appearance, to appease our insatiable desire to see our enemy, to know their presence, physical features, to ensure that we are never caught off guard again. It is part of our obsession towards the end, towards finality. An incessant desire to embalm the specter of terror as to make sure that it will never return to seek vengeance. However the Enlightened mind was delayed in its pursuit of that ghastly figure, the spirit that haunted The War on Terror, and the American national conscience. Bin Laden remained elusive and slipped further and further into the void of mountainous tribal lands. Bin Laden's immanent spirit gradually disappeared and left our immediate ability to grasp, capture, and manage the uncertain principle of Evil that lay inside its ghoulish composition; America began to feel haunted.

The paranormal shift undertaken by the spirit of Usama bin Laden can be witnessed by the change in media coverage or interpretation of the event of terror. Our information outlets were thrown into uncertainty and speculations began to surface at an increasing rate and in contradictory fashion. How many times did we hear "We know where he is", "He is dead", or a number of rumors to explain the mysterious disappearance of our not so friendly ghost. Our response to our curse was characteristic of the way we handle most challenges. We disavow the issue in a predictable stage of denial in wake of our failure and produced innumerable reports and speculations that attempted to reanimate the thrill and feeling of certainty that America once felt about its neighborhood spirit. Attempting to pacify our fears we told ourselves that we still held the advantage convincing ourselves of our impervious nature. As our nation coddled its neurosis in simulacra Bin Laden's phantom figure hovered above subtly infiltrating our thoughts by remaining indifferent to our desperate need to escape the uncertainty, his reluctance to relinquish the anthropomorphic grip that he held over the Western powers and their ability to resort to their familiar, convenient, and privileged tactics. Veni Vidi Vici. "I came, I (over)saw, I conquered".

We had been haunted for ten years, that is until the "Mission Accomplished".  The phantom no longer resided in the blind spot of America's dominance, hidden in the depths of America's Shadow. His ghastly nature was now property of the United States government and with this beautiful acquisition uncertainty was possessed in its physical manifestation, and it came in the form of a corpse. Again his spirit becomes immanent in the most natural sense. His death brings about a renewal of certainty in Western consciousness. We will always know and be able to predict our ghost's actions, thoughts, and behaviors and never again will he be able to advance against our weakness in the face of negativity in the face of chaos.

However there is an intriguing turn our story takes after the culmination of its destiny. Do we feel relinquished from our hex? Relieved from living under the shadow of Terror? As the debacle of an illegal assassination unravels we come to a gripping realization - now that we have retrieved the spirit and consumed its energy in a symbolic sacrifice we feel as though the sacrifice was sufficient. Time continuing in its victorious and fatal strategy over the human experience began to corrode the meaning of Bin Laden's spirit. The event of his demise took place almost as a whisper and then most predictably was amplified by all levels and channels of media. Then in the midst of our celebration the inevitable talk began. What significance does this have now? The prevailing consensus it seems is there is one less terrorist in the world. A net decrease of evil that pollutes our atmosphere of thought, politics, and culture. As though trying to avoid drastic climate change we solute every effort no matter how pathetic in nature (US has to kill a man to make themselves feel better) to cleanse our consciousness of all inhibition, contradiction, and anomaly. Mission Accomplished spurred an orgy of self-confirmation, patting ourselves on the back, reassuring ourselves that we are still the superior people, an advanced post- industrial nation that holds the world(and all of its inhabitance) in the palm of its divine hand. This childish and spoiled response characteristic of the liberal notion of entitlement revealed the general inferiority of the United States in the face of a primitive opponent. An enemy that should have been easily defeated under scientific calculation. Bin Laden haunted this truth and contradicted its validity unraveling the regime by removing the ground upon which it was established.

Compensation for the Real: Hyper-reality, Speed, and Inertia in the Mass Media Coverage of the Arab Uprisings

The only thing faster than the protests that began nearly 3 months ago in much of the "Arab World" was the media-hyper orgy that followed behind it. News stations from all over the world covered in a multitude of languages and filtered through infinitesimal mirrors of representation and a systematic over- saturation. Systematic because it follows a throughly planned, researched and executed schema in the most literal definition it follows a system. It could seem at times that media and all of its accomplices, talk shows, headlines, interviews, opinions, interpretations, and images were intertwined to create a circus and general spectacle for the Western public.

Where has all the 'time' gone?

In just a days time it seems as though all of those geeks that were a part of the event have vanished. The Glenn Beck chalkboards, Think Tank reports, and political hooplah have seemed to slow down and even disappear; it even seems as though the revolution itself has seem to slow. A familiar for some(our own Hank Stolte) a Jean Baudrillard speaks to this in one of his more well explained aphorisms:

I repeat: it is a question here of a completely new species of uncertainty, which results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information. It is information itself which produces uncertainty, and so this uncertainty, unlike the traditional uncertainty which could always be resolved, is irreparable.(Implosion of the Social in Media: Selected Writings pg.212)

This "excess of information" is what the Arab uprisings became subject too. The information that travels at the speed of light over oceans and continents seeking to identify, define, and magnify every aspect of every detail of the revolution to its most extreme form confronts the audience with a chaotic potluck of interpretations, facts, and observations. The Resonance whichmany including those of our own faculty have spoken on is amplified to its extreme by the over- saturation of mass media culture and:

"This is happening today with electronic media, where information is beginning to circulate everywhere at the speed of light. There is no longer any absolute with which to measure the rest. But beneath this acceleration something is beginning to slow down absolutely"(Selected Writings: Fatal Strategies pg. 196)

This can seen by the sudden disinterestedness in Libya, now partly it is because of the downsizing of US involvement which makes it less relevant, but also because the Rebellion has failed to produce the final spectacle in a way that is reciprocal to the speed that media coverage has already produced allthe possibilities of the events finality. In compensation for the lack of real in the real, the media attempted to hyper- actualize its potential into a mass media frenzy that signified nothing to the actual revolution that was taking place- although appetizing and seemingly delicious for most of the American public. However, 'beneath this acceleration something is beginning to slow down absolutely' the over- saturation of the media and images shoved down our consciousness inevitably begins to bring us to a slowness, a place of uncertainty and inertia. We turn to Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies:

"Tentacular, protuberant, excrescent, hypertelic: this is the inertial destiny of a saturated world. The denial of its own end in {190 Fatal Strategies} hyperfinality; is this not also the mechanism of cancer? The revenge of growth in excrescence. The revenge and summons of speed in inertia. The masses are also caught in this gigantic process of inertia by acceleration. The masses are this excrescent process, which precipitates all growth towards ruin. It is the circuit that is short circuited by a monstrous" finality.(Selected Writings: Fatal Strategies pg. 190)

Our excrescent coverage of the phenomenon has entangled and essentially sped past(at the speed of light)the event, This simulated media transcendence of the event leaves the actual event as a dying carcass challenged to overcome its more perfected and hyperreal form that the media has produced. However, because it has failed to overcome this challenge for whatever reason, the event has been finalized, actualized, and transcended in its most extreme form. Thus the event has been 'caught in this gigantic process of inertia by acceleration' that has transcended and gone above the experience of the pure event. In this transcendence the physical body of the event these revolutions are frozen in time never able to proceed on its destiny because it has already been predetermined by the subjective creation of its end and finality.

The Enframed Mirror or Beyond the Technological Horizon

There's been much talk the past months over the power of social networks and the role they play/are playing in the revolutions in Egypt and other middle eastern nations. Some have deemed these the "Facebook Revolutions" or alternatively the "Twitter Revolutions". This is on the basis that large parts of the organizing, planning, and mobilizing was done through these social networking and their ability to instantly connect people in a decentralized and rhizomatic (hence network) way.

However these lines of analysis were shown to be highly premature and quite shallow when Mubarak essentially "turned off" the internet for the Egyptian population and the revolution kept barreling forward. To the surprise of Mubarak (and those in the FB/Twitter camp) people were still able to mobilize in the same instantaneous decentralized patterns they were before. There were two main reactions to this new development. The first ,by those singing the praises of social networking, was that the internet blockade had come to late, social networking had already done its job. The second, mostly hedged by the Left, was that it proved that social networking was indeed a useful tool for organizing people but the same things would of been accomplished without they just might of been slightly more difficult.

I think however that there is a third much more metaphysical way of thinking about social media's role in the Winter of Dissent. Jean Baudrillard brings up an interesting quote of Heidegger's in the lecture The Murder of the Real:

...to quote a very mysterious phrase of Heidegger: “When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.”... It so far refutes the very conception by Heidegger himself of technique and technology... This would be that at the extreme horizon of development, of technique, perhaps something other happens, a reversibility.

 This quote by Heidegger is so very intriguing because Baudrillard is right this does seem to go against much of Heidegger's project. Heidegger was no Luddite but his ideas about how technesis enframes the dasien into standing reserve is quite a gloomy one. However the above quote makes it seem that  if we are to behold this constellation of technology perhaps we can invest in a strategy that instead of retreating from technology strives to push it to it's limits past the horizon, a reverse enframing.

 The protests in Egypt provide a pretty good example of how this reverse enframing can ideally function. When looking at the revolution in this light both the Left and the social media cheerleaders were wrong: Facebook and Twitter were did not start a revolution, but they also were not merely helpful tools of protesters.

The majority of the original protesters and organizer of the Egyptian protests were the youth of Egypt. A generation of people for whom being constantly integrated and connected is a daily function of life (I know, I'm one of them).A generation whose default mode of being is not one static identity but rather one that is constantly in motion and concert with other identities in an interconnected world, similar to how stands of DNA collide into each other and come away with bits of foreign code causing recombinants, cross-overs, and mutations.So when these individuals have a goal (oust Mubarak) there is not a need for them to study social networkings to see how decentralized networks are created because it is how they normally function in everyday social life.

This is why simply shutting down the internet didn't stop the protests- the Egyptians were not using Facebook, they were being Facebook. Heidegger and Virillo got it correct that speed and technology could easily turn the social into an apathetic silent majority, but they failed to see beyond that mysterious horizon were these would be the new methods to turn an standing reserve into a mobile one.