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.



Do the Right Thing

For those of you who haven't seen it, go out and see Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Tonight I noticed it was on TV again and I realized this is a perfect continuation of my Rant on Culture.

In the film it portrays the typical idea of the American "Melting Pot." The film depicts the series of events that happen in a single day in a multi-ethnic neighborhood that leads to a race riot. My question after watching the film again- does the melting pot of American culture breed tolerance, violence or something in between?

As we evaluate the melting pot of American culture we see that the pot isn't actually melting. As you look around you see that cultures are no intermingled. Growing up in LA this is extremely apparent, you have Chinatown, Koreatown, the Jews in Pico-Robertson and the predominately African American community in the Crenshaw district. How is this a melting pot? Wouldn't a melting pot involve all of these communities in the same area? So why do these lines of division occur? Most people explain that people feel most comfortable with their own ethnic group but I say this is not true.

I am a self hating white person. I hate white privilege, I hate the suburbs and I hate the SUV. The reason professors and psychologists choose to generalize and say that all ethnic groups feel at home with members of their ethnic group is because that is how white America feels. As Kevin Kuswa writes in "Suburbification, Segregation, and the Consolidation of the Highway Machine" (Journal of Law in Society Vol. 31 No. 3) for white America "the urban fringe became a flight away from the poverty,crime and inadequate social services of the city."

The white flight phenomenon is responsible for why we see cultures segregated and grouped off. As the white man fled to the suburbs they became the elite in society, divided from the inner city by the highway. They chose what population could inhabit certain spaces. Through control of the economy white America forced ethnic minorities into certain neighborhoods by controlling the local businesses and real estate.

But how does this address the original question? My answer is this segregation breeds something akin to violence. It breeds and ignorance for other culture. The lack of exposure between the cultures prevents the pot from heating up instead it is cold, with every culture staying intact. This ignorance and inexperience with other cultures breeds fear between cultures. Just like America has irrational fears of Iranian or North Korean nukes the people of Beverly Hills are scared of the people in Crenshaw and vice versa. This fear much like the fear of American politics manifests itself in violence just like it does in American politics. The LA Riots (sometimes known as the Rodney King Riots) provide a great example. The cultural response by both the African American and white community was one of extreme outburst, the African American community resorted to violence and the white community did the same but sent their personal thugs the LAPD in to do it.

In Do the Right Thing we see at the end of the film that everyone in this melting pot only wants the same thing--the American Dream. They all want to survive and put food on the table. The urban/geographic separation of culture leads to a cycle of fear and violence. In the wake of the race riot in the film the main character played by Spike Lee come to an epiphany moment--the violence never solves anything, it only widens the rift and prevents us from heating up the pot. So what do we do? We stop being afraid, we stop worrying that someones ethnicity means we cannot get along, we turn the flame on and mix with other cultures, seeing what the melting pot cooks up.

How the Revolts in the "East" are being Represented(Part One)

I begin with what seems to be cliche in academic post- colonialism. In 1978 Edward W. Said published his epochal work Orientalism. Said describes Orientalism as a "style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) The "Occident". He goes further to explain that Orientalism is the way in which the "Occident" interacts with the "Orient". This sounds very simple but these interactions come to form an expansive nexus of ideas, texts, discourses, policies, subjects, etcetera. It is all of these ways in which the Occident relates itself to the Orient and seeks to have the Orient for itself(and production).

After this brief introduction I want to pose the question this post attempts to shed light on. How are the recent revolutionary events of multiple "Oriental" nations such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, and even Albania being represented by modern Orientalism? To begin, if we accept that Orientalism is centralized on the notion of:

"feel[ing] oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography"

who's objective, and obligations is:

"to institute new areas of specialization; to establish new disciplines; to divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight(and out of sight); to make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law about Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type;"

then what is modern Orientalism's response to the spontaneous, and exilic energies produced in these nations? The very unpredictable and chaotic nature of such protests frustrates and strikes at the very structures that Orientalism as founded its influence upon. Orientalism is based off the West's ability to produce a predictable, and manageable Orient subject for itself. This ability to produce came with Western dominance over the Orient crudely beginning around the 17th century. With this new political, and military power, the West was able to exert its will- to - power over the Orient, and produced knowledge about the Orient, and sought to give it a static identifiable structure for others who will need such information to continue domination over the Orient subject. The protests go against this belief, by giving the Orient the opportunity to represent itself. To establish and define it's own identity by the actions it takes, untampered by menacing traditions of knowledge that seeks to dis-mantle this humanistic(existentialist*) spirit.

The construction of this relationship and way of "dealing" with the Orient has been a long, and strenuous project throughout history that involved so many people, things, and ideas it can seem almost infinite, and unfortunately I do not have the ability to give you this history sufficiently in such as post as this one. This means that we will have to turn to more recent events for evidence. First, we turn to an explicit observation of this mode of thought and how it manifests in our everyday conversations, and atmosphere. Coincidentally it comes from a very recent headline in US News titled "Palin Not 'Enthused' by Obama's Handling of the Crisis in Egypt". This title has a couple of implications for the purpose of our discussion here. First is the entirely exceptionalist idea of America's "handling of the crisis". What is the "crisis", and why would a completely irrelevant actor need to be handling it. Is a revolt of youth who hope to save their country from economic degradation and rescue it from the sinking ship of a thirty year dictator a crisis? This is a striking example of how knowledge is produced about the Orient in terms of the Occident and in this process is distorted, and manipulated to relate itself to the Occident(US). Because the revolt does not benefit us, and even threatens our political, and strategic balance in the region, the experience is produced for the general public as a "crisis". Although almost obviously so, this is only a crisis for America(and the rational, civilized, Western nations). Surely the Egyptians do not see this as a "crisis" but freedom, and a moment of great pride. The West does not seek this distinction because it unravels the very mythical nature of its power and instead it labels and defines this phenomenon with a cliche, reified phrase "Crisis in Egypt". Said identifies this in the updated preface to Orientalism:

" It is common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle east, as if ancient societies and myriads of people can be shake up like so many peanuts in a jar"

this whimsical description is exemplified by the headline of the article in which the US is placed at the center of an Egyptian experience and thereby condemns to the abyss the Egyptian opportunity to represent itself to the West. The construction of an Orient crisis is what is used to justify the handling of such crisis by a more formidable, and superior Western power. The second intriguing portion of this headline is Palin not being enthused about Obama's ability to handle the crisis. This reveals the Orientalist ability to deposit his/her subject in exchange for the Orients. Thus, it is no longer an issue of the phenomenon that is taking place but rather how it affixes itself towards the disposition of the West. It indicates that there is debate being had, and decision being made over the Orient for the Orient but seemingly without the Orient present(because ironically it is in "crisis). Without giving the Orient the opportunity to represent itself, it allows the West to execute through a much more stealthy manner the inherently(traditionally) prejudiced, and violent knowledge producing problematic that disfigures the Orient experience and forces us to evade the possibility of these relationships being able to re-shape the way we understand ourselves and the Orient as its own subject(ivity). Although this headline only outlines Egypt there are a multitude of other articles discussing the many protests taking place that follow this same tradition of thought.To be able to avoid this we must be able to reposition the points from which we examine and understand the Orient and with this repositioning be able to better understand the implications of the events taking place in the Orient in our day and age.