Iraq is in a Postmodern War (Scrap 1)

Taking as our information eidolon Andy Warhol’s screen print cans of soup, as an icon key to the postmodern, we have an information technology that in tendency homogenises reality into a processed information soup - voila! Democracy soup is on the menu.  Some of its effects could be seen in Vietnam.  Politicians found themselves responding to a world made out of streams of videotape.  The ‘information soup’ that Vietnam was ‘communist’ and that on the ‘domino theory’ (dominoes being a kind of information soup of dots, so to speak) everything else would go communist too derived its authenticity from the emulsion of grey grainy film. Reason operated through the logic of a merely visual mist!  We have the same with the ‘war on terror’. That all ‘terrorisms’ are alike. The war is with ‘terrorists’ - the concept seems to need no further definition. It was hoped that by making Iraq ‘democratic’ (another kind of information soup concept) a reverse domino effect would transform the hatred.

Or another blueprint. Philip K Dick’s Time Out of Joint.  I am thinking of the incident where Gumm comes across an ice cream kiosk that turns out to be not there.  He discovers that what he thought was an ice cream kiosk is actually a kind of psychic construct … Compare the ‘communist threat’. The ice cream kiosk is actually just a small slip of paper with the words ICE CREAM KIOSK printed on it. Looking around, the same applies to everything else. What had been grass is a piece of notepaper saying GRASS. And so forth.  Media reality has in perception become larger than reality itself.  News banners fill our heads and seem to take on the very caste of the ‘things themselves’ in their banal concretisations of the imaginary.  Reality is reduced to the status of a fantasy; a situation that by destroying all sense of limit as real, invites us to think about reality as black and white in order to rediscover those limits.  The result is that we still think according to the categories; we still believe: “Exists”  “Does not exist”, only in the impoverished terms of a gross metaphysical simplification. 

In other words, if you still think that America was dealing with a real enemy in Vietnam, in South America, in the Middle East, that is because your mind set supposes that reality can and should be understood according to categorical opposites - rather than (say) according to the actual facts on the ground. 

In other words, we find the ‘enemy’ by which the state defines itself rendered as an ever more abstract ‘other’. Good and Evil. Clear distinctions are understood!  Yet conceived in categorically inauthentic circumstances.

Not much has changed, one could say.  Greed, fear and arrogance: as of old, the political world remains chaotically imaginary.  But I don’t think this has ever been quite so transparent.  I don’t think there have been as many moments in history as there have recently where the protagonist picks up a piece of paper and realises that here is the reality of the ice cream kiosk he has just bought his ice cream from.

Tags: Iraq