Adilkno

The Media Archive


Writing in the Media

"The archive! It cannot count on my wholehearted support. The A. is a 
philological and dusty thing, that interests no-one; even the Nietzsche-A.: - 
who knows of it, who ever visited it, whom has it impressed?" - Gottfried Benn

To write about media is to raise the question of what gives writing the 
presumption to speak for other media. Language presents itself as the 
metamedium to contain all past and future media. In Western textual culture, 
phenomena are only considered understood once they have been included in a 
final story. Theory is believed to possess an extraordinary gift, lacking in 
audio and video, to solve the mysteries that drive the phenomenal universe. 
Whereas the word still maintains that the question of the world is in writing, 
the symbol has long since assumed it is a geometrically representable master 
plan. Once, the harmony of the spheres was a musical program.

Preaching, drama, cinema, television, museum, sports, and concerts all unite 
their audience in a collective ceremony. Conversely, solitary reading creates a 
distance from the receptive ritual's shared experience, so that the reader 
feels as if he or she were the only one receiving this medial transmission. The 
immanent silence in reading creates an imaginary space where language appears 
to soar above the immediate tumult of the mass media. The idea of order, which 
gives language its charm, is a medial effect that is abruptly disturbed when 
someone reads over your shoulder. Insight is as much the technological 
circuit's noise as it is an authentic source of information unique to primates. 
Writing is no exception to the rule. Media constitute a closed system which 
sends off sparks into the cosmic void every once in a while. Amidst the media 
landscape, we are never more than tourists who keep stubbornly looking for 
landmarks.

Media writing ought to situate itself within the media network. Even those who 
believe they can place themselves outside it in some heroic gesture and deny 
the omnipotence of the media remain just one among many media figures. This 
puritanical, old-fashioned ambition, as surely as any other, will result in an 
end product to be included in the universal media archives. The consistent 
response to this is to destroy one's complete oeuvre, which will not only serve 
to create a legend but a mountain of waste as well, at the disposal of many an 
inquisitive generation to come. The halfway approach - to merely shut down all 
links to normality for a time, in order to lead the personal medium to ecstasy 
within an artificial desert - is to dream of conquering all other modes of 
expression on one's return. All that the outsiders ever notice of this 
totalitarian claim by certain media tribes is a brilliant book, a good film, or 
a pleasant evening. No matter how one-dimensional the talented presentation, in 
the media sphere the unique commodity is always and instantly classifiable as 
part of a genre, period or development. The figure of the alien who grazes on 
history and deposits its droppings in it may be real enough - at the end of the 
day, it's just another modern artist who realizes the state of its art and acts 
accordingly.

The media text is not concerned with the secret intentions lurking behind an 
information transmission. Media are not carriers of cultural or ideological 
values. Rather than transporting messages from A to B, they form a parallel 
world of their own which never touches on classical reality. Media see the 
world as raw material for their own project, nothing else. Writing in the media 
does not seek the media's internal logic within their processed material, but 
within their ecstatic strategies. Media are forced to constant development, 
since all their ecstatic routes can be taken only once, after which the 
technique used becomes obsolete. Media never mature past the trial stage. Every 
medium must, time and again, discover its own dynamics in order to bring itself 
to a new conclusion.

The path followed by the various media thus far is the subject of 
textual-materialist media theory. The way in which media suck up material from 
reality is the theme of communication studies, while the field of cultural 
studies sides with the viewers. The media text, on the other hand, forgets 
about dialectics and strives for ecstasy, having understood itself to be part 
of the media. The media text, like the media themselves, can never produce a 
final understanding that might be established in a dissertation or magnum opus. 
Caught in the stage of experiment, it carries on in its own irresponsible but 
methodical way. The media text looks for trajectories, models of thought, 
tactical maneuvers, and magic words that will help it spell itself out to the 
point of exhaustion.

The media text describes no reality or ideas beyond the text. Its material are 
the media themselves - not their equipment or programs, but their 
possibilities. The electrosphere is full of potential media and media forms. 
Their present or future being is uncertain, but nonetheless open to 
examination. The media text offers an irresponsibly rash insight into them. It 
speculates on chance, danger, dream, nightmare. It challenges potential media 
to get real, starting with the media text itself. It provokes language to take 
on these forms. Potential media exist only as options, but once they are 
described, you run into them everywhere.

Liquid theory does not aim at an overall text, to be constructed chapter by 
chapter. The media text is no rhizomatic elaboration on schizoid currents, nor 
is it about stretching difference yet further. It focuses on the vaguest 
possible contours with the utmost sharpness. In its compelling will to text, it 
treats any concept or info that breezes by with systematic arbitrariness. It 
does not need to categorize its subjects - the magic words just cling to the 
media text, refusing to let go until they've crystallized. A media overview is 
by definition unfeasible. The media text enables the potential media field to 
download on the level of language, so as to condense the mega data package 
which scrolls by as the limited, but (to us) comprehensible, Compact Text 
format.

Generation, manipulation and recording are no longer sequential stages in data 
handling, but always take place simultaneously. Preservation does not take 
place after the fact, in the service of history, but is a technological a 
priori (F10). The unlocking of the media archives does not take place in the 
post-medial world, though they anticipate it will. The archives wish neither to 
raise an ode to transience and its traces nor to unleash protest against it. 
The construction of a new freeway attracts previously immobile traffic. To 
switch on a medium is to conjure up previously unregistered data. To establish 
a media archive is to attract files that would otherwise never have been 
compiled. To compile is no less to generate, than to generate is to compel to 
compilation; simultaneity works both ways. Starting an archive is sufficient to 
have it fill up with new material. There exists no more gratifying task than to 
write for the desk drawer.

Passive storage is not enough; data must be retrievable as quickly and 
efficiently as possible. While it is relatively easy to optimize access to 
one's personal archives, the real trouble starts with visits to other people's 
datasheds. On the other hand, this inaccessibility is an essential condition 
for amazing discoveries. Permanence is the hallmark of all structured attempts 
at preservation. The media archives will prove to be modernity's Alexandria, 
and likewise go up in smoke. Once the bookshelf has fallen over, it may be a 
small disaster to the author, but a giant step for the readers. The greater the 
gibberish beheld by the writer, the more clarity is gained by the audience. The 
media archives are open to any unsuspected cross-connections, and generously 
invite misreadings. They do not strive for the ultimate aha-experience, but 
anticipate the metamorphosis of their own content. To read books = to destroy 
books.

The Media Archive presents computer-aided theory (CAT) from the era of word 
processing (WP 4.2). The empty screen is an essential feature of word 
perfection, an electronic tabula rasa whose only known factors are the 
coordinates of the theory-to-come (Doc Pg Ln Pos). The soft page has not yet 
supplanted the letter-size thinking of the typewriting era ("to the end of the 
page and no further"), a poor use of computing capacity that shifts the 
computer into suspension gear: The PC processes nothing, the LCD screen's 
restricted parking area leaves all options open. Menu bars, sidekicks, windows 
next to or behind the text, even simple subscreens: They were either missing or 
remained unused. CAT is as flat as a pancake. No hidden codes, no footnotes, no 
registers. The keyboard's greatest literary achievement is the delete key. The 
computer serves as an unprecedented text compression tool, and this is where it 
comes in handy in media archiving.

Compact hermeneutics rears its head as a compressed file, unzipped by the 
reader when requesting a book into an overall text, suddenly rich in slanted 
distinctions. The theoretical signal has been divested of its superfluous 
profundity. Even with 70 percent of the argument omitted, discourse still comes 
through loud and clear. There is no question of clandestine advertising for 
other registered authors. Our subliminal discomfort, which would like to have 
the diagonal text related to something at least, is not rewarded with specific 
clues.

Those in dataland who believe they have the hang of pattern recognition soon 
embark on a quest for the exclusive keyword to disclose new universes. Such 
magic words, however, may also settle in from outside, and start to suck up 
charged particles of theory, factoids and semi-quotes. The massive assault on 
keywords continues until the inevitable overload occurs: time to reset. 
Unidentified Theoretical Objects (UTOs) are chance theoretical field 
compressions. Their vocabulary is discovered on desert islands in the web of 
scanned-in text. UTOs are crystal balls gleaming with the dim light of a yet 
nonexistent theorem.

The peremptory essay ends the discussion before it has even begun. The 
arguments surrounding a given problem area are surveyable and refutable from 
the start. This fact lies at the basis of theoretical modesty, of its hope that 
all existing problems seem so familiar because they are never more than 
extensions of the twentieth century. To take debates never held to their 
logical conclusion holds a promise that beyond every existing issue there lies 
a hinterland, the "world after the media," in which the eve of destruction will 
not be repeated again, but we will end up way beyond World War IV instead.

Deconstruction, like semiotics, is a traditional method of reading. It is not 
an intellectual project to dismantle culture as a whole, but a faculty which - 
provided it is exercised a little - enables you to get your own show on the 
road. Once everything has been analyzed, it's time to think through the 
non-deconstructible remainder. Text destruction launches word processing. 
Critical casuistry test drills a promising topos, taking a maniacal interest in 
paradigmatic splinters. It tries to say as much as it can about the smallest 
imaginable clues, without paying much attention to the entire exegetic field 
that surrounds them. It provides precision arguments about the how, not the 
why, of phenomena breezing by. By contrast, the study of disciplines - with its 
expanded-theory toolkit - carries out full-time research of the overall outline 
and places miscellaneous partial issues within a framework that provides 
insight as to why things are experienced as problematic in the first place. It 
seeks an arbitrary methodology that will suggest hitherto nonexistent 
relations. Since it claims no truths, it is dismissed as pseudo-science by the 
schools of thought analyzed by it. A negative thinking which denies all claims 
to unicity and the universality of actually existing attempts to interpret the 
world, is itself the gay science par excellence. Media theory cracks up over 
the determination whereby movie theory, art history, or dramaturgy defend their 
specific "extensions of man" and challenge their rivals by accusing them of 
cultural deterioration.

The media archives contain all the data in the world. The adilkno branch is a 
scant and paltry thing; all this archive contains is instructions on the 
impressionability of the media, and proposals as to how to get rid of them. It 
was unpremeditatedly compiled in the period between 1988 and 1995, in response 
to the short summer of the media. Now that autumn is on its way and permanent 
tourism is likewise coming to an end, the question of the media is becoming 
more urgent. Both the global and alternative use of media have become stuck in 
perfect professionalism. Even without a Gulf War, infotainment is just no fun. 
The reality effects are superseded more quickly than technology can produce 
them. Now that it becomes clear that the media have no answer to their own 
global questions, we see a revival of premedial affairs, so that after a period 
of liberating breakdown and decline there threatens a dismal stage of 
reconstruction. The archives, on the other hand, stumble blindly into the 
postmedial world's state of uncertainty. It is only from that future that they 
can look back with pleasure on the media, without bitterness or nostalgia.


Sovereign Media

"I cue you." - DFM

In this age of media overproduction, information immunity is a question of life 
or death. When the defense mechanism fails and the consumer is overwhelmed by 
strange impressions, doom seems near. To call a halt to crippling indifference, 
a media diet is prescribed. The pressure exerted on world citizens to 
constantly adapt their own image of the world and put technological innovations 
into practice puts them into a permanent state of insecurity. The urge to 
create disappears, and we are merely able to react to the overwhelming array of 
choices. Data are no longer stimuli to interest, but an inimical barrage 
constituting a physical threat. From exchange to effacement: communication is 
preying on naked existence.

Sovereign media insulate themselves against hyperculture. They seek no 
connection; they disconnect. This is their point of departure; we have a 
liftoff. They leave the media surface and orbit the multimedia network as 
satellites. These do-it-yourselfers shut themselves up inside a self-built 
monad, an "indivisible unit" of introverted technologies which, like a room 
without doors or windows, wishes to deny the existence of the world. This act 
is a denial of the maxim "I am connected, therefore I am." It conceals no 
longing for a return to nature. They do not criticize the baroque data 
environments or experience them as threats, but consider them material to use 
as they please. They operate beyond clean and dirty, in the waste system ruled 
by chaos pur sang.

Their carefree rummaging in the universal media archive is not a management 
strategy for jogging jammed creativity. These negative media refuse to be 
positively defined and are good for nothing. They demand no attention and 
constitute no enrichment of the existing media landscape. Once detached from 
every meaningful context, they switch over in fits and starts from one 
audio/video collection to the next. The autonomously multiplying connections 
generate a sensory space which is relaxing as well as nerve-racking. This 
tangle can never be exploited as a trend-sensitive genre again. All the data in 
the world alternately make up one lovely big amusement park and a five-star 
survival trek in the paranoid category, where humor descends on awkward moments 
like an angel of salvation and lifts the program up out of the muck.

Unlike the antimedia, which are based on a radical critique of capitalist (art) 
production, sovereign media have alienated themselves from the entire business 
of politics and the art scene. An advanced mutual disinterest hampers any 
interaction. They move in parallel worlds which do not interfere with each 
other. No anti-information or criticism of politics or art is given in order to 
start up a dialogue with the authorities. Once sovereign, media are no longer 
attacked, but tolerated and, of course, ignored. But this lack of interest is 
not a result of disdain for the hobbyist amateur or political infantilism; it 
is the contemporary attitude towards any image or sound that is bestowed on the 
world anyway.

Sovereign media are equipped with their own starters and do not need to push 
off from any possible predecessors or other media. They are different from the 
post-'68 concept of alternative media and from the autonomous "inside" media of 
the '80s. The alternative media work on the principle of antipublicity and 
mirror the mainstream media, which they feel needs to be corrected and 
supplemented. This strategy aims to make individuals aware of their behavior as 
well as opinions. This process will ultimately be seen in a changed public 
opinion. These little media have no general claims but work with a positive 
variant of the cancer model, which assumes that in the long term everyone, 
whether indirectly or through the big media, will become informed about the 
problem being broached. They presuppose a tight network stretched around and 
through society, so that in the end the activism of a few will unleash a chain 
reaction by the many. Until that time, they direct themselves at a relatively 
small group, in the certainty that their info will not stay stuck in a ghetto 
or start feeding back in the form of internal debates. This "megaphone model" 
aims in particular at liberal-leftist opinion leaders, who have no time to 
accumulate information or invent arguments and get politically motivated 
specialists to do this thankless work. Movements in the '60s and '70s gave 
themes like feminism, the third world and the environment a great range this 
way. Professionalization and market conformism in those circles, however, have 
caused people to switch to the "real" media. The laboratories where information 
and argumentation get tested are currently an inseparable part of the media 
manufacturing process, now that their movements have become just as virtual as 
the media they figure in.

At the end of the '70s, radicals who had gotten tired of waiting for the 
other's change of consciousness founded the so-called "inside media." At 
precisely the moment that the official media started emancipating themselves 
and terms like "press" and "public opinion" vanished from the scene, a group of 
activists gave up the belief in their deaf fellow citizens and got to work 
themselves. Although to unknowing outsiders they seemed a continuation of the 
alternative media activity, they let go of the cancer model and, like the 
official media, went gliding. The mirror of the alternative media was 
shattered. It had become pointless to keep appealing to public responsibility; 
they needed to look for a different imaginary quantity to concentrate on: "the 
movement."

Although they were only locally available, they had no concern for the regional 
restrictions which the ascending local media impose upon themselves. They no 
longer wanted to be alternative city papers. In form as well as content they 
became transnational, like their global peers. They wanted nothing to do with 
growth. Their brilliant dilettancy turned out to be not a childhood illness, 
but an essential component. As a leftover product of vanished radical 
movements, which flare up every now and then, their continuity and 
unchangingness remain breathtaking to this day. It cannot be reduced to their 
dogma. They turn away from the short media time and create their own space-time 
continuum.

Sovereign media are the cream of all the missionary work performed in the media 
galaxy. They have cut all surviving imaginary ties with truth, reality and 
representation. They no longer concentrate on the wishes of a specific target 
group, as the "inside" media still do. They have emancipated themselves from 
any potential audience, and thus they do not approach their audience as a 
moldable market segment, but offer it the "royal space" the other deserves. 
Their goal and legitimacy lie not outside the media, but in practicable "total 
decontrol." Their apparently narcissistic behavior bears witness to their being 
sure of themselves, which is not broadcast. The signal is there; you only have 
to pick it up. Sovereign media invite us to hop right onto the media bus. They 
have a secret pact with noise, the father of all information. And time is not a 
problem; there is room for the extended version as well as the sampled 
quotation.

This is only possible through the grace of no-profile. Without being otherwise 
secretive about their own existence, the sovereigns remain unnoticed, since 
they stay in the blind spot that the bright media radiation creates in the eye. 
And that is the reason they need not be noticed as an avant-garde trend and 
expected to provide art with a new impetus. The reason sovereign media are 
difficult to distinguish as a separate category is because the shape in which 
they appear can never shine in its full lustre. The program producers do not 
show themselves; we see only their masks, in the formats familiar to us. Every 
successful experiment that can possibly be pointed to as an artistic or 
political statement is immediately exposed to contamination. The mixers 
inherently do not provoke, but infect chance passersby with corrupted 
banalities which present themselves in all their friendly triviality. An 
inextricable tangle of meaning and irony makes it impossible for the 
experienced media reader to make sense of this.

The atmosphere inside the sealed cabin conflicts with the ideology of 
networking. As a central coordination machine, the computer subjects all old 
media to the digital regime. The sovereign media, conversely, make their own 
kind of connections, which are untranslatable into one universal code. 
High-tech is put to the test and turned inside out. But this trip to the 
interior of the machine does not result in a total multimedia artwork. 
Disbelief in the total engagement of the senses and technically perfect 
representation is too great for that. The required energy is simply generated 
by short-circuits, confusion of tongues, atmospheric disturbances and clashing 
cultures. Only when computer-driven networks begin to break their own 
connections, and scare off their potential users, will it be time for the 
sovereigns to log in.


Normal Media

In the long run, everything becomes interesting; such is the fate of normal 
media. The only surviving Mayan text may reveal the deepest mysteries to us or 
turn out a department store ad: neither would make it any less fascinating. 
Normal media are characterized by the fact that they cannot be interpreted as 
cultural expressions during their time of appearance. It is only after they 
become a collection with the appropriate chronology or an object of study for 
the science of normal history that they acquire that little extra of a 
misaddressed letter or conversation at the next table. Only through such 
annexations can the imagination be stimulated to practice the hermeneutics of 
everyday life.

Normal media, when planted into their natural environment, are so obvious that 
they exclude all metalevels. They are so much a part of their own space-time 
that they do not allow for the necessary distance to observe them in an 
anthropological sense, or simply for pleasure. They are like the tiny bone from 
which the whole dinosaur is deduced, or the one scene through which the entire 
movie can be reconstructed. As long as they remain submerged in everyday life, 
they are of minimal information value. But as paradigmatic splinters, they 
reveal the entire landscape in which they once figured. Untimely normal media 
can only be conceived of as the inconceivable.

Normal media require no advertising. They are handed out uninvited in 
inescapable editions. Waste is a precondition. Direct mail has achieved its 
goal if three percent of the recipients react. Normal media institutions abuse 
the statutory obligation to receive mail. Thus, we find descriptions of stray 
cats, announcements for nextdoor parties, Scientology leaflets about Hubbard's 
latest, an invitation to the official opening of Harry's Butcher's, interior 
design catalogues, respectable students seeking apartments, a salsa dance 
class, supermarket special offers, various local papers, a book club catalogue, 
Chinese takeout and Italian delivery menus, the neighborhood newsletter, a 
personal message "to all those at the designated address," political flyers, 
and cultural teasers. A similar category survives in the news sphere in the 
form of personal ads and obituaries, personal announcements and readers' 
letters. The white and yellow pages, too, enjoy regular contact with average 
folks.

Uninvited media ignore the contemporary consumer habit to compile one's own, 
personal media package. The classic unilateral model in which recipient B had 
no choice but to accept the message from source A has been renounced as 
undemocratic. The adage of "choose your own message" has turned reception into 
an act of volition. The media for the millions cut right through this conscious 
selection, sovereign to the extent that they are uninterested in market 
penetration or spiritual incorporation. They feel at home in a stack of old 
newspapers, down the hallway, out in the street, on top of a garbage can.

Normal media design requires a certain period of incubation before it can be 
recognized as such. In their layout, normal media neither plunder the work of 
risqué avant-gardists nor make an appeal to nostalgia. They inadvertently 
succeed in short-circuiting the field of tension between folk and mass culture. 
Their problem is how to draw attention without becoming interesting. They must 
avoid their instant degradation into a message for a single market sector at 
all costs. They combine the amateurish clumsiness of the anniversary and 
marriage song with the professional charisma of the quizmaster and revue 
artist. Desktop publishing, handycamcorders and autozoom see to it that neither 
level is ever attained. They reveal a carefully edited normality in which there 
is room for everyone. This is where contempt fails. Average media may be 
copied, but they cannot be parodied. Letters by the city council or local 
industries may be a standard weapon in the Spaßguerrilla repertoire, but the 
first ironic mail order catalogue has yet to be written.

To turn to normal media for innovative content is useless. They have turned 
McLuhan's brilliant analysis - that the content of the media consists of the 
preceding media - into their editorial policy. They are shopwindows in print, 
visual radio shows, screen adaptations of myth, digitized town criers, 
neighbors by phone, motorized billboards. Whereas sovereign media still manage 
to produce some alienating effects by broadcasting movies on radio, filming 
novels by the page, screening radio plays or word processing in cyberspace, 
watching the radio on television has become common practice, what with talk 
shows, game shows and the news. Tolerant media aren't necessarily conservative, 
just because they elaborate on the preceding situation. They do not long for 
the return of God, country and the family, but offer a new security. 
Vegetarians are not upset by horsemeat mailings. On the other hand, racist 
propaganda is instantly exposed by its display of prewar typography and Nazi 
palette. Normal media merely annoy us because of their overwhelming numbers and 
the certainty that this particular stream will never dry up.

Dominant images may be scratched, stilled, or sampled, but they cannot be 
turned into camp. Normal media are distributed far beyond the reaches of 
kitsch. The only way to increase banality is through outdated pictures. For 
instance, there are no recorded instances yet of an ironic use of laptops or 
other mobile immaterials. Meanwhile, the solid wares that gave consumer society 
its material charm give one plenty to go on. Normal media are always one step 
ahead of the banality fans. Their emptiness is so much a product of its age 
that even the artistic avant-garde of durability radically overlooks it. Only 
as foundered cultural values can the maxima normalia become discourse carriers, 
and thus fit for artistic recycling.


Vague Media

"The magna of culture: confused traditions, mono-opinions, inconsequent 
discourses and quasi-argumentations." - Alex in "Xuxem"

Vague media do not respond to success. They do not achieve their goals. Their 
models are not argumentative, but contaminative. Once you tune in to them, you 
get the attitude. But that was never their intention; their vagueness is not an 
ideal, it is the ultimate degree of abstraction. The ability to avoid specific 
questions is combined with answers which lack any depth of field. This is why 
vague media still manage to appear diplomatic and polite. Their social critique 
is troubled by an unsteady world view. For them, crisis does not lead to a new 
beginning, but to a gradual evaporation of the problem area. Doubt doesn't 
merely arise; it's a sixth sense. The senselessness of existence renders 
everything a sensible activity which can be given up whenever desired, so that 
nothing ever gets finished. Here, no one works; rather, one devotes oneself to 
taking apart and putting back together undefined objects and projects. The 
liquid being of vague-media adherents never crystallizes into definite forms. 
When beginning and endpoint have disappeared from view, existence can be 
experienced in peace. Having obliterated the factor of time, the vague ones 
distribute their concentration over n years and transmit their broadcasts only 
on homeopathic frequencies. They are no less present for that.

Vague media do not depend on any network requiring construction or maintenance. 
The lines of the net are dissolved in an astral mist. In lieu of distribution 
decisions, a random selection is offered, and eagerly snapped up. In this 
post-atomic business culture, uncertainty is the foundation of efficiency. The 
untrustworthiness of agreements is not a result of other activities, but a sign 
of good will. The field of possibilities is left open at all times. There is a 
willingness to get caught up in anything, be it a meeting, party, or accident. 
Parallel to transparent society, there unfolds a cloud of vague structures 
through which the subject moves in Brownian motion. This nonlinearity defies 
the rhizomatic dogma that prescribes endless switching. These hard-luck pilots 
do not wander, but stumble from one discontinuity to the next. Nor is it a case 
of trees or roots. With vague media, a veiled belief in progressive bifurcation 
gives way to mist on the window to eternity. Undirected recreations form 
temporary compressions in the random distribution of particles that roam the 
vague ether. Whatever order may be discovered in this chaos, it fails to 
impress the insiders. The brilliant conspiracy will be heard out for a while, 
then forgotten.

Vague media are impossible to follow. Their fuzzy logic frustrates signifiers 
in search of uni- or multivocality. The result is a fluffy sign (information 
value 0.34 or 2.74). Nothing is concealed or intentionally distorted. One 
simply does not know exactly, and this message comes through. In spite of it 
all, the other gets plenty of room to voice its revolutionary message. There is 
no fear of data here. The historical excursion is a strenuous exertion gladly 
undertaken, though the history of vagueness has yet to be written. There are 
still plenty of shadowy Greek philosophers and not-so-lucid theologians to be 
discovered who didn't quite get around to making their statements, or brilliant 
Renaissance painters who never came into their own. The B movie rose above pulp 
and started being taken seriously a long time ago; there is no reason why the 
same fate should not befall B thinkers (e.g., Russell), B literature, and the 
rest of illegible culture. Certain historical figures have found their natural 
habitat in vague media: Mao, Gysin, Manson, Reich, Jesus, Debord, Meinhof, 
Fromm, Hitler, Hendrix, Castaneda, Goldman, Marley, Pippi Longstocking; 
furthermore, cookbooks, weapons, children's drawings, witches, blood, skulls 
and crossbones, and animals (by all means, animals). As long as it's cut up, 
overloaded with text, dark and intense, with heavy black-and-white 
illustrations.

The vague medium as object and the vague one as determinant subject are 
inseparable. Their shared foggy concept of barriers prevents man & media from 
growing apart. Comprehensibility arises only when the subject succeeds in 
extracting an object, thus rendering himself obsolete. Vagueness is not so much 
a strategy as it is a style of media. The matching design, as rugged as it is 
blurred, does not signify a lack of concept, but something like an essentialist 
approach. Media are not used as homes or garments, but as durable nutrition 
that will last for years. Media, housing and clothing become interesting only 
after they've lost all practical or exchange value and any hope of ever 
becoming youthful, nice, hip, or risqué - in short, modern - again. Because the 
vague ones lack the team spirit that distinguishes most fashionable trends and 
movements, they immediately recognize the foreign as their own, whereas the 
normal is alien to them. They have passsed through the doors of perception 
without realizing it and are incapable of finding anything normal in normality. 
This explains their immense rage against anything or anyone who tries to force 
things on them that are "only part of the complex society we live in." Far from 
profound, their indignation lashes out unreservedly, to be as quickly forgotten 
again - until the next clash. Not wishing to be irresponsible, they reject all 
responsibility. Johnsons in a mediascape full of shitheads, they subscribe to 
the slogan, "Mind your own business and let other people mind theirs." Their 
only means of attack is the boycott, the active denial of the enemy: Don't 
smoke, don't buy, don't go, don't drink, don't refuel. The achievement of the 
campaigns is to burden activists with impossible standards.

Vague media are not out of focus, badly printed, or amateurishly edited - or 
are they? Their technological presumption is unshakable. Their appearance has 
been carefully prepared. But these nebulous media do not consider themselves 
products, but atmospheres. It's much harder to generate a cloud than it is to 
cover up in the hype blown up by fleeting contacts. All information is admitted 
to a dimension where the whole is not distinguished from the obsolete detail. 
Overload does not occur, as time knows no bounds and chaos is part of the 
mystery of the world. Information and noise only differ when you're in a hurry. 
The issue of hazy media results from a spring cleaning of the personal archive. 
In contradiction to Third World scrap collectors who scrutinize garbage dumps 
in search of recyclable goods, the transmitters of crap patiently comb the 
public domain for material to embellish their private dumps with. Another 
example of Grassmuck-Unverzagt's Law: Waste can be transferred but not 
destroyed.

Ongoing research in the semi-scientific domain consists exclusively of sources, 
and is not concerned with such trivia as surveys, summaries or final 
conclusions. Vague media adhere to the teachings of Claude Shannon, who holds 
that views and opinions can be deciphered only as information. The preference 
for torn-out newspaper photographs does not mean they see them as illustrations 
or works of art; instead they are a collection of possible meanings, none of 
which takes preference over the others. Even the more powerful signs and 
symbols (such as the star or swastika) that keep popping up on their pages and 
frequencies are blessed with this charm. Like crystal-ball media, they are 
simultaneously maximally and minimally abstract. From the viewpoint of vague 
media, meaning is a matter best left to users. To them, the blurred 
relationship between sign and meaning is a social achievement.

Far from being particularly obsessive or passionate, vague media harp forever 
on the same subject. Whereas sovereign media are on a perpetual journey of 
discovery, the vague channels pitch their tents for an indefinite time or stick 
around forever. The universe is all around, so why mobilize? For vague media, 
the greatest mystery is their own functioning. This existential moment sees to 
it that individual expressions never take on a definite or immutable form, yet 
make a point. The travelers of the "terrain vague" find their way in wastelands 
where even the hot-spot tourists du moment get lost. Vague media are not 
concerned with forms, but with the empty spaces in between, which are timeless. 
This is why they will long outlive the rising and setting of other media.


Topical Media

"Real time means less than three seconds, so that anything giving news within 
five goes under the umbrella of historical information." - Reuter

Information as such radiates such availability that it evokes only pure 
revulsion. As being per se, it is just a little more than life can handle. Data 
can never be taken for granted. They must be made to resonate and processed 
through state-of-the-art equipment. Processing technology must be continually 
updated to prevent data from escaping and regaining their obstinate parasitical 
silence. Decay and erosion are major issues in the world of the recording and 
processing industries. Data recorded on magnetic tapes or CDs instantly cover 
themselves up in soothing static, soon giving up all legibility in terms of 
significance, listening pleasure or other methods of pacification. It is only 
when the smooth generators have brought them to life that data become amusing. 
No recreation without creation. Watching the telephone or listening to movie 
reels is no longer a form of entertainment, but a sign of real obsession.

Back in the days when messages were still carried by sailing vessels, they were 
allowed to ripen into reports. Data developed into news because they had a 
chance to mature. Only when accompanied by opinions and commentaries could the 
message escape such crushing remarks as, "What business is that of mine?" By 
consolidating and concentrating the mixture of incoming messages, editors could 
impart their daily coherent worldviews. The substantialist presentation of 
ephemeral sensation enabled citizens to absorb the news as a segment of the 
daily package. It successfully provoked a general interest by appearing as a 
regulated encroachment on the ritual of personal existence. News originated 
outside. Inside, it caused the necessary reactions, spreading through the 
national community as the topics that gave it the required solidarity.

The notion of topicality originates with the acceleration of transport. The 
significance of the event was increasingly determined by absolute time. The 
interval left for the message to parade itself as today's item was reduced ever 
further. For example, on January 23rd, 1766, the "Amsterdamsche Courant" 
reports that the King of Denmark has fallen seriously ill. On January 28th, it 
informs us that "Copenhagen is plunged into bitter mourning over the passing of 
its beloved Monarch," even though in fact he had already died on January 14th. 
In other words, the moment of the monarch's death lasted two weeks. In 
telematics, this regime of the interval is utterly defeated, while reports of 
tales from elsewhere become neverending stories. Reports are no longer 
delivered in segments, but as part of a continuous flow centered around local 
time. News no longer reaches you, but is permanently present. Instead of 
occupying a fixed place within daily routine, it can be consumed whenever 
desired.

Until recently, obstinate personal timetables were still curbed by the 
programed media. They managed to lend an aura of news to info by selecting, 
saving and dressing it so that the ritual digestion of international titbits 
regained its air of collectivity. News reports became platforms for local 
nationalities. The dictates of time imposed by the programers and their 
television guides gave one the comfortable feeling of having made a personal 
choice by switching on the set. Programed media presumed that the consumer as 
subject would naturally collaborate with the makers in giving a meaningful 
context to the presentation. It is when data succeed in escaping such dictates 
and television becomes a piece of furniture like sideboard family pictures that 
topical media are introduced.

Topical media appear as an interruption of the program. The fatal topicality of 
traffic (traffic information broadcasts, ghost drivers) is used as a means of 
coercion to stay tuned, even at home. Life itself is conceived of as a traffic 
flow that must never be interrupted. One unexpected result of the capacity of 
topicality to suggest relevant hierarchies that justify jumping the queue was 
the media users' fragmentation as subjects: As far as topical media were 
concerned, they no longer had a say. The equality between news and 
entertainment was restored by settling topical media on a wavelength of their 
own. At first, news still interrupted the regular program, but this invasion 
was soon allotted its own channel. But at the same time this eliminated the 
pretense that topical media have a universal right to all those aged 8 to 88. 
Every minority was delivered its own message. Thus, the notion of conquerable 
markets became an integrated part of the medial and the liberal proliferation 
of channels could commence.

The secret of topical media is that they present themselves as separate media 
to the point where all programed media are temporarily switched off or banished 
to tiny subscreens. Topicality's now or never is incompatible with lasting 
ratings. To everybody's surprise, the inflammatory character of spontaneous 
news bursts soon turns out to be the ultimate stage-managed affair. Those who 
are looking for in-depth information are better off having a chat with the 
neighbours or reading a book. Topicality and news are mutually exclusive. Once 
topical media start broadcasting live press conferences so that journalists 
will have something to write about, the interval in which events can turn into 
news is destroyed, as we watch the reporters on screen get up to report what 
we've just been watching. Long before the cameras arrive at the scene, we have 
already videotaped the stills of the camcorder witness.

When we can watch Nobel prize writers write their awardwinning novels via 
bulletin boards, or witness the shooting of a Hollywood feature to be released 
next spring via movie channels, or listen to live broadcasts of telephone 
conversations between world leaders, or follow the studio takes of a 
world-famous musician's CD live on radio, and when the only reports we see are 
about the production process of special reports: then the end product lags so 
much behind topicality that it can only be appreciated as waste. Why bother to 
buy the disc at all, when all of us have just spent months listening to the new 
track's recordings, minutely evaluating the various takes? The public is placed 
into the position of permanent journalists, while the viewers must keep on 
switching to get the message. Thus, the period of reception is given an active 
interpretation.

Waste has always been a pure object. One promising consequence of the silly 
urge to consolidate collected data into an end product screaming for a cool 
design is that all it does is attract more waste. Nobody needs to read the 
magazines, because everybody knows what graphic programs they were made with. 
But that which loses its meaning regains its secret. Obsolete media have 
succesfully restored their silence. By nature, data evoke suspicions that they 
are not alone. They are always found in groups. Data may operate but cannot be 
received as such. Every single bit of data counts; data never lose their 
obstinate character. One cannot simply adress data, one must know which 
language to speak. To look at data is to objectify them - as waste.

Topical media are media in progress. No longer able to produce instant 
documents, they roam the regions of raw material forever. At present, the 
avant-gardes of hard info study the next phase, in which the redundancy of end 
products will go without saying. They frantically test the data-vacuum cleaners 
developed in their own laboratories. The collection, attraction, gathering, 
tapping, clipping, copying, categorizing, storing, restructuring and, above 
all, saving of data is their life fulfillment. In perfect keeping with 
sovereign media, they no longer require an audience to tackle their chosen 
subject. They are more and more amazed at the inexhaustibility of their data 
sources. Like traditional computerized societies, they perform a ritual to 
exorcize the social data surplus. But this anthropological approach to archaic 
modes of reconciliation ignores the fact that the problem of waste concerns all 
of society. There is a great danger of the amount of data exceeding its 
critical limit and exploding. A handful of priests wielding their data-vacuum 
cleaners can do little to avert the threat of crucial data carriers going up in 
flames: The incident as event.

Even the miniaturization of data storage cannot prevent the impending overload, 
but merely contributes to its amplification. Compressed nanodata are still 
objects, with all the power to strike back. Just like material waste, data can 
only be relocated, not destroyed. The ecological answer consists of data 
prevention ("Prevention is better than storage"). But this magic formula 
inevitably creates Gulag-style media-free zones and an educational censorship 
to erase data-intensive periods from history, for example. These solutions are 
as conceivable as they are outdated. Only the strategy of data recycling - to 
compost information as the manure for fresh events and phenomena so that they 
in turn may revolve through the wheel of mythical history as data - offers some 
hope of an effective reduction of immanent data accretion.


Incorrect Media

"Conceivably, the departing train will carry only a few passengers - just the 
ones who made it in time. But perhaps most of them prefer to miss it, because 
they find the railway station more pleasant, more comfortable, more intimate 
than the journey." - Ernst Jünger

Incorrect media are found to have defected to the enemy. They prescribe set 
courses, forcing our protracted stay on a single channel. They're nondemocratic 
in that they prohibit independent rambles through the mediascape. They demand 
absolute reception. People who get on halfway down the line are quickly 
rejected, often resulting in a grudge held for life. Incorrect media ignore the 
immediate availability that characterizes accessible society, giving rise to 
suspicion concerning the intentions that preceded reproduction. But no positive 
response is forthcoming. Incorrect media refuse to discuss the discomfort they 
cause; they're masters of concealment when it comes to hidden agendas. Behind 
these media lurks a world which is continually copied through the successive 
stages of the technological era, but is never brought to light. There exists a 
terrible suspicion that these media not only contain but have long since 
analyzed technological consciousness, while the innocent observer is still 
trying to come to terms with it.

Contemporary media are always on. So, by definition, the program has been 
running for a long time before we come in. We are visitors in a world that will 
keep transmitting with or without us. Loyal media keep resetting, explaining 
their function and usage every half hour. But with incorrect media, the point 
of entry - our possible point of initiation - is nowhere to be found. If we'd 
understood what they were about, their complexity might have been acceptable. 
If we begin at their moment of conception, with much study, we might still 
grasp their deeper knowledge. But we are so far in arrears and have so little 
time, there can be no question of catching up. The walls that have been erected 
can only hide the secrets of some evil genius. But the subject behind this 
medium demonstrates no tyrannical urge to control the democratic media. It 
guards a spiritual treasure, and refuses to share it with us. Then why does it 
share our reproductive impulses? Is it the agent of extramedial forces, a 
sorcerer perhaps? Whatever caused this work to appear in the first place?

The modern phenomenon of the introductory chapter cannot come to grips with 
incorrect media. This is where all education fails. Incorrect media annoy us 
because they appear either too soon or too late. Too small to offer an 
alternative, they're too big to be ignored. They force themselves on us like 
some mysterious oeuvre or magnum opus. Their potential is enormous, but never 
finds room to unfold. Their works remain miserably limited to a circle of adept 
initiates. They contain possible solutions or events that never took place or 
may offer relief tomorrow. They're manuals to the wrong universe.

Incorrect media carefully distinguish between themselves and transmitters of 
the wrong information. The latter rest assured of their animated interaction 
with the medial environment. Once they make their dubious statement, 
communication can commence. The miscue fuels public discourse. Misguided 
content is not an attack on those who think differently; it is an application 
for membership in the media sphere. Prior to coming out as renegades, the 
incorrect could still speak freely in the cozy premedial climate. Generation 
after generation, on street corners, in coffeehouses and in pubs, the 
disaffected have vented their unpopular views on religion, revolution and race. 
But once they enter the media, all fuses blow. Collaboration in the age of 
technological reproduction: Let the shit hit the fan, the microphones are wide 
open. For a moment, a lack of opinions seems averted, as the nation turns to 
face the question of media collaboration. Now the opinion leaders and their 
info brokers face the task of swiftly eliminating the threat of all those 
personal opinions by making them the subject of public debate.

Attempts to establish communication with the impervious incorrect media 
commonly use the trick of pointing out the dubious statements they contain. 
This is based on the presumption that all writers and artists are 
collaborators, except those who haven't had the chance yet. The further we are 
removed from the twentieth century, the more obvious it becomes that the era 
has known nothing but traitors. Those who did nothing should have gotten 
involved; the ones who did should have shut up. Refugees should have stayed 
put; the people who stayed home should have scrammed. Artists should have 
explored the nature of technology; technologists should have left art well 
alone. Communists should have manipulated sexual desire; Fascists should have 
looked towards the other. Democrats should have woken up; the rich should have 
looked beyond their class interests. The colonies should have been liberated 
sooner so blacks would have stayed in their homelands. The Reformed, Catholics, 
and Protestants shouldn't have bitched, since they all turned Christian 
Democrat anyway. Instead of allowing its non-normative abuse, science should 
have founded a world government of experts to solve problems, of which the 
century saw plenty. The ones who caused them were given free play, while the 
little rational intellect that remained sat morosely aside. What on earth did 
those twentieth-century folks do with all the energy and resources they wasted?

Incorrect media are never of this age. Untimeliness is their central feature. 
Attempts to extract anything from them might prove fatal. It's when the makers 
of incorrect media try to put their ideas into practice that things really get 
out of hand. The art of incorrect thinking is to ignore any invitations by the 
Zeitgeist. It takes a lot of alertness and flexibility to be consistently off 
the mark. Means to this end are polemical silence or radical naiveté, 
undeterring perseverance on one's own set course (even if it intersects with 
modernity), ruthless negativism or willful amnesia, thinking modernity through 
to its most radical conclusions, carefree escapism into history or a touristic 
self-image, an alienating view of personal screw-ups or an anthropological 
approach to local rituals, regular contact with extraterrestrials, spurious use 
of philosophies and women's magazines, mixing up lines of incompatible thought, 
and incoming phone calls - you always get called.

Incorrect media are never springboards; they are ladders ascending to black 
holes. They painfully transcend their condition of being always in the right. 
Up there, the view of the moral landscape fascinates. All is seen, and none of 
it is of any use. This experience is what incorrect media are all about.


Old Media

Old media are back in force. Authenticists claim they have rediscovered the 
tools to call forth the spirit from matter once more: delicate shades of grey 
that flow from a pencil, the relief conjured up by oil paint, the magic of 
decaying nitrate films, the perennial eloquence of world literature, the 
astonishing relevance of ancient symbols, the sheer beauty of Bakelite phones, 
the elasticity of organic textiles, the ultimate poetry of typewriters, the 
stained-glass window's magical display of interweaving light rays.

All these techniques are thought to inform us about the true nature of human 
life, pointing to the emptiness of the modern media world. The old tools are 
thought to lead us back to a universe that predates industrial media, a place 
where sense still made sense. In this Golden Age, in which consciousness had 
not yet been eroded by the blur of images or the cacaphony of radio and people 
still awoke each day to tune in to their cultures, pure reception observed a 
world of vivid forms and acoustic space was filled by the song and warble of 
birds (by all means worthy of rerecording). In this primeval era, there was 
still ample room for the message to contain secrets, not interpretations. 
Although contact with the gods had been lost after Homer, one could still 
profess faith in the deceased geniuses as a longing for the most ancient of 
media. Furthermore, there remained the possible miracle of spirit merging with 
matter to produce the perfect work of art.

To be misunderstood by one's contemporaries was not a case of failed marketing 
strategies or of malafide agents taking the loot, but a quintessential feature 
of genius. One could still be unrecognized instead of just uninteresting. Today 
Manhattan harbors 100,000 painters, more than the entire globe had back then. 
In those days, there was still room for artisanship, for masters and 
apprentices, lunatic rulers dishing out ducats, bishops requesting new opuses 
by the week. Flourishing cultures produced masterpieces, masterpieces caused 
cultures to flourish; who wouldn't like to set their time machines for such 
space-time coordinates?

The authentic artist's charge against pulp culture is that civilization gets 
the art it deserves. Artists who exploit this state of affairs are celebrated 
as enlightened thinkers. Authenticists with an ironic understanding of 
contemporary profundities transform their cultural discomfort into works of 
artisanal banality, and are liberally rewarded for their efforts by investors. 
Others use their authentic reappraisal of outdated techniques as a sales 
technique. Their convincing presentations offer welcome relief from the 
collection of postmodern curiosities, which owes its existence to 
overinterpretation. The most inaccessible regions of the sublime have been 
democratized, yet our artists succeed in reactivating an exalted remainder. 
Deconstructed fragments are spontaneously shattered in their hands, revealing a 
landscape of true images. All those French reflections on language, signs, 
simulations, fractal power, result in the conservation of forgotten or lost 
destinies as truth and labor.

Old media are not aware of their purity. They are here to stay. Once the media, 
always the media. Ornate instruments have no quarrel with wax cylinders or CDs. 
It would be more consistent of the authentic performers if they would render 
their historical timbre only within the old medium of the parlor, and tried to 
convince us that microphones cause their viola da gambas and hammer dulcimers 
to go out of tune. Even if medial disruption of the instruments could be 
scientifically proven, and this knowledge converted into a truly authentic 
sound, the essence of the thing would never penetrate the ear molded to media. 
Even authentic art performances cannot exist without recording and 
reproduction. The old-music circles lack the will to dissociate themselves from 
the media. Since contemporary concert halls no longer regulate admission 
(unlike European squatter's bars, which have banned recording equipment), they 
are deprived of premedial ambiance. By reproducing ancient charisma through 
state-of-the-art techniques, the authenticists automatically end up as 
folklorists; the end point of all culture, the repository of old media, out of 
which they can celebrate their comeback in the new.

By nature, media seek to associate with their peers. Old media will not be 
forced back into a historical village, like cute old handicrafts, wielding the 
same brief power of nostalgia as a spinning wheel in action. The old media are 
as intoxicating and empty as the new playthings. Their age is no guarantee of 
wisdom. Nor can we accuse the old media of dull or demented behavior. Their 
chronicling continues; they perceive with the one sense to which they have been 
doomed. With a little exercise, old media may serve us just fine, amidst all 
the contemporary telematic machinery.

The hybrid character of media means that anything can be linked to anything. In 
posthistory, the opposite is equally true. The cinema has always shown great 
interest in the dressed-up past. Visconti's extras were not just required to 
wear original attire; he forced them to wear corresponding underwear, 
supposedly conducive to the old ways of moving. Likewise, Stanley Kubrick 
thought it necessary to shoot "Barry Lyndon" using late eighteenth-century 
candlelight, for which he had to develop a special kind of highly sensitive 
film. Techno artists also exhibit a persistent urge to prove they can make real 
music on stage. The latest trend is movie adaptations of computer games. 
Soundtracks often far exceed actual movie popularity, and may even lead to the 
rerelease of pictures that were otherwise complete failures. Any major picture 
worth its salt appears as a novel soon after. Due to overwhelming response, the 
video clip is now available on compact disc. Now all we have to wait for is a 
video game adaptation of Rilke's "Neue Gedichte." Have you read "Cyberspace: 
The Manual" yet?

To say that interactive CDs are making world literature more accessible is 
stating the obvious. Great literature has always been interactive. Only those 
who failed to comprehend it ever thought of it in terms of CD-ROM. This 
memory-only attitude considers the past a closed area, inaccessible to data 
input. Things only get going once media are falsely hooked up. Only 
misconnections can produce sparks. Old media should be treated as RAM and 
accessed at random.

Data processing is unthinkable without the use of old media. They supply the 
materials to be processed. Computer peripherals are meant to absorb this 
material. There's a whole world waiting to be scanned. Only when the computer 
world has liberated itself of all its peripheral equipment, and the central 
processing unit functions autonomously, will the status of old media ever 
change. Only then will the computer create an intractable data world in which 
the human archive has been fully assimilated. At present, integrated circuits 
still need TV screens to communicate progress, and printouts on their 
performance are still available. Only when computers refuse to tell us what 
data manipulations have been carried out will they have become a pure 
metamedium. The possibility informs fears about the artificial intelligence of 
neural networks.

The question remains, however, to what extent the recording frenzy that 
underlies the construction of this giga-databank can ever be exhausted. The 
ideal of a comprehensive archive dates back to the eighteenth century at least. 
The twentieth century needed a world war to keep up with the pace of worldly 
dynamics in an open archive. War was the ideal condition for the brutal 
introduction of revolutionary recording techniques. But we do not have to 
follow this military storage strategy in order to maintain the status quo. The 
old media archives may continue to exist (or perish) freely, unabsorbed by 
cyberspace.

A more subtle option is to have the media do as they please, forming 
multirational links as they see fit in a "personal network" of old and new 
media, not necessarily interlacing but possibly compatible. The user as a 
disturbance variable occasionally interferes with the sublime operations of the 
autonomous matrix. Only technocrats dream of perfectly integrated media 
systems, of ISDN as the generator of absolute transparence. Deficient 
conversion techniques guarantee that the mystery of technology will remain, 
even for the most brilliant of cybernauts. Malfunction is their only food for 
thought. It's when the control panel flares red that the console prankster 
comes to life.


Total Media

"To hear more and to see more is to shorten one's life." - Luis de Gongora

As long as the extramedial exists, the media cannot be total. Even if we take 
the technological trends of multimedia, telepresence and interactivity to their 
logical conclusions and beyond, there will always remain doubt that not all 
ground has been covered. There have always been items that didn't make the 
news, consumers who accidentally switched off, unused takes, near-data, one-way 
recording devices trained on the wrong side at the critical moment, leaky 
ideological grids. The Gulf War not only taught us that media can control an 
event on all fronts, it also brought us Hussein's Law: One can always remain 
invisible. Even if satellites confine one's freedom of movement to a 
twelve-inch margin, it is still possible to find adequate media camouflage.

The nice thing about operations like Desert Storm is that the concentration of 
extensions on a single focus creates a proportionate medial cast shadow. Thus, 
antiwar actions are allotted their own Temporary Autonomous Zones (Hakim Bey) 
where they are free to discover their own trajectories, unhampered by the 
obligation to be unequivocal and without the make-up of images. Saddam 
Hussein's gift to the West was the joyful experience of a few weeks in the 
background, out of sight of the media. The mobilized medials fought their New 
World War still influenced by the global philosophy of the eighties, namely, 
that the whole world must be fed the same images. They ignored local 
developments, as they were ruthlessly made to understand during the subsequent 
massacres in Yugoslavia where the media didn't stand a chance.

As the planet disintegrates and local populations become obsessed with their 
defrosting forebears and the genius of their locale, the media get the 
uncomfortable sensation that they're just going over the same old show. Ever 
since man first set foot on the moon, all their resources have gone to lending 
credibility to the slogan, "The sun is always rising somewhere." But consumer 
confidence in the 24-hour marketplace is now dwindling. The nonsense attitude 
of the nineties calls for a different appreciation of media, in which a local 
omnipresence is to guarantee that the brilliant transience of instances gets 
celebrated only in front of one, two, many cameras. The irresistible inertia of 
being shatters the one eye of God. The severity of classical universal themes 
such as the ozone layer, greenhouse effect, AIDS, refugees, drugs, recession, 
the Mafia, and the communist legacy is intended to suck up the user into the 
media. The viewers' attention fuels the media engine. Still, it is in permanent 
conflict with the twentieth-century yen for touristic experience. Whereas media 
demand absolute participation, the tourist's desire is to break out completely 
for a while. This oppositional constellation not only feeds the medial 
discomfort about John or Jane Doe, it also induces media resentment of their 
incredulous masses.

Material media are no more than technological switches. Short-lived extramedial 
islands will always arise within the networks. God's great asset was his 
immateriality, his power always to be everywhere and to interfere even with the 
most local of events, down to the congregational conscience. The question of 
attitude is to be appreciated as a contemporary sacralization; it shares with 
the historical religions their aspect of immanence. If the media are to keep 
their sources of public devotion from becoming exhausted, they will have to 
move hearts and souls. Total media rule by physical absence; they owe their 
existence to the collective sensation that everybody is always in the picture. 
Theme parks represent the educational project that promotes this mentality. 
Here, touristic desire is eroded from within.

The project carried out by total media is to recreate the outside world 
according to its immaculate image, such as only the media can present it (after 
the necessary information adjustments). No matter how sublime the upgrading of 
European inner cities, some human excrement always remains on screen. The 
profound disappointment with the image pollution that is inseparable from 
classical reality demands a mecha-approach of superhuman proportions. The theme 
park not only summarizes a given culture, it demands that the surrounding 
nonpark follow its example. Once outside the gates, the visitor is expected to 
read the old surroundings as a precursor to true civilization as solidified 
behind the counter. Second-rate reality is redefined as the input supplier of 
total media.

"Do you want a total world peace?" There's no need for Americans to explore the 
States or their illustrious history anymore; they've been exhaustively covered 
in the Disney-Galaxy. Europeans don't have to cross the ocean to study the 
imaginary aspect of the New World. In Paris, Eurodisney offers Baudrillard all 
the excitement of "indomitable vigor" and "orgiastic elasticity" he can handle. 
Instead of the original, the Japanese prefer to stay in a 1:1 copy of the Dutch 
"Huis ten Bosch" or in the Deutsche Märchenstadt, Hokkaido. In this age of 
frenzied stagnation, there is no longer a need for corporeal confrontations 
with the uncomfortable world. No more notorious pickpockets, grumpy waiters, 
sagging hotel beds, 24-hour strikes, jet lag, or dingy restaurants. The 
enterprising home entrepreneur is delivered from all ecological and 
antropological guilt. The disturbing and oppressive sensation of being an 
outsider is replaced by the comfortable feeling of having truly understood a 
foreign civilization. Aboriginals elsewhere seem unable to value their own 
cultures nowadays, what with their noisy mopeds, garish souvenirs, ghetto 
blasters, public drunkenness, and unrestricted demolition schemes that amount 
to crimes against humanity.

The tourist industry crisis generated by this new trend will be parried by the 
managers of State and Capital with relentless representational frenzy. The 
exclusive mechanism of this plot against the unreasonable nations is obvious. 
All nations will demand a park of their own, to be located on the rich nations' 
territory on the principle that you "get it where the money is." With 
development aid withdrawn, national debts frozen, and the abandoned territories 
having lost their exotic charm forever owing to desertification, 
overpopulation, civil war and epidemics, the wretched of the earth now turn to 
us. While the depraved dress up as refugees and try their hardest to hide their 
origins with false identity papers, the elites opt for safe cash flows and open 
so-called "reality parks" to further exploit their indigenous cultures over 
here.

Visit Euro Machu Picchu Park near Cologne for the ultimate Peruvian experience. 
After forming a vigilante committee using handmade wooden rifles and meeting 
with liberation theologists and professional revolutionaries, you will camp 
outside in the freezing cold, but not until after you've seen Los Incas perform 
at Lambada Discotheque, of course. Witness an authentic skirmish between 
drunken Sendero guerrillas and the cocaine mafia over conflicting participation 
interests. Get struck by cholera after eating potatoes in the street; you may 
even get cured by an elderly Aztec herbalist. In our simulation area, witness 
the lack of oxygen at 13,200 feet or a case of severe air pollution; after, 
make a human sacrifice on top of an old Inca pyramid. Of course you won't leave 
without attending our make-your-own-panpipes course in Von Däniken Parlor, or a 
bribery workshop. To top off our three-day, all-inclusive stay, you get to 
participate in a real coup d'état. This park is the dream of nations!

Disneyland is mere fantasy; there is so much more to enjoy. Take "Tiranacitta," 
Tuscany's Albanian Park, built with Italian assistance, or the Zairean park 
constructed south of Brussels at a cost of 600 million Belgian francs. For a 
change, visit theme park Katastrophia, a 1:1 replica of the twentieth century. 
With parks popping up everywhere, the demand for global information is swiftly 
dwindling. Why take in information, when the real experience is readily at 
hand? That is the question the twenty-first century will have to face. "More 
speed means less time for boredom." It remains to be seen whether the 
extramedial will succeed in motivating coming generations of troubleshooters to 
spoil the positive ambience that reigns within the ramparts of total media.


Intelligent Media

"ITV will let you massage the medium AND the message." - Mike Saenz & Michael 
Synergy

The medium of the media has been universally installed and has successfully 
completed its stage of acceptation. The final reaches of satellite orbits are 
being colonized, and intramedial growth occurs exclusively within the channel 
package. But on reaching their adult phase, the media already face a mid-life 
crisis. From the beginning, the couch potato's passive indifference has been 
acknowledged and radically reversed through the acceleration of images and the 
generation of participation, the sense of oneness with the medium. The media 
fear that this indifference will spread like an epidemic and lead to 
inscrutable situations in tomorrow's boundless world. In accordance with the 
old-fashioned notion of marketing, the answer consists of maximum product 
differentiation to keep every niche in the market involved: the Stalinist 
channel for elderly communists, Toddler TV, pet television for free-range pigs, 
etc., and all of them twenty-four hours a day, of course.

But this offers no solution to the far greater threat of a massive defection to 
reality. The increasing urge to make a little history of your own on a 
hobbyist/touristic level other than work represents a conscious effort to place 
the media in the shadow of the event. For an instant, people have no time for 
the media. The generators of experience skillfully refer the media to the 
worn-out historical symbols that belong to the visual repertory of the 
mediatists and tend to suggest that something is about to happen. Through these 
media traps, the busy daytrippers clear their own field to instigate the right 
thing somewhere else.

In the museological cities of the West, this has produced a company of 
handiworkers: the antimedial movement, which puts an end to all connections 
inspired by the slogan, "Smash up a medium for breakfast." Through actions of 
disappearance it creates local and temporary media-free spaces, to the point of 
terrorism with its own harmless anti-satellite laserguns. It represents the 
ultimate secret movement, because it is carefully kept out of the news and only 
makes itself heard as interference and sabotage. It claims every event that 
does not make the media as a victory and leaks them to the whole extramedial 
circuit it identifies with. Stirred up by this violence, along with the 
alarming increase of public indifference and fragmentation of the ratings, the 
attitude police will have no option but to initiate a broad public debate on 
the future of the media. Meanwhile the media lobby, impatient of the final 
outcome, has already begun R&D of the inevitable answer: The intelligent media.

Whereas interactive media take the point of view of the subject and render 
reality obsolete, intelligent media (IM) take the point of view of the object 
and would like to determine what happens in front of the screen. The 
fragmentation of viewing behavior during the previous, rigid media age was a 
result of remote control. Television producers either ignored the practice of 
zapping altogether, or tried to prevent it by compiling even catchier programs 
or simultaneously broadcasting different versions of the same story on various 
channels. Moreover, the media spread out the diversified package during the 
day, a relic from the juvenile phase when the nation still used to watch a 
single channel all through the evening. Now that the ratings lose their 
commercial value due to endless switching, attention shifts to the registration 
of channel time - the number of minutes the user spends on a given channel. 
This is accomplished by introducing an extra chip into the remote control.

Digital IM go one step further. They receive permanent viewing behavior 
feedback and establish certain threshold values above which the product reaches 
the screen unaltered. If average channel time threatens to drop below such 
levels, the IM conduct subliminal testing to find out what programmatic 
elements need to be introduced or altered (news, sex, personalities, setting, 
dialogue, music, colour). Producers merely deliver potential programs; the 
chances of integrated screenings of old blockbusters are minimal. Competing 
channels are constantly scanned for more attractive bits. The classic 
sequential edit of sound and image has been replaced by the central computer's 
synchronized mix. Contributions are judged according to the discreetness of the 
applied manipulations. If, in spite of it all, attention drops to a minimum, we 
imperceptibly slip to a completely different program segment. Fragmentation 
will remain, if only because public taste is an erratic affair, and there are 
early adopters and followers. But from being a threat, it has become a first 
condition of existence.

Still, IM cannot remove the disaffection for the media. Intelligent media lead 
to a universal relativity of information. Uninteresting news items gradually 
take on a different content. The fellowship of true democrats freaks out and 
demands an alternative to save information from its destruction, strengthened 
by the outcome of its broad media debate. Since the TV image of the last of the 
politicians is increasingly dependent on the media, they are out for revenge. 
Because with their state-monopoly broadcasting systems they are in no position 
to compete with the dynamic media, they come up with reasonable proposals. They 
suggest showing a logo as a warranty of reality in the upper left corner of the 
screen. IM, who will never agree to this, compensate by releasing specified 
zones where the community can set up its own media-passive reality districts. 
At the same time, these are meant to split the antimedial movement into a 
radical wing and a faction willing to negotiate.

The democrats proceed by saying that healthy social conduct depends on a media 
diet. Some patients will have to decrease their intake, others increase it. IM 
are required to build in an ecological principle: if the number of viewers 
drops below an absolute minimum, the channel must switch off; if it rises too 
high, the information level must be increased to establish the proper 
infotainment balance. At first, channels may be cancelled for a day or a week, 
but for the IM tycoons it is far more attractive to shut them down for good, 
because this makes viewing far more exciting and thus increases the channel 
time of the worst stations. Besides, media politics demands that the excess of 
redundant information be controlled so that the essential may be brought back 
to the historical surface. Again, IM can make no promises because, after all, 
information is just noise. The proposal to sidetrack politics to a channel of 
its own is rejected because it wouldn't last for a week. Democrats will always 
remain an intolerant minority in an utterly democratized media order. But these 
ecological restrictions will in turn be used by IM to legitimize their 
permanent control of media use, and consequently of every movement that takes 
place within range of the sensors. The common denominator remains that there 
has to be media participation at all costs.

The intelligent response to IM is given by the IM themselves: PTV. Personal 
television does not depend exclusively on material offered by IM for its visual 
intake, but uses sovereign images to produce its own samples and remixes. PTV 
lifts the video game from its infant stage and offers a central visual pool to 
the interactivist. Besides file footage and latest reports, one gains unlimited 
access to scenes from security cameras, satellites, camcorder clubs and 
survival treks. Naturally, participants immediately relay their personal 
versions of events to the pool for further processing by others. Thus, these 
do-it-yourself media are to save the ideology of creativity. The only viable 
media survival strategy is to stay more interesting than reality at all times. 
PTV is an attempt to replace the individual bid for history with a final techno 
fix.

With PTV, the media enter their third life stage. But reality cannot be locked 
away in a park as a tourist attraction forever: it will always lurk around, 
ready to jump any media maker sooner or later. The extramedial circuit is 
already among us, but stays out of reach of touristic experience because it 
refuses to give the game away. It quietly awaits the death of the media.


Probing McLuhan

"Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The 
book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand." - Ezra Pound

The opening up of the new paradigm of media theory took place in a literary 
milieu at the beginning of the Cold War. In the 1930's Marshall McLuhan became 
aware that literature should not be appreciated on its aesthetic merits, but 
that it was to be understood as a scientific method. The analysis of poetry and 
prose according to the principle of "practical criticism" focused on the link 
between their social consequences and stylistic features. In the 1940's McLuhan 
applied his insights to written advertisements, expecting that future audiences 
would find these more interesting than the literature produced by his 
contemporaries.

According to Robert Anton Wilson, the "most important idea ever presented by 
McLuhan" can be found on the first pages of "The Mechanical Bride," McLuhan's 
1951 debut. These are dedicated to the collage aspect of The New York Times' 
front page, which McLuhan calls "a collective work of art." Newspapers are a 
"daily 'book' of industrial man, an Arabian Night's Entertainment." McLuhan 
defends the use of discontinuity as a basic concept against his contemporary 
critics, who saw incoherence as irrationality. "To the alerted eye, the front 
page of a newspaper is a superficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to 
cosmic harmonies of a very high order." But people remain unaware of the 
newspaper page's rich symbolism. "Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that 
is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on his back." It 
is only several decades later, after the historical view gains depth of field, 
that we discover the beauty in advertisements, book covers, jukeboxes, the 1949 
Buick Roadmaster with Dynaflow Drive, the comics in "Crime Does Not Pay" ("More 
than 6,000,000 readers monthly!"), the careless but equally helpless "Men of 
Distinction" sporting their "rare, smooth, mellow, blended Lord Calvert 
Whiskey," or the August 1947 Reader's Digest table of contents ("Marriage 
Control: A New Answer to Divorce," "What Price Socialism?," "Laughter, the Best 
Medicine").

"The Mechanical Bride" consists of crossovers between Blondie, Superman, 
Coca-Cola ("a kind of rabbit's foot"), Emily Post, Tarzan (an amalgam of noble 
savage and aristocratic detective), and horse operas, with John Wayne at one 
end and Margaret Mead, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham 
Lewis, Toynbee and Kinsey at the other. McLuhan is the one-liner's philosopher. 
Eventually, this worked to his disadvantage, because hordes of people never 
progressed much beyond stammering the slogan, "The medium is the message." 
"Have you had your literary hypodermic today?" Most of the slogans are 
questions: "How much behaviorism is needed to make a big mental proletariat 
behave?" In the "How to iron shirts without hating your husband" department, he 
wonders "if there is any known gadget for controlling a rampant Know-How." "In 
the beginning was montage"; "How often do you change your mind, your politics, 
your clothes?"; "Superman or subman?"; "You little culture vulture, you!" 
Finally, in the "Understanding America" section, he remarks: "Don't run but 
look again, Reader. Find the Mechanical Bride."

Simultaneously with the publication of "The Mechanical Bride," his book on 
advertising, television was introduced and he was forced to admit that he had 
written a review of a historical era, rather than a critique of his own age. He 
decided he could only keep up with technological advancement by treating the 
"communications media" as a scientific method, much the same way he had done 
with literature.

Art, to McLuhan, was an "early warning system"; he defined art briskly as a 
powerful style with powerful results ("Literature is news that STAYS news" - 
Pound). The technique of, say, Eliot or Joyce was to use the old medium of the 
written word as though it were already part of the new electronic age. The 
accelerated circuits made possible by electricity opened up a new environment 
to humanity, which till now had been caught in typographic settings. In the 
eyes of McLuhan, art consisted of "special artefacts for enhancing human 
perception." Like human antennae, artists were in the best position to develop 
an insight into the impact of technology and the media because they allowed for 
and tested its effects in their own literary styles. The function of art was to 
make humanity realize the psychological and social consequences of 
technological advancements.

"Joyce is, in Finnegans Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the 
entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures 
during all phases of human culture and technology. Joyce could see no advantage 
in our remaining locked up in each cultural circle as in a trance or dream. He 
discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite 
conscious."

In 1953, in his article "Culture without Literacy," McLuhan for the first time 
summarizes Western history in terms of media. In it, he also introduces 
historical tripartition, which he will elaborate on and diversify in all of his 
later works. The first stage he terms that of "preliterate man," who lived 
without a script in an acoustic environment that had no set points of 
reference. Preliterate man was completely and universally connected to his 
surroundings, in a mythological and unfragmented world. He translated his 
entire body into outward form: that of a ship, a home, or a roller ("the Incas 
did not know the wheel").

The second stage is that of "literate man," who connected to the surrounding 
world by renouncing certain bodily functions, which were transferred to 
technological devices. The spoken word represented the first fragmentary 
guideline in acoustic space. Next came written/printed language, which 
visualized acoustic space ("an eye for an ear"). The act of joining sentences 
produced linear logic, which came to its own in the book, filled with linear 
lines. McLuhan considers the book an extension of the eye, while all the 
printed works in the world together make up the comprehensive milieu of the 
"Gutenberg galaxy." The distance between man and the world expanded as more of 
his bodily functions were emancipated as tools.

The third stage is the present one, that of electrical/electronic man, 
"manthefactfinder," who, like the man in stage one, is without script and 
externalizes and amputates his very being: The information network is his 
nervous system. He has regained a mythical understanding of the world; he has 
once more become tribal, all involved; and he does not require sequenced 
fragments in order to feel that he knows what he's doing. Man connected to 
electronic media is in a new acoustic space, where he is bombarded by signals.

With this first and tentative proposition, McLuhan opened up the field of media 
theory. From then on, his own way of writing would enable him to remain 
enthusiastic regarding the effects of modern media. "Nothing ever printed is as 
important as the medium of print." There followed one book after another. As 
for media theory itself, McLuhan's universe is all it needs to fathom every 
artistic and technological revolution.

Media theory is a Theory of Everything. As the medial terrain is by definition 
interminable, McLuhan prefers to step right in the middle of it. "There is no 
longer a single item that is not interesting." Media theory is a way of looking 
at the universal data archives with pleasure, without having to doggedly chase 
after some idea of an overview: What you see is what you get. Thus, McLuhan 
stumbles from one brilliant insight to the next. Since everything is related to 
everything, the important thing is to construct one's own quotation-magnet 
which, as a strange attractor, will cause the right sort of bifurcation on 
every occasion. Media theory establishes a temporary local center of global 
civilization in the form of an obscure collection of points. Now, take your 
scissors and cut out all the texts featuring pine trees, Doberman pinschers, 
formica tables, Inuit, tobacco, Stevenson and war babies. Combine these with a 
selected number of favorite authors, and presto: your very own full-fledged 
theory, something millenia to come will be able to sink their teeth into.

"Media are artificial extensions of sensory existence. Language was the first 
outering of the central nervous system. In language we put all of ourselves 
outside. Then we retracted and began to hedge our bets by putting out single 
senses like wheel (feet), hammer (fist), knife (teeth- nail), drum (ear), 
writing (eye). But when an organ goes out, it goes numb. The central nervous 
system has gone numb, for survival, i.e., we enter the age of the unconscious 
with electronics, and consciousness with shifts into the physical organs, even 
in the body politic. There is a great stepping up of physical awareness and a 
big drop in mental awareness when the central nervous system goes outward. The 
one area which is numb and unconscious is the area which receives the impact."

Organs moved out of man and into the world as technological devices go numb 
within man himself. Through this defensive reaction, the individual prevents 
the amputated organ within from being crushed by the onslaught of impressions 
suddenly released upon it. "Each extension alters both private and corporate 
images, creating great pain and alienation." Every new technology is a medium 
that topples man's former world view. Everything is changed in relation to the 
central nervous system's new technological possibilities.

In this sense, media are new art forms: They enable new modes of perception. 
This led McLuhan to formulate his set of media definitions: "All media are 
fragments of ourselves extended into the public domain"; "A new medium is like 
the trumpet at the battle of Jericho"; "The new media are not bridges between 
man and nature, they are nature"; "Any understanding of social and cultural 
change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as 
environments."

"Europeans cannot master the new powers of technology because they take 
themselves too seriously and too sentimentally. Europeans cannot imagine the 
Earth City. They have occupied old city spaces too long to be able to sense the 
new spaces created by the new media."

Media can be understood in their relation to the body, private or social. That 
is, not in terms of the transfer of messages but from an ecological 
perspective: they create a new environment. To McLuhan, the question was "how 
the medium affects the person, not how people affect media." The introduction 
of new media exposes the environment which would otherwise remain "virtually 
invisible and unnoticeable, subliminal." The environment exposes its 
characteristics during the transition from one medium to the next. The only one 
capable of perceiving environments is the artist who connects an old medium to 
a new environment: Joyce's stream of consciousness was already television.

Art, like a sense of humor, is "anti-environmental": both liberate man 
momentarily from an invulnerable environment that imposes its restrictions as a 
matter of course. And that is precisely the point. "Professionalism is 
environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the 
individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development 
of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the 
groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose." Media theory will be 
critical or not at all.

"The children of technological man respond with untaught delight to the poetry 
of trains, ships, planes, and to the beauty of machine products. In the school 
room officialdom suppresses all their natural experience; children are divorced 
from their culture. They are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage 
of mankind through the door of technological awareness; this only possible door 
for them is slammed in their faces."

McLuhan labeled the methodical part of his scientific method "pattern 
recognition." Typographical man, in need of chronological accounts and 
argumentation to understand certain processes, has been succeeded in the 
electronic age by enthusiastic youth whose thinking no longer follows 
trajectories such as "in for a penny, in for a pound." Homo electricus follows 
a nonlinear logic which seeks to grasp the pattern in a series of facts and 
events. Instead of shifting from one fragment to another, processes are now 
seen to be an aggregate of imperative combinations, links, collisions, 
repetitions, intersections, and manifestations. Pattern recognition is like 
that of preliterate man: mythical, tribal, all-involving. It is based on trial 
and rejection and yet more experimenting, rather than de- and induction.

"Suspended judgment," in short - don't start all over, but consider the 
possible outcome instead. Until the nineteenth century, to discover meant to 
discover things. Nowadays, one discovers methods. Once the method has been 
found, there follows a series of inventions. "The method of invention is simply 
to begin with the solution of the problem." McLuhan, like Elias Canetti, wrote 
satirical theory. He described his texts as "observation minus ideas": Deduct 
your moral judgments from your insights and look again with what's left; ideas 
are sure to follow. "I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out 
different sequences - until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open." The 
word used by McLuhan to sum up his intellectual activities was "probe."

"My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our 
technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books 
constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my 
purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern 
recognition ... I want to map new terrain rather then chart old landmarks. I'm 
trying to get my audience involved in perceptions. I expect my readers to do 
more work than I did. I am offering opportunities, roles of initiative."

Whenever McLuhan got hold of a book, the first thing he did was to read page 
69. If it managed to raise his attention he would continue by reading all the 
left pages. This way he hoped to avoid the redundancy in books. He took an 
"Evelyn Wood reading dynamics" course in speed-reading. This, he said, 
"revealed patterns, not data". Applied to writing, this library surfing 
provided a "redundant scattering of samples," a "wholesale use of quotations" - 
a mosaic. Which is exactly what McLuhan's books are: "Clear prose indicates the 
absence of thought." Time and again, McLuhan succeeds in reducing the patterns 
he discovers to a single brilliant slogan, so admired by him in advertisements 
and poetry, to mythical formulae, the somersault by which thinking suddenly 
breaks to a new level of insights (as he himself had experienced while working 
on "Culture without Literacy"). "Forcing thoughts into abrupt interface with 
each other." Media-conscious poets and ad makers try first of all to cause a 
reaction in their audience. Both work according to the brainstorm method, 
"serendipity through association." Advertising slogans are haiku, and the 
aphorism's modern equivalent is the headline.

McLuhan's gay science aims to beat the media men at their own game, by inciting 
his readers to stop ignoring the environment which commands their lives in 
every detail without them ever realizing it. Time and again, he stresses that 
"literacy [was] a brief phase," that literacy belongs to the Gutenberg galaxy, 
but that we are now "beyond Jupiter." We are free to treat literary texts as 
casually as we are to take advertising texts seriously. Every "breakdown is a 
breakthrough." By leaving the past behind, we enter the present, where we can 
begin to charter the unknown, the "hidden dimension," so obviously close it 
remains invisible. "I predict only what has already happened. Anyone who truly 
perceives the present can also see the future, since all possible futures are 
contained in the present."

Media theory is not looking for feedback, it's looking for feedforward. The 
present is a network of past analogies; the past is a toolbox open for plunder 
by those who wish to think further. Burglarize all the books in the Gutenberg 
nebula if you will; don't stop to wonder whether the present "tribal situation" 
is better or worse than the (il)literacy of past generations. "Help beautify 
junkyards - throw something lovely away every day." The secret rule of media 
theory discovered by McLuhan was the capacity to write with enthusiasm about 
everything one opposes. "Blast the Canadian beaver - apt symbol of our 
dammed-up creativity. Bless culture shock as dislocation of mind into meaning." 
Historical data are no more than material in which patterns may be discerned; 
they do not provide imperative conclusions concerning the question, "What to 
do?". In the network of the media, we are past such linearity. According to 
McLuhan, one had to proceed with utmost caution when dealing with the media; 
therefore, one must understand media. The only chance of disarming the media 
was - and is - to understand their laws.

After extensive investigations, McLuhan had discovered four media laws and 
could find no more. He pictured them in the shape of a tetrad. All media cause 
four simultaneous processes: a medium enhances a given human function, restores 
lost practices, renders still others obsolete, and turns into a new function 
itself. McLuhan places this quadruplicity within a graphic image: a circle 
surrounding a cross, with each of the four parts of the circle representing one 
of the media laws. Thus, for example, the pipe as a "human artefact" enhances 
"group participation via environmental smell," brings back the "contemplative 
inner trip," renders the "individual nervous haste" outmoded, and may turn into 
the "solitary smoker; need for consideration of audience." In his series of 
"simple quadruplets" we find liquor, brothel, cigarette, mass, medicine, 
hermeneutics, high-rise buildings, kinetic space, microphone/PA system, 
perspective painting, refrigerator, semiotics, tactile space and xeroxes. 
Amidst these quadruple condensations, the page still has plenty of room left 
for brilliant ideas and quotes. All of this can be found in "Understanding 
Media"'s successor, "Laws of Media," published by McLuhan's son Eric in 1988.

We now move to the higher tetrads. Here we find Aristotelian causality, cubism, 
the clock, the law of the jungle, washing machines, TV, cars, electric light, 
and new genetics. Thus, the satellite enhances the planet, brings back ecology, 
renders nature redundant, and turns into implosion: "The population as 
participating in their own audience participation." Under "the pollster" we 
read: "Who am I? Let's take a poll." And: "Does the president really have 17 
per cent more charisma than Campbell's soup?" Under the "slang" entry, McLuhan 
observes that "Our current technologies are slang - tetrads explore their 
verbal character." Slang enhances new possibilities of perception and brings 
back "unconventional feeling." McLuhan uses this to indicate how language can 
raise the media to understanding - for every technology is lingual by nature 
and offers its own percepts: the outlook that enables obstinate perception.

"I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest surfaces and human 
scale. I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening. I study it for my own 
survival. The effect of the new media on human society has never aroused the 
slightest enthusiasm in me. Only by understanding change can I ease the burden 
of experiencing it - and therefore the only extension of man I desire is that 
of awareness. I wish none of these technologies ever happened. They impress me 
as nothing but a disaster. They are for dissatisfied people. Why is man so 
unhappy he wants to change his world?"


Media or Barbarism

There is increasing talk about "media or barbarism." Is this a choice, an 
alternative, a threat, a slogan, a questionnaire, a luxury, an advertisement 
for opinions perhaps? If it's a matter of choice, we must examine the pros and 
cons of each option; we must make an assessment of the merits of medial 
barbarism and the use of media by barbarians - or of barbarians by the media - 
in order to arrive at a sound and balanced judgment. Let the experts provide 
the arguments and analyses, and let a public discussion draw the conclusions.

If "media or barbarism" is seen as an alternative, then we see the media as the 
most powerful psychotherapeutic means to cure the last of the disconnected 
barbarians - from the illiterate to the Muslims - as though watching "Dallas" 
and "Twin Peaks" might save them from the dead weight of their premedial 
history and finally include them in the civilization of market democracy. The 
coming of the media is always accompanied by the threat of impending armed 
intervention or humanitarian aid campaigns. Increasingly, disaster areas will 
refuse access to the media in order to avoid the catastrophic arrival of 
international aid organizations. If, on the other hand, the battle scenes and 
environmental calamities do get extensive coverage, the information offered 
attains such a complex scale that even the most sympathetic of citizens find it 
impossible to keep up. Media have no civilizing impact on either those in the 
pictures or the viewers. If the barbarians refuse to see media as multipliers 
of complexity, but instead as archives full of evidence, they proceed to treat 
the question of media in their own way - by shooting as many media carriers as 
possible. Every dead journalist is a victory in the media war.

The fear underlying the question of media-or-barbarism is that without 
mediation humanity quickly loses control of itself, that it starts acting like 
a beast as soon as it is deprived of images to distract it. On the one hand, 
the media are expected to keep the masses off the street; they've a long record 
as the people's opiate. On the other hand, the media are thought to corrupt the 
people and incite them to violence, satanism, ecocide and cultural devastation. 
Once again, the relationship between cause and effect is completely forgotten. 
The practice of relativism has led to a rampant revaluation of values. The 
middle classes come up with the wildest proposals: censorship, freezing 
government subsidies, rescheduling, self-regulation, educational 
categorization, age discrimination, the scrambling and encoding of naked 
images, the dubbing of bold statements, and other methods to conceal harmful 
data. The moral terror of other people's consciences is given free play to 
frustrate the evil schemes of one's fellow humans, from incest, fraud, 
corruption, child pornography, drug abuse, and serial killings to car theft, 
adultery, nationalism, and racist remarks. The media are credited with the 
power of turning people into either barbarians or civilized participants. Bad 
media must be made good, the question being how many cubic meters of public 
information it takes. The point of political correctness is not to behave 
correctly yourself, but to have the others corrected.

As a slogan of the antimedial movement, "media or barbarism" reflects a real 
1980s attitude: the dream of destroying a communicative global empire. Those 
who demolish teleports and MediaParcs claim that a bit of negative energy can 
only serve to strengthen democracy. Recently, their slogan has been taken 
hostage by the emerging media ecologists and transformed into the equation 
"media = barbarism." All the shit that flows through societies we owe to media. 
A reduced emission of i-smog would result in a manifest reduction of 
multicultural abuse. The route followed is from the outside in: Violence and 
crime are seen as mental disorders that are containable through a correct and 
balanced data diet. Information turns people on, and frequent encounters with 
multimedia have a titillating effect that is ultimately released upon the 
others. The only way to prevent this is through the implantation of inner 
peace. Nudist data don't dress themselves up through design, but strive for a 
natural representation within a sheltered environment. Data dietitians prefer 
to be left to their own creations, without the constant interruption of someone 
else's tragedies and monstrosities.

Our hot and central question gains real stamina once it is seen as a call for 
"decision." But where is this sovereign? Is it the editor-in-chief? Is it the 
tycoons? Should we wait for a world government to decide on the urgent matter 
of whether Russia should be allowed more media, or that we arm ourselves 
pending a second Cold War? The consequences of a massive import of media are as 
unpredictable as those of the interruption of media. Every conceivable question 
of power is up in the air, where it remains without consequence. Only on the 
local level do we still find some self-made sovereigns who take pride in the 
control they have acquired over the remote. Only within the self-defined 
private reality are fatal nanodecisons still being made. Within this reserve, 
decision becomes a fashionable gesture, intended to provide oneself with the 
necessary individuality. It is the coming-out of the will to decision; not a 
postponement but a proposed conclusion.

The puking-out of the twentieth century is well under way, though there's still 
plenty to look forward to in this dynamic age of ours. The question arises: 
Will the unbeaten record of '39-'45 be improved upon or not? It remains to be 
seen whether we will achieve the necessary escape velocity to leave the 
twentieth century and continue on our way, or instead end up in the eternal 
return of the same 20th century (or, perhaps, witness the crash of spaceship 
Earth). The marshes having been drained and converted into farmlands, the 
latter are now being reflooded to create neo-swamps. According to Hans Peter 
Duerr, the last barbarian became civilized at least twenty thousand years ago. 
Terror and joy are both products of Civilization & Progress, Inc. Nothing could 
possibly ever enter civilization from outside again. The fear and the desire 
that civilization can be corrupted and eroded from within represents a cultural 
high point, presented with massive technological support. The ancient Greeks 
understood tragedy as an exquisite dramatic genre. No Dionysus without Apollo, 
no Sarajevo without Dallas. The crisis is a must you can afford to miss. The 
question is not whether the barbarians are at the gates, but what to do with 
all the technology at hand. Once the crisis is taken seriously, you lose track 
and can only internalize it as the next personal experience of the end of 
ideology, history, international aggression, and the subject. Add the twentieth 
century to your media archives, free to flick through it on weekends. Those who 
prolong their artificial existence in personal opinions cater for a lost cause 
which was undesirable to begin with. The world after the media is not made up 
of barbarians; more likely it is full of businessmen. It is their stockjobbing 
that poses the next challenge.


Media in the New World Order

On leaving the twentieth century, the world has acquired a sixth continent that 
encompasses and dwarfs the previous five. Communication technologies have 
created an autonomous field which, though evident in all four corners of the 
globe, never touches the regional civilizations into which the world population 
is still organized. The relentless fascination with the media environment 
results from its ability to make familiar issues appear forever and totally 
alien. The pleasure of uncommitted sharing in someone else's joy and misery 
produces a state of euphoria that lasts as long as one is on line. No sooner do 
we turn our backs to the media than our awareness of local duties and 
diversions reemerges unaltered to detail. Just after having donated your 
savings to the victims of some Bangladeshi flood disaster, you may well blow 
your top over the neighbors' leaking washing machine.

The global consciousness created in the media never leaves its medial 
surroundings. Awareness of the surrounding world occupies its own, separate 
level within the collective unconscious. Archetypes generated by the news 
somehow never find their way into the civilized mindset. Compassion for African 
victims of starvation is easily coupled with indifference concerning one's 
countrymen. Predictions of how the media would cause a shift in social 
attitudes have proved more than prophetic. Media teach us not to aim our 
actions at our immediate surroundings, but rather to subject them to the 
information at hand.

The media's educational scheme aims only to initiate users in the rules of 
immateriality and show them an individual approach to global virtual reality. 
The contemporary potlatch of the game show proves how viewers may be abundantly 
rewarded for their concentrated participation - a pastime to instruct us in the 
casual attitude necessary to market one's own personality. The slick promotion 
of personal identity represents a code of behavior so far removed from 
workplace and bedroom bungling, it's simply amusing to watch.

Whereas hi-tech is taking traditional progress to unheard-of extremes, local 
populations reorientate on civilizational models or cultural ideals quite 
immune to advancement. The current resentment of rebellion and extremism does 
not result from some reactionary scheme to implement bourgeois values; rather, 
it represents a victory by the emancipation and liberation movements. A normal 
existence is now viewed as a universal human right, no longer to be abruptly 
impeded by outside forces. The clearing of bigotry and prejudice concerning the 
social identity of labor and sex has led to the disarmament of social critics. 
Where gays embrace marriage, feminists advocate motherhood and the notion of 
"jack of all trades and master of none" denotes a flexible attitude towards 
employment, the beckoning option of uncertain expeditions into experimental 
modes of living has become unthinkable. Lifestyles that attempt to shed light 
on their intentions via the medial environment are merely providing meaningful 
contributions to democratic citizenship. Multicultural society proudly 
advocates its tolerance of distinct identities, no matter how odd. Bag ladies 
have the same existential right as do ethnic butchers or lesbian pornophiliacs.

In this legible society, there no longer exists any beyond to tempt us. The 
other, for want of comprehensible proofs of identity, is persuaded it must 
either integrate or be banished. Finally, those who refuse their social 
emancipation or liberation can only be relegated to the posthistorical through 
military or colonial measures. Parliamentary democracy, the free market 
economy; they're not values advocated by the Free West, but conditions to be 
realized by the individual lest he falls under direct attack by the New World 
Order. They comprise a formalized model, open to covert rule by 
political/economic elites as long as they respect their own national borders 
and the rules laid out by the world economy. The nation-state is a prerequisite 
for full participation in the World Order. The rise in nationalist movements 
represents a misinterpretation of this fact, carried away by the remnants of 
local history; those who have thus missed out on the capture of economic 
markets easily take to the market of capture.

The implosion of communist regimes and Third World dictatorships must take 
place in an orderly fashion, dictated by New World Order patterns ... for we 
are mere spectators. It's all right for the media to keep us posted on 
upheavals, but don't expect us to interfere. The greater the media attention on 
former Warsaw Pact countries or the Middle East, the deeper our stupefaction 
and the lesser chance of people here ever taking to the streets. High ratings 
during live registration of conflicts denote fascination with the power of 
modern communication technologies, not concern through the awareness that "we 
are all in the same fight together." In fact, all those liberation movements 
just threaten our own positions. Both refugees and cheap products endanger 
individual citizens' work and welfare. The one political factor to which 
bourgeois awareness remains sensitive is defensive by nature: preservation - of 
benefits packages, the virgin environment and multicultural society. All other 
themes for action are, by virtue of their unintended air of masochism, unfit 
for the calculating citizenry. No matter what radical discourse may be mounted, 
all lines of argumentation must end up in some Gulag or Auschwitz.

The study of the two parallel worlds of media and classical reality teaches 
that anything taken from the local environment to the field of hi-tech is 
instantly incapacitated. On the other hand, it is clear that all positive 
action taken on the level of everyday life can only reinforce the desire to 
leave everything as it is. Tolerance and indifference both reflect the same 
urge, that is, to shut out the outside world from that level of consciousness 
where insights must be acted upon. Information no longer is a weapon, but an 
arsenal in which we permanently find ourselves.

Those who refuse to accept this state of affairs can take three possible 
courses of action: inside, against, or outside the media. If, in the first 
instance, we enter media reality, our purpose would be to erode the media by 
charging them with an explosive topicality. The patronizing notion that 
bourgeois media need to be rectified by counterinformation has been abandoned. 
Mediumistic actions discard all well-intentioned content and lines of 
argumentation, employing semio-artillery discharging pure signs. Even if all 
the action's intentions are fleeced, distorted or omitted, it will generate 
images so powerful their significance cannot be devalued. To paraphrase a Dutch 
squatters' slogan, "You can tear down our ideas, but our images will always be 
ours." A guerrilla based on the presumption that the emancipated citizen has no 
faith in whatever the media churn out to begin with, privately chuckling away 
at the destructions on display. Negative images are still images. Disguised as 
issues, they force themselves on the media in order to gain maximum 
circulation. Their assault on the dogma of PR, which effectively blocks any 
true intervention in classical reality, turns the media on themselves, thus 
clearing the field for an autonomous abuse of media and the obstinate defiance 
of their reality potential. A radical version of this strategy is to be found 
in the workings of sovereign media. They no longer view the media as channels 
for the transmission of information about events, but as material to be freely 
adapted by all and sundry. The purpose of sovereign media is not to invade 
recent media, but rather to encapsulate them so they can subject them to their 
own homemade rules.

The second option is the domain of the antimedial movement. Convinced that all 
information is disinformation, this democratic movement seeks to reinstate the 
twin categories of truth and falsehood. It aims at the radical short-circuiting 
of the parallel worlds so that the planet's unity may be restored, if only for 
a few moments. Through its antimedial acts of sabotage, it temporarily 
eliminates "media-related communications," thus giving way to time and space 
for direct encounters on the local level. These Temporary Autonomous Zones 
challenge events to unfold in the present, based on an awareness that democracy 
thrives on real conflicts - not stage-managed, but spontaneously erupting, 
under no one's direction.

It remains to be seen whether the event will respond to these actions based on 
media critique. Demolishing the tentacles of the electricity grid; disrupting 
telephone communications, electronic banking, terminals, cameras and other 
tools of everyday repression; and sneaking viruses and worms into mainframes 
and networks were all part of an experimental stage in media renunciation. They 
were an expression of a will to reality, relic of a pre-Nietzschean, 
nineteenth-century paradigm. Romanticism from a tourist perspective. However, 
even in the case of unforeseen events and all-out rioting, the mob is still 
democratically obliged to inform the rest of the community concerning the 
upheaval's nature and development. This forces the antimedial to invent tactics 
for the wilful takeover of the media, in order to prevent distorted reports 
from causing confusion. The final dilemma of any antimedial strategy lies in 
the fact that it must maintain the media if it is to save democracy.

The problem of the antimedial movement is how to employ the media without 
becoming a part of them. Perhaps the media never possessed either transmitters 
or receivers to begin with. It requires little effort to imagine a network that 
functions to perfection, unaided by operators or users, free of input or 
output. Images have no meaning whatsoever to start with - they merely exist. 
They do not require our concern; we do not have to charge them with our 
attention or disinterest. To them, it's all shit and onions. The antimedial 
gesture intends to establish contact with others; it is not aimed at the media 
and their existentiality, but at ourselves - the human remainder. Still, the 
continuing broadcast of signals remains a persistent source of annoyance and 
aggression. The antimedial movement is the media's ultimate issue. The media 
implode through their reports on the antimedial movement; it, in turn, 
disappears through its exposure to media.

The third option, that of extramedial acts, is based on the presumption that 
all positive activist goals are ultimately defensive, and can only reinforce 
the conservative climate. Any medially discernable goals served by extramedial 
actions are utterly negative. Extramedial operations frustrate media attention 
by being simply indescribable. As soon as the media appear, they disappear. All 
that remains is fits of laughter, astonishment and terror. They claim no 
attention, but are satisfied to occupy their own worlds. Contrary to the 
antimedial movement, they do not wish to restore society. Most likely, they've 
been a part of it all along, though it's hard to tell. From our medial point of 
view, they are in a state of uncertainty, immeasurable, not open to comment. 
They are forever transmutating, in defiance of destiny; they may be the medium 
of the event.


Virilio Calling

"Time is a resource and we're running out of time. It is necessary to travel. 
It is not necessary and becoming increasingly difficult to live." - William 
Burroughs

To Paul Virilio, the Gulf War acted as a watershed. He had proved right before 
in some of his minor predictions. His conclusion that any state that submits to 
its inner urge towards total control will end up exterminating its own people 
came true in Pol Pot's Cambodia, much to his own horror. But it was not until 
the early 1990's that he was forced to admit to the global accuracy of his 
military/technological analyses. A few years before, the French intervention in 
Chad had already led to his observation that from now on, world wars could only 
be fought in the desert. As the espionage satellites were maneuvered over Iraq 
and the cruise missiles set to new coordinates, Virilio knew what was about to 
happen. Still, the renewed correctness of his thrilling tales on the 
development of state-of-the-art weapon systems was not what shocked him most 
about the events.

In his published books since 1976 (some ten in all), Virilio developed his 
position that if in the past speed was the essence of war (cf., Sun Tzu), today 
it equals war. The latter is no longer directed at the enemy however, but 
against the world's material existence. The greater the acceleration, the 
quicker does reality evaporate. Light has absolute speed; technologies that 
make use of it are absolute weapons. Therefore, too, instant communication 
technologies are apocalyptic by nature: "I spy with my little eye - who is seen 
will have to die." But if before, media merely unhinged space-time awareness 
and immaterialized the human body by transforming it into transmissible light 
waves, during the Gulf War, apart from the devastation of derealized land, 
information as such became incredible.

In Virilio's chronology, Desert Shield and Desert Storm were followed up by 
Desert Screen. The same strategic developments that helped visualize the Gulf 
War in the Arabian Desert are also occurring in the public sector. Just as 
generals can direct field campaigns without ever leaving their bunkers, so the 
viewers can do their jobs without leaving their homes. All information 
converges on, and radiates from, the screen, the pole of inertia. Distant 
viewing - yesterday's television - has been replaced by distant action, today's 
and tomorrow's teleperformance; from teleshopping and home banking to 
telepresence and teletourism in virtual reality. Only, as Virilio adds in 
"L'écran du Désert" ("Desert Screen"), his war chronicle, we now know what the 
communication weapons are after. Who is seen will no longer have to die; 
rather, it is the observer who will be struck blind. Whereas, time and again, 
Virilio has described the history of control over the external world as an 
acceleration and refinement of observation techniques and their logistics, with 
data transmission acquiring the speed of light total fascination turns out to 
converge with absolute disbelief.

What's left of information when it reaches journalists and the public 
simultaneously, without there remaining a second for verification, analysis, or 
double-checks? The news that reaches us as information through the media 
communication weapons can always be disinformation. If information is a weapon, 
disinformation is the shield. The viewers can no longer believe their eyes. But 
if they cannot, the world as we know it will disappear, as Virilio has warned 
us for years. Distrust of the media means the end of the world. The central and 
final question in "L'écran du Désert" is thus: "Can omnipresence and 
instantaneity be democratized; that is to say, can inertia be democratized?" 
According to Virilio, democracy is impossible without the categories of truth 
and falsehood, which have currently been replaced by the "actual" and the 
"virtual."

Paul Virilio represents a critical, antimedial stance. Live connections must be 
interrupted in order to restore democracy. To him, media coincide with 
observation technologies, all of which are the products of military 
intelligence. He sees the development of the logistics of observation - 
hilltop, watchtower, hot air balloon, reconaissance flight, satellite, field 
glass, photo camera, film camera, video - taking place analogously to the 
development of infrastructure - road, railway, freeway, cable television, air 
corridor, orbit. Now that the industrial traffic revolution has succeeded, 
Virilio finds it impossible to distinguish between the military and the civil. 
Both institutions are characterized by acceleration; both turn classical 
space-time inside out in their respective ways. Both culminate in the speed of 
light (laser) and both turn the world's natural environment into a desert 
("glacis"). The media, viewed as a global network produced by observation 
machinery, are the greatest obstacle to our (re)cognizance of humanity and the 
world.

Although the media remain the object of Virilio's concern, his absolute 
disaffection never results in a hostile attitude towards technology. Salvation 
may well come from within, and is impossible if we turn our backs to téchn. 
"There would be hope in our careful study of disaster." To Virilio, the 
unlocking of creation takes place through a sequence of shipwreck, collision, 
car crash, derailment, plane crash, explosion, short-circuit, malfunction, jam, 
breakdown. As with the computer hackers, his method combines resistance against 
the technological control strategies with a vast knowledge of, and open 
fascination with, apparatuses. Unlike the Foucauldians, his resistance does not 
necessarily reinforce the system, but is a necessary attitude to arrive at 
post-science. The latter understands "that it is developing a way of 
not-knowing, and that all development of understanding can only expand the 
unknown." The non-military science and technology envisioned by Virilio use the 
media as information vacuum cleaners that remove data from the world and 
emphasize how much non-knowledge there is actually circulating. Media show us 
that there is nothing to be seen; all else is disinformation. Cases of data 
void are like accidents that prompt reconsideration; they are revelations of 
relativity.

Virilio, too, knew the antimedial dilemma that democracy must break all its 
ties with the media, but that it cannot exist without data transmission. If all 
information is distorted and the media can only communicate not-knowing, the 
inevitable question arises what democracy is to based on. Virilio answers that 
it must be based on physical perception. His vision is not confined to some 
Parisian study. Since the end of the Cold War the figure of the political 
observer appears in every area of conflict, where it has become synonymous to 
the concept of democracy. After a trial period attending dubious elections in 
Third World nations, the observer was sent to NATO/Warsaw Pact military 
exercises, arms depots, nuclear power plants, civil wars, nuclear laboratories, 
and chemical arms factories. If the observers are refused entrance, one is de 
facto at war with the world. The physical presence of independent experts 
guarantees the democratic quality of intentions and practices. Satellites can 
record everything except democracy and human rights. This technological 
limitation indicates where classical politics may yet be situated, now that the 
military perception has become transpolitical.

Virilio discards the notion that democracy owes its existence to political 
observers as naive. The world's visibility suffers less from camouflage and 
concealment than it does from problems of perception on the part of the 
subject. Humans, according to Virilio, are not lingual beings, but are 
controlled in their thoughts and actions by the force of implanted images. 
Mental images are "fragments of the public domain extended into ourselves." "It 
is unnecessary to visit the National Gallery or the Louvre to watch 
eighteenth-century scenes. We only have to open our eyes in the morning, and 
already we find ourselves in a museum of outlived modes and styles of 
observation." Perception is occupied territory.

Negative perception discovers a space as yet uncolonized. If the image of 
material objects is necessarily predetermined, then new things can be made 
visible only by looking at the void inbetween things. To see nothing is to 
maintain sight. In the void we may yet observe the disappearance of our 
culture. The disappearance of the natural contours of landscape, city, national 
borders, political adversaries, bodies, time, the interval and the decision 
comprises a story that Virilio tries to come to terms with over and over again, 
and that takes up a considerable part of his works. By turning perception 
inside out it becomes possible to visualize disappearance, even if it is by 
definition invisible.

Time and again, Virilio's paradox resurfaces: everything he warns against he 
simultaneously considers indispensable. With him, thinking in terms of and/or 
escalates both ways, clearing a field of unsuspected concourses of thought. At 
the same time he denounces disappearance as a political and social disaster, he 
praises it as a principle of knowledge and aesthetical method. Virilio sees 
both unbridled imagination and restrictive common sense created during those 
brief moments of mental absence which all of us experience daily. The 
disappearance of conscious presence stimulates the creative or prescribed 
interpretation of lacking fragments. Virilio himself uses this picoleptic 
faculty like no one else does.

To read Virilio is to see the invisible, to interpret the unwritten. The voids, 
the interspaces, the black between the images - Virilio is the thinker of 
absence, of disappearance, of negativity, of the future. Only those who 
recognize the invisible, hidden from sight by the visible, are able to see the 
world. Virilio's is the gift of clairvoyance, in the age of total transparency. 
The invisible is the material he researches, the challenge he poses, the 
question he imposes on thought: find that world.

If everything is visible, scientifically visible, permanently veri- or 
falsifiable, then it becomes impossible to form a coherent world view. 
Coherence becomes possible only through the absence of information, through the 
need to form one's own links beyond the absences, interspaces and intervals. 
Virilio is against disinformation, but is a supporter of temporary uninformed 
zones. Understanding can only derive from seeing nothing occasionally.

Negative thinking remains close to the body. It translates the prospect of 
death into the strategy of taking every social development to its logical 
conclusion. It is not a case of the extrapolation of the present into the 
future, but of the happy recognition that even what is to come is already past. 
Doom does not await us, and the signs of the apocalyps are all around. As a 
thinker of '77, radical negativism is Virilio's logical starting point. Back 
then, "no future" presented a way out of the Cold War, by stating that WW III 
had already come and gone and one should not be intimidated by the question of 
perspective. The physical condition became the new point of calibration: "the 
mysterious existence of living bodies who are curiously present in time." 
Negative thinking incorporates social processes in order to study their effect 
on personal well-being.

Since '89, the matter of whether the body will evaporate on the pole of inertia 
or rather backfire is once more completely out in the open. The astonishing 
conclusions in Virilio's books were suddenly surpassed by the chain reactions 
in military/political space. Current events went beyond dromology, forcing live 
theory to stop and reconsider. The old wil