* CTHEORY is an international, electronic review of
* theory, technology and culture. Sponsored by the Canadian Journal
* of Political and Social Theory, reviews are posted weekly of key
* books in contemporary discourse as well as theorisations of major
* "event-scenes" in the mediascape. CTHEORY includes interactive
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* Wernick & Gail Valaskakis.
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* Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/Documentation
* politique international; Sociological Abstract Inc.; Advance
* Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and Government;
* Canadian Periodical Index; Film and Literature Index.
THE INFORMATION WAR
~Hakim Bey~
Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers
escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess.
Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal
ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern
(i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of
distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created"
world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have
a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy)
without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The
Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning)
till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies
the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body
to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization". A
similar trajectory can be traced through the phenomenon of "war".
Hunter/gatherers practised (and still practise, as amongst the
Yanomamo) a kind of ritualized brawl (think of the Plains Indian
custom of "counting coup"). "Real" war is a continuation of religion
and economics (i.e. politics) by other means, and thus only begins
historically with the priestly invention of "scarcity" in the
Neolithic, and the emergence of a "warrior caste". (I categorically
reject the theory that "war" is a prolongation of "hunting".) WWII
seems to have been the last "real" war. Hyperreal war began in
Vietnam, with the involvement of television, and recently reached
full obscene revelation in the "Gulf War" of 1991. Hyperreal war is
no longer "economic", no longer "the health of the state". The
Ritual Brawl is voluntary and hon-hierarchic (war chiefs are always
temporary); real war is compulsory and hierarchic; hyperreal war is
imagistic and psychologically interiorized ("Pure War"). In the
first the body is risked; in the second, the body is sacrificed; in
the third, the body has disappeared. (See P. Clastres on War, in
Archaeology of Violence.) Modern science also incorporates an
anti-materialist bias, the dialectical outcome of its war against
Religion - it has in some sense become Religion. Science as
knowledge of material reality paradoxically decomposes the
materiality of the real. Science has always been a species of
priestcraft, a branch of cosmology; and an ideology, a justification
of "the way things are." The deconstruction of the "real" in
post-classical physics mirrors the vacuum of irreality which
constitutes "the state". Once the image of Heaven on Earth, the
state now consists of no more than the management of images. It is
no longer a "force" but a disembodied patterning of information. But
just as Babylonian cosmology justified Babylonian power, so too does
the "finality" of modern science serve the ends of the Terminal
State, the post-nuclear state, the "information state". Or so the
New Paradigm would have it. And "everyone" accepts the axiomatic
premises of the new paradigm. The new paradigm is very spiritual.
Even the New Age with its gnostic tendencies embraces the New
Science and its increasing etherealization as a source of
proof-texts for its spiritualist world view. Meditation and
cybernetics go hand in hand. Of course the "information state"
somehow requires the support of a police force and prison system
that would have stunned Nebuchadnezzar and reduced all the priests
of Moloch to paroxysms of awe. And "modern science" still can't
weasel out of its complicity in the very-nearly-successful
"conquest of Nature". Civilization's greatest triumph over the body.
But who cares? It's all "relative" isn't it? I guess we'll just have
to "evolve" beyond the body. Maybe we can do it in a "quantum leap."
Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried
out through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of
our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on
information rather than direct experience. In this sense the Media
serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out
of the body by re-defining spirit as information. The essence of
information is the Image, the sacral and iconic data-complex which
usurps the primacy of the "material bodily principle" as the vehicle
of incarnation, replacing it with a fleshless ecstasis beyond
corruption. Consciousness becomes something which can be
"down-loaded", excized from the matrix of animality and immortalized
as information. No longer "ghost-in-the-machine", but
machine-as-ghost, machine as Holy Ghost, ultimate mediator, which
will translate us from our mayfly-corpses to a pleroma of Light.
Virtual Reality as CyberGnosis. Jack in, leave Mother Earth behind
forever. All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism - as in
science, so in the social. Classical physics played midwife to
Capitalism, Communism, Fascism and other Modern ideologies.
Post-classical science also proposes a set of ideas meant to be
applied to the social: Relativity, Quantum "unreality", cybernetics,
information theory, etc. With some exceptions, the post-classical
tendency is towards ever greater etherealization. Some proponents of
Black Hole theory, for example, talk like pure Pauline theologians,
while some of the information theorists are beginning to sound like
virtual Manichaeans.[1] On the level of the social these paradigms
give rise to a rhetoric of bodylessness quite worthy of a third
century desert monk or a 17th century New England Puritan - but
expressed in a language of post-Industrial post-Modern feel-good
consumer frenzy. Our every conversation is infected with certain
paradigmatic assumptions which are really no more than bald
assertions, but which we take for the very fabric or urgrund of
Reality itself. For instance, since we now assume that computers
represent a real step toward "artificial intelligence", we also
assume that buying a computer makes us more intelligent. In my own
field I've met dozens of writers who sincerely believe that owning a
PC has made them better (not "more efficient", but better) writers.
This is amusing - but the same feeling about computers when
applied to a trillion dollar military budget, churns out Star Wars,
killer robots, etc. (See Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of
Intelligent Machines on AI in modern weaponry). An important part of
this rhetoric involves the concept of an "information economy". The
post-Industrial world is now thought to be giving birth to this new
economy. One of the clearest examples of the concept can be found in
a recent book by a man who is a Libertarian, the Bishop of a Gnostic
Dualist Church in California, and a learned and respected writer for
Gnosis magazine:
The industry of the past phase of civilization (sometimes called
"low technology") was big industry, and bigness always implies
oppressiveness. The new high technology, however, is not big in
the same way. While the old technology produced and distributed
material resources, the new technology produces and
disseminates information. The resources marketed in high
technology are less about matter and more about mind. Under the
impact of high technology, the world is moving increasingly
from a physical economy into what might be called a
"metaphysical economy." We are in the process of recognizing
that consciousness rather than raw materials or physical
resources constitutes wealth.[2]
Modern neo-Gnosticism usually plays down the old Manichaean attack
on the body for a gentler greener rhetoric. Bishop Hoeller for
instance stresses the importance of ecology and environment (because
we don't want to "foul our nest", the Earth) - but in his chapter
on Native American spirituality he implies that a cult of the Earth
is clearly inferior to the pure Gnostic spirit of bodylessness:
But we must not forget that the nest is not the same as the
bird. The exoteric and esoteric traditions declare that earth
is not the only home for human beings, that we did not grow
like weeds from the soil. While our bodies indeed may have
originated on this earth, our inner essence did not. To think
otherwise puts us outside of all of the known spiritual
traditions and separates us from the wisdom of the seers and
sages of every age. Though wise in their own ways, Native
Americans have small connection with this rich spiritual
heritage.[3]
In such terms, (the body = the "savage"), the Bishop's hatred and
disdain for the flesh illuminate every page of his book. In his
enthusiasm for a truly religious economy, he forgets that one cannot
eat "information". "Real wealth" can never become immaterial until
humanity achieves the final etherealization of downloaded
consciousness. Information in the form of culture can be called
wealth metaphorically because it is useful and desirable - but it
can never be wealth in precisely the same basic way that oysters and
cream, or wheat and water, are wealth in themselves. Information is
always only information about some thing. Like money, information is
not the thing itself. Over time we can come to think of money as
wealth (as in a delightful Taoist ritual which refers to "Water and
Money" as the two most vital principles in the universe), but in
truth this is sloppy abstract thinking. It has allowed its focus of
attention to wander from the bun to the penny which symbolizes the
bun.[4] In effect we've had an "information economy" ever since we
invented money. But we still haven't learned to digest copper. The
Aesopian crudity of these truisms embarrasses me, but I must
perforce play the stupid lazy yokel plowing a crooked furrow when
all the straight thinkers around me appear to be hallucinating.
Americans and other "First World" types seem particularly
susceptible to the rhetoric of a "metaphysical economy" because we
can no longer see (or feel or smell) around us very much evidence of
a physical world. Our architecture has become symbolic, we have
enclosed ourselves in the manifestations of abstract thought (cars,
apartments, offices, schools), we work at "service" or
information-related jobs, helping in our little way to move
disembodied symbols of wealth around an abstract grid of Capital,
and we spend our leisure largely engrossed in Media rather than in
direct experience of material reality. The material world for us has
come to symbolize catastrophe, as in our amazingly hysterical
reaction to storms and hurricanes (proof that we've failed to
"conquer Nature" entirely), or our neo-Puritan fear of sexual
otherness, or our taste for bland and denatured (almost abstract)
food. And yet, this "First World" economy is not self-sufficient. It
depends for its position (top of the pyramid) on a vast substructure
of old-fashioned material production. Mexican farm-workers grow and
package all that "Natural" food for us so we can devote our time to
stocks, insurance, law, computers, video games. Peons in Taiwan make
silicon chips for our PCs. Towel-heads in the Middle East suffer and
die for our sins. Life? Oh, our servants do that for us. We have no
life, only "lifestyle" - an abstraction of life, based on the
sacred symbolism of the Commodity, mediated by the priesthood of the
stars, those "larger than life" abstractions who rule our values and
people our dreams - the mediarchetypes; or perhaps mediarchs would
be a better term. Of course this Baudrillardian dystopia doesn't
really exist - yet.[5] It's surprising hovever to note how many
social radicals consider it a desirable goal, at least as long as
it's called the "Information Revolution" or something equally
inspiring. Leftists talk about seizing the means of
information-production from the data-monopolists.[6] In truth,
information is everywhere - even atom bombs can be constructed on
plans available in public libraries. As Noam Chomsky points out, one
can always access information - provided one has a private income
and a fanaticism bordering on insanity. Universities and "think
tanks" make pathetic attempts to monopolize information - they too
are dazzled by the notion of an information economy - but their
conspiracies are laughable. Information may not always be "free",
but there's a great deal more of it available than any one person
could ever possibly use. Books on every conceivable subject can
actually still be found through inter-library loan.[7] Meanwhile
someone still has to grow pears and cobble shoes. Or, even if these
"industries" can be completely mechanized, someone still has to eat
pears and wear shoes. The body is still the basis of wealth. The
idea of Images as wealth is a "spectacular delusion". Even a radical
critique of "information" can still give rise to an over-valuation
of abstraction and data. In a ~pro-situ~ zine from England called
NO, the following message was scrawled messily across the back
cover of a recent issue:
As you read these words, the Information Age explodes ... inside
and around you - with the Misinformation Missiles and
Propaganda bombs of outright Information Warfare.
Traditionally, war has been fought for territory/economic gain.
Information Wars are fought for the acquisition of territory
indigenous to the Information Age, i.e. the human mind itself
... In particular, it is the faculty of the imagination that is
under the direct threat of extinction from the onslaughts of
multi-media overload ... DANGER - YOUR IMAGINATION MAY NOT BE
YOUR OWN ... As a culture sophisticates, it deepens its
reliance on its images, icons and symbols as a way of defining
itself and communicating with other cultures. As the
accumulating mix of a culture's images floats around in its
collective psyche, certain isomorphic icons coalesce to produce
and to project an "illusion" of reality. Fads, fashions,
artistic trends. U KNOW THE SCORE. "I can take their images for
reality because I believe in the reality of their images (their
image of reality)." WHOEVER CONTROLS THE METAPHOR GOVERNS THE
MIND. The conditions of total saturation are slowly being
realized - a creeping paralysis - from the trivialisation of
special/technical knowledge to the specialization of trivia.
The INFORMATION WAR is a war we cannot afford to lose. The
result is unimaginable.[8]
I find myself very much in sympathy with the author's critique of
media here, yet I also feel that a demonization of "information" has
been proposed which consists of nothing more than the mirror-image
of information-as-salvation. Again Baudrillard's vision of the
Commtech Universe is evoked, but this time as Hell rather than as
the Gnostic Hereafter. Bishop Hoeller wants everybody jacked-in and
down-loaded - the anonymous post-situationist ranter wants you to
smash your telly - but both of them believe in the mystic power of
information. One proposes the pax technologica, the other declares
"war". Both exude a kind of Manichaean view of Good and Evil, but
can't agree on which is which. The critical theorist swims in a sea
of facts. We like to imagine it also as our maquis, with ourselves
as the "guerilla ontologists" of its datascape. Since the 19th
century the ever-mutating "social sciences" have unearthed a vast
hoard of information on everything from shamanism to semiotics. Each
"discovery" feeds back into "social science" and changes it. We
drift. We fish for poetic facts, data which will intensify and
mutate our experience of the real. We invent new hybrid "sciences"
as tools for this process: ethnopharmacology, ethnohistory,
cognitive studies, history of ideas, subjective anthropology
(anthropological poetics or ethno-poetics), "dada epistemology",
etc. We look on all this knowledge not as "good" in itself, but
valuable only inasmuch as it helps us to seize or to construct our
own happiness. In this sense we do know of "information as wealth";
nevertheless we continue to desire wealth itself and not merely its
abstract representation as information. At the same time we also
know of "information as war;"[9] nevertheless, we have not decided to
embrace ignorance just because "facts" can be used like a poison
gas. Ignorance is not even an adequate defense, much less a useful
weapon in this war. We attempt neither to fetishize nor demonize
"information". Instead we try to establish a set of values by which
information can be measured and assessed. Our standard in this
process can only be the body. According to certain mystics, spirit
and body are "one". Certainly spirit has lost its ontological
solidity (since Nietzsche, anyway), while body's claim to "reality"
has been undermined by modern science to the point of vanishing in a
cloud of "pure energy". So why not assume that spirit and body are
one, after all, and that they are twin (or dyadic) aspects of the
same underlying and inexpressible real? No body without spirit, no
spirit without body. The Gnostic Dualists are wrong, as are the
vulgar "dialectical materialists". Body and spirit together make
life. If either pole is missing, the result is death. This
constitutes a fairly simple set of values, assuming we prefer life
to death. Obviously I'm avoiding any strict definitions of either
body or spirit. I'm speaking of "empirical" everyday experiences. We
experience "spirit" when we dream or create; we experience "body"
when we eat or shit (or maybe vice versa); we experience both at
once when we make love. I'm not proposing metaphysical categories
here. We're still drifting and these are ad-hoc points of reference,
nothing more. We needn't be mystics to propose this version of "one
reality". We need only point out that no other reality has yet
appeared within the context of our knowable experience. For all
practical purposes, the "world" is "one".[10] Historically however,
the "body" half of this unity has always received the insults, bad
press, scriptural condemnation, and economic persecution of the
"spirit"-half. The self-appointed representatives of the spirit have
called almost all the tunes in known history, leaving the body only
a pre-history of primitive disappearance, and a few spasms of failed
insurrectionary futility.
Spirit has ruled - hence we scarcely even know how to speak the
language of the body. When we use the word "information" we reify it
because we have always reified abstractions - ever since God
appeared as a burning bush. (Information as the catastrophic
decorporealization of "brute" matter). We would now like to propose
the identification of self with body. We're not denying that "the
body is also spirit", but we wish to restore some balance to the
historical equation. We calculate all body-hatred and world-slander
as our "evil". We insist on the revival (and mutation) of "pagan"
values concerning the relation of body and spirit. We fail to feel
any great enthusiasm for the "information economy" because we see it
as yet another mask for body-hatred. We can't quite believe in the
"information war", since it also hypostatizes information but labels
it "evil". In this sense, "information" would appear to be neutral.
But we also distrust this third position as a lukewarm cop-out and a
failure of theoretical vision. Every "fact" takes different meanings
as we run it through our dialectical prism[11] and study its gleam
and shadows. The "fact" is never inert or "neutral", but it can be
both "good" and "evil" (or beyond them) in countless variations and
combinations. We, finally, are the artists of this immeasurable
discourse. We create values. We do this because we are alive.
Information is as big a "mess" as the material world it reflects and
transforms. We embrace the mess, all of it. It's all life. But
within the vast chaos of the alive, certain information and certain
material things begin to coalesce into a poetics or a way-of-knowing
or a way-of-acting. We can draw certain pro-tem "conclusions," as
long as we don't plaster them over and set them up on altars.
Neither "information" nor indeed any one "fact" constitutes a
thing-in-itself. The very word "information" implies an ideology,
