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| Henk Oosterling on Media & Terror |
| From the Media & Terror Debate, 9/11, de Balie |
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Henk Oosterling, philosopher, Erasmus University Rotterdam
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My last and most dear point was the transformation of knowledge practices into information practices and the respective 'mental' attitudes. In my last book Radicale middelmatigheid (radical medi@crity), published in 2000 by Boom Publishers and reprinted last August, I explore this transformation in terms of the rule of the media in the most broad sense (not only mass and new media but also cars, pace makers, in built chips. In terms of Critical Art Ensemble: from the warmachine via the sight machine to the flesh machine. One of the issues is this idea of information being disconnected from experience and agency: information as a sheer form of connecting, notwithstanding any content: "hello, are you still there?!". You will recognize an actualized form of McLuhan's medium-message idea, but this is enhanced by the political philosophies of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard. For instance, related to Derrida I wrote on the phenomenon of 'ICTheology': the unchallenged presupposition of the informational society as Castells qualifies it.[you can find all the information of my books, publications, plus texts and other stuff on: www.eur.nl/fw/cfk/oosterling] Information is dynamised: accelerated and made transparent, as a result of which physical 'resistance' is annihilated more and more. In IVTheology - Extropians and so on, Erik Davis' Techgnosis - we still want to get rid of the body, completely in line with Christian tradition.
Within this information perspective agency has gradually become a problem: the complexity and velocity of our interactions and transactions have become so intense that we can no longer be taken responsible for 'our' actions. It is on this point that I have introduced the importance of the category of aansprakelijkheid or accountability, having in mind the US claim culture. In Holland 'suing your pants off' is the nightmare of every judge, but a goldmine for victim lawyers (letsel advocaten). To me victimization is related to collective accountability, as the last resort of human agency in a world that has become to complex to handle. I think 'tactical' media and agency must take these aspects into account in order to find the right scale for positive agency again beyond victimization.
In a historical perspective one can relate guilt (related to the past, premodern), responsibility (related to the present, modern) and accountability (related to the future, beyond post-modern). Of course this last category is first and for all a juridical category, while responsibility is a ethical category, but this is exactly what I try to explore: the juridification of interactions and transactions as a result of the informatisation. Accountability can be read against the 'risk society' perspective of Ulrich Beck.
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