I am delighted by Glenn Fuller’s critical reading of my ‘Seven Theses on Terror, Security and the New World Order’ which have been published on the Space and Culture Blog since June 2006. His own blog called Disambiguation: desire in uneasiness provides an excellent series of reflections on popular culture mixed with theoretical infusions. Most interesting perhaps is his use of Foucault’s notes on commentary on blogging itself. In a recent post on Foucault, Glen writes:”commentary is an extension of the event of which the ‘primary’ text was a first example, like another wound in a war. (Hmm, I am sure there is something weird going on here involving a possible engagement with Derrida’s thought… ) Foucault puts it this way:
The infinite rippling of commentary is agitated from within by the dream of masked repetition: in the distance there is, perhaps, nothing other than what was there at the point of departure: simple recitation.
It is with this in mind that I seek to respond to his more critical notes regarding my fourth thesis on terror etc.. In this Glen links my fourth thesis on the digital revolution to the work of Baudrillard and states that:
However, Baudrillard’s semiotics is still caught up in what D&G call the despotic signifier. The ‘despotic signifer’ captures the assymetrical relation between signified and signifier in pre-capitalist semiotics.
The problem for me is simply that I am not sure whether this applies at all to the ‘digital revolution’, which – following Kittler – I simple understand to be the merging of two distinct forms of mediation: writing and numbers. The latter were already linked to electronics in the form of swicthes since the 1940s (e.g. the Turing Machine). In other words, what digitalization enabled is ‘electronic inscription’ which is a means by which the act of inscribing can affect other actions without the necessary intervention of hermeneutics. That is, an electronic command is not a representation but an ‘order’. So this signifier is despotic in so far as it does not call upon a signified to complete the sign, but instead simply ‘does’.
This means that I might be on exactly the same line as Glen when he writes
The truth of the hyperreality is irrelevant when the power of the simulacrum does not rely on truth! The truth of the simulcra is determined by the affective resonance of the image, by what it does, not by what it represents.
There is however, a misleading section in my fourth thesis that Glen rightly finds problematic and that is that I make quite a meal out of the hyperreality as inauthenticity. The least I could have done there was using quotation marks to highlight that I was speaking in a forked tongue. For me, authenticity in modernity was never more than a wet dream of psychoanalysts (or structuralists for that matter). What digital-performative mediation simply does is granting ‘the real’ (defined as a variable by Latour, i.e. the degree of resistance to trials)its due vanishing point, at the threshold that Virilio calls ‘escape velocity’. Hence, this is why it is useful to refer to television as a medium of neuropolitical control. I let Glen fill this in, because he does this so well when he says:
The ongoing editing is not because of the impossible slippery link between signifier and signified but merely the technical means for the ongoing affective modulation and attunement of populations. Media is thus a biopolitical problem, not a problem of representation
Thanks Glen for pointing this out.