The observant reader may have noticed that out of my previous two Flow articles two significant themes emerge. The first one is the pervasiveness of good intentions when it comes to tackling pressing issues like globalization (in the case of Arundhati Roy) and the current financial crisis (as with Barack Obama). In both cases, my criticism is not directed at Roy and Obama themselves (even though one may accuse them of being subject to and playing into a certain naïveté), but rather at the logic of a larger economic system of mediatization – which I have dubbed speed-elitist capitalism – that gives rise to a certain displacement of their good intentions. The second theme that arises therefore in light of this, is how the speed-elitist logic and its politics seem to be increasingly based on some form of delusion or hallucination, in which the activist or political actor shares a technological perpetuation of a certain questionable faith with her or his audience. This faith, combined with the curious logic of mediatization, in turn generates a widespread acceptance of a very particular version of the ‘truth’ that seems to have as its prime outcome to reflect back to us who we believe we are and what we believe we can do – in Jean Baudrillard’s illustrious words, this truth is hyper-real.

In this recent neoliberal procession of delusions and their good intentions, one such a hyper-real truth currently stands out more than any other: the Reality of Global Warming. It is utterly astounding how this a few decades ago relatively obscure scientific model has made alarmist headlines in pretty much all so-called developed nations. Once again, the reader must appreciate here that I am emphatically not arguing that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect, and that we should all go back to sleep and forget about the possible negative effects of our industrial and technological ‘progress.’ It would be prudent to take note though that the greenhouse effect is merely one scientific hypothesis among many in relation to climate prediction. In fact, there are just as many climate-related hypotheses that suggest CO2 emissions will cool down the globe, that calculate that a rise in CO2 is an effect of natural warming, and even that predict higher CO2 emissions will have no impact at all. I am also not suggesting that the greenhouse model is a deliberate governmental or corporate fear-mongering ploy in order to better exploit citizen-consumers, although government and industry certainly have stepped onto the greenhouse bandwagon to initially niche-market and now mass-market ‘green’ products and incentives.

What I instead propose is that the greenhouse model should not be grasped as warning us about some possible catastrophe in the near or far future, but should best be understood as an allegory of all the current social and environmental violence that our technological progress engenders. As Paul Virilio would have it, the true ‘accident’ of acceleration is not some future apocalyptic event; the accident has in fact already happened. Understood in this way, it becomes clear that the fashionable mediatization of the greenhouse model successfully eclipses the real, dissimulating and hence perpetuating the actually existing problems, violence and desperation in relation to techno-neoliberalism. The simulation of this popular scientific model importantly functions as a Lacanian synthetic mirror: it reflects back to us ‘as truth’ three pervasive scientific and humanist delusions under speed-elitism. These delusions are, one: that we have established beyond doubt, by way of our extraordinary wits and apparatuses, that global warming really exists; two: that we ourselves are the main cause of this global warming; and three: that we have the means to combat this self-inflicted global warming by merely adjusting our consumerist lifestyles and inventing ‘greener’ technologies – the ubiquitous mirage of the techno-fix. As Al Gore’s website “An Inconvenient Truth” unflinchingly proclaims: “we can solve the climate crisis.” All this must be understood in light of this scientific and humanist model itself harboring these three elements already as its grounding assumptions, which our technological and media-apparatuses then merely reconstruct and inflate as if it were reality by providing us with the appropriate ‘facts’ and ‘data,’ like infrared satellite images showing higher temperatures in certain geographical areas. Whether eventually true or untrue, the story of the greenhouse effect therefore in any case comprises the clearest contemporary occurrence of Western enlightenment hubris if there ever was one. And it is this Narcissistic techno-mirroring that has made this particular scientific model so fashionable and popular, not its bare scientific legitimacy.

The extent to which this hallucination dissimulates the current negative fallout of technological-scientific ‘progress’ and gets wrapped up in ‘combating global warming’ (note also the militaristic language typical of speed-elitism) to the point where it becomes bizarrely self-contradictory, can be gathered from the huge political, corporate and activist mobilization around global warming. If one already believes in global warming being an effect of humankind’s CO2 emissions, then how can one explain the escalating use of transportation and communications technologies for combating it? I have earlier pointed out how this inconsistency emerges in serious games like for instance Global Warming Interactive – CO2Fx, but this peculiar paradox also returns in many other well-meant activist endeavors. In fact, the huge mobilization on- as well as offline of political, academic and corporate activity is itself directly implicated in the current acceleration of violence under neoliberal globalization. How can it be for instance that someone like Gore produces a disaster movie like “An Inconvenient Truth” (imagine the amount of electricity going into its filming, editing, dissemination, and screening alone), all the while happily flying across the United States to appear on Oprah and even across the world to announce ‘his’ message, sitting behind the desk in his office stacked with three 30 inch cinema displays, one always-on television feed screen, and copious printouts, telling us on television and YouTube to change our lifestyle in order to ‘save the earth’?

One can only conclude that Gore is either an utter hypocrite, or – and perhaps more likely and dangerously – that he and his team are themselves under the spell of the hyper-real greenhouse model and the dissimulation of its relationship to the use of air-conditioned computer networks and fossil-fueled transportation. Whether hypocrite or deluded activist, it is at any rate outrageous that Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for this, unless the Prize is really awarded for the greatest display of naivety – never mind mentioning that many other activists have been announcing the same message for eons yet walked away with no financial rewards. The reader may object that Gore’s movie aims at prospective change, but I would rebuke that the ultimate illusion here consists precisely in how the system of communication itself that underlies the dissemination of this conceited movie and model, always already presupposes the Promethean promise and premise that technological disaster as well as its salvation reside in some just-out-of-reach future. It is this promise that today fuels – pun intended – environmental activism and philosophy, as well as its current disenfranchisement, negative fallout and technological acceleration for the speed-elite like Gore. Eventually, there is an aporia at work in all these well-meant mobilizations, in which the unintended effects of these mobilizations themselves oddly spiral into calls for even more vigorous technological, academic and political activity. It seems to me therefore that Gore’s rejoinder is not at all unique, but typical of another paradox: the one of the philosophical (environmental) critique. If the CO2 induced greenhouse effect is really happening, there is no way we can reverse this by making lifestyle changes à la Oprah. We would be wiser to step off our high humanist-scientific horse and receive it as the natural force that it is. But I can only argue this assuming that the greenhouse hypothesis is at base true. So finally, its simulation returns here in its most crystallized form: at this very moment of my technological enunciation and propagation, and you reading this alarmist article online in your air-conditioned office or home. Dire effects indeed.

Image Credits:
1. Causes of Global Warming
2. Global Warming
3. Al Gore

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In my last contribution to Flow, I suggested that there is a digital mediation of East and West present in all sorts of academic and cross-cultural work that at base simply accelerates capital flow for the new speed-elite. I was suggesting that the same logic might have espoused the presidential campaign and recent win of Barack Obama in the US. Now it might be imprudent for a European scholar living in Southeast Asia, who has set foot in the United States only a few times, to comment on the recent goings-on around the North-American presidential campaign. But as the globalization of Hollywood entertainment and everything else that accompanies it – like American politics – has also penetrated the small media landscape of Singapore, I believe my critical comments may not entirely be out of place. In fact, after the euphoric celebrations of the Obama win among almost all of my left-wing friends and online networks, I think that a bit of ‘outside’ perspective on this ostensible symptom of economic and democratic despair – because this, and not racial politics, is what made Americans vote for Obama – might be more than healthy. After all, American politics today, thanks to the techno-enhanced near instantaneity of global capital flows and its close relationship to expansionist politics, unfortunately concerns all of us globally.

Let me be clear first: the Obama victory certainly appears to be a major step forward in terms of a more equitable racial representation in the American government and the otherwise white- and male-centered mass media. And certainly, he may function as a positive role model for many a child from certain disadvantaged racialized communities (although it would be prudent to remember that Obama is a rather pale kind of black). But I would like to suggest that Obama’s election win could or should also be read as marking the fact that the locus of power has today effectively vacated the arena of media representation and identity politics, and entered the realm of digital mediation. Put differently, the well meaning but shortsighted racial identity politics that made certain people vote for Obama may in the end fuel precisely the disastrous machinery of speculative neo-liberalism that Obama supposedly has come to release us from.

What I am arguing is that, under technocratic globalization, there exists an increasingly vast gap between representational politics (Vertretung) of the so-called ‘democratically’ elected governments, and the politics of symbolic and media representation (Darstellung) – an ever more important distinction that Gayatri Spivak already makes in her infamous ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ This vast gap, I claim, presents itself in the Obama case on two levels. On the first level, what Barack Obama represents in terms of cultural signification, is not at all what he represents politically. It would be a huge mistake to believe that Obama’s government will really fight for all minorities, like the queer communities or the lower classes, simply because he is a ‘minority’ himself. We Dutch folks made a huge mistake several years ago when many queers in the Netherlands were rooting for a gay male politician who was essentially going to sell the middle-lower classes, black people’s, and women’s rights down the drain. Judith Butler has likewise already unearthed the obvious but by many left-wingers willfully overlooked fact that Obama is not gay-friendly, nor really concerned about the black lower classes, nor in fact left-wing at all, in her timely and cautious “Uncritical Exuberance?”

But while Butler is still ‘exuberant’ enough to give the good man a chance to prove himself, I am more pessimistic. This is not because I think that Obama will turn out to be a new Bush in disguise – he seems certainly more intelligent and compassionate. It is because the vast gap on its second level (and even more disturbingly so) boils down to that what and whom Obama seeks to change and represent, is out of sync with the economic structure and discourses that he will eventually reproduce. Mike Davis for one addresses the dangers of this gap in his lucid and incisive “Can Obama See the Grand Canyon? On Presidential Blindness and Economic Catastrophe.’ He analyzes the vast gap in terms of the utter blindness for its underlying capitalist logic and seriousness of the current economic crash. I would like to further address the existence of this ‘canyon’ in terms of technocratic acceleration through signs of relative difference, like ‘black’ versus ‘white.’ The ‘canyon’ is not merely an economic issue, but an issue that more seriously marks the crisis of humanism and its complicity in neo-liberalism.

What really happened during the Obama road to the presidency was a frantic reproduction of a fake oppositional politics, and a masquerade of relative differences as if they were radical differences. Obama, in short, has come to symbolize the promise of humanism and people’s yearning for transcendence from major ideological and economic structures of oppression that has sadly come to do nothing else but accelerate capital. Who else than a black man to prove that Western humanism and the democratic principle were right, and that its horrible legacy of colonialist and racist oppression were mere accidents en route to utopia? Obama therefore has been bombarded in left- as well as right wing circles as womankind’s savior, very much in the Christian redemptive tradition which likewise reproduces its problematic social structures and ideologies through letting its subjects shuttle between hope and despair. But of course, Obama is not and cannot be this savior, although he has certainly made clever political use of his symbolic function in his ascendance to the oval office. Obama is really a prime figure of the new speed-elite and its bogus claim that the cross-breeding of representative democracy, technological invention, and capitalism leads to social equity. And it has already turned out that he is professing to a highly problematic middle-class populism, with making decisions that only look good in their symbolic dimension but actually espouse ultra-capitalism, like capping salaries of bank CEOs and extending broadband networks to rural areas.

So what I am ultimately suggesting is that on both levels I described above, as Davis aptly puts it, “deception is truly the mother’s milk of American [and increasingly today, global] politics.” It is the workings of (technological) deception that make the politics of representation today complicit in that neo-liberal and technocratic acceleration and disenfranchisement that precisely had Americans so desperately vote for Obama. And we want to be deceived, because we cannot believe that centuries of technological, industrial, and moral humanist ‘development’ will prove to be hubris of the most dangerous and destructive kind. It is for this reason also that I feel I can safely predict that Obama, despite his rhetoric of international outreach, will simply continue with the foreign militarist politics of the Bush regime in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, chasing down ‘terrorists’ and ‘bringing democracy and stabilizing areas’ wherever he deems fit. Likewise, I can safely predict that under his government, the ‘canyon’ between rich and poor will widen. This might decrease the overt amount of racism and sexism in the speed-elitist echelons of society, but it will further increase the total number of poor as well as aggravate the racism, racialization, and feminization of poverty worldwide. And this time, we cannot blame the political right anymore.

Image Credits:

1. Black Messiah
2. Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama Print
3. Obama on Republicans
4. Front Page Image

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In this first installment of my contributions to Flow, I will discuss the US left-wing popularity of Arundhati Roy in relation to issues of Easterness, Westernness, and digital mediation. But allow me to confess that I feel virtually (pun intended) incapable to say anything substantial on the issue of ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Being an alleged Westerner in the alleged East for the past six years, I feel increasingly unclear about what these terms mean today. In my first weeks in Singapore, I told a Chinese friend that I thought Singapore looked Western on the surface, but seemed quite Eastern underneath. ‘Really?’ said my friend, ‘I think it looks Eastern, but is deep down actually very Western!’ My confusion has grown ever since. This confusion may tell us something about the state of digital media, globalization, and terms like ‘East’ and ‘West.’

So in light of the confused relationship between East, West, and their mediation, I want to ask a few probing questions, and suggest a preliminary interpretation. I will next discuss this interpretation in relation to a popular video of Roy on the Internet. What is the contemporary relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ and how does this difference figure in the techno-logical moment under networked globalization? What dominant imagination grounds this form of mediated interaction? And how do the mediations between these categories possibly suggest a variety of border-crossings that are symptomatic of neo-liberal globalization? In short, I seek to address the ways in which the discourses and technologies of (crossing) borders, in their cultural but also in their material specificity, may reproduce or even aggravate contemporary modes of gendered, raced, and classed in- and exclusion under globalization. In line with pundits like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, I hold that such new modes of in- and exclusion today function for what I in my own work call ‘speed-elitism.’ Speed-elitism is the reproduction of the dominant discourses and technologies of acceleration, which often express themselves in a worship of emancipation, making connections, heightened mobility, and crossing borders. Under speed-elitism, the utopian emphasis on the transparent mediation through technologies of instantaneity gives rise to the fantasy of the East being the West’s radical other, as well as the fantasy of transparent dialogue between East and West. This would mean that ‘East’ and ‘West’ have become relative differences of each other under globalization: the East figures as a hallucination of radical otherness for the West. Let me illustrate this with an apparent East-West digital mesh-up: the left-wing anti-globalist video We on Arundhati Roy’s famous “Come September” speech. This video was made by an anonymous US group, and was spread free of charge through the Internet in 2007. It gathered huge popularity amongst Western left-wingers online and offline.

This video tells us a whole lot. Firstly, the whole Roy hype among left-wing Americans is actually fascinating as a phenomenon in itself. This is not to say that I do not agree with her argument, but much of what she says is common knowledge for many left-wingers outside the US. And even though I recognize that it takes courage to say some of the things she says in the US, some of her rhetoric is rather simplistic. There is for instance her crude pitching of the evil state and multinationals versus the innocent public and citizens, or her blatant romanticization of anti-globalism. Her rhetoric is in that sense very populist: a narrative of anti-statism and personal independence that is very typical of American dominant imaginary, on the left as well as on the right. There is also another element that makes her particularly interesting in terms of a Western imagination of authentic resistance: her Indianness and femininity play an important role in her popularity. After all, the left-wing West has for a long time idealized the Indian other ‘speaking truth to power,’ and I think still has in the figure of Roy. A sort of ‘hyperbolical admiration’ that is the mirror image of ‘ethnocentric scorn,’ as Jacques Derrida lucidly remarked in Of Grammatology. In a way then, Roy in her speeches cleverly performs the ‘East’ speaking truth to the ‘West.’

Secondly, the actual aesthetics of the video are much more interesting than the content of Roy’s speech; or, to put it differently, the enunciation of Roy as an ‘Easterner’ parallels the rhetorical strategy of the video – that is, to blame the US state and multinationals for contemporary oppressions. I am not saying that the video is wrong to do this. But one could read this video as marking the mutual enmeshment of new media technologies and war technologies – there are many self-reflexive moments in the video that point to this. Note for instance how Roy is represented in a screenshot of RealPlayer, and how these shots are juxtaposed with smart bomb- and TV war reporter-imagery. The speedy trance-like digital background music is an excellent choice in this respect: it implies that there is a connection between the pace of digital music, the speed of digital media, and the war for oil. So despite the content of the video blaming the hunger for expensive private transport and right-wing capitalism for poverty and the war on oil, it suggests on its formal level that it is digital media and their left-wing appropriation themselves – like the production and dissemination of this video – that are implicated in current wars and disenfranchisement. The alarming thing about the video is then not how wicked the right is, but that this video is indeed about ‘we’ or ‘us’  (and not simply about our governments or corporations). Our left-wing narratives and tools of resistance have themselves under speed-elitism become complicit in precisely the rhetoric and technologies of war and imperialism. This would also mean that the hallucination of Eastern otherness, in the figure of Roy mediated through RealPlayer, is structurally implicated in such imperialism.

Because of the increasing encapsulation of otherness in speed-elitism, we can expect this logic of the structural implication of East-West difference to return in many varieties of digital interaction ‘between East and West.’ One could think for instance of academic ‘cross-cultural’ collaborations through new communication technologies, like those in the co-called creative industries, and in the Singapore-MIT alliance. The East-West difference today, as much as it functions as relative difference masquerading as radical difference, simply provides an excellent moment for accelerating capital. This difference then effectively no longer makes a difference to speed-elitism; or, as Slavoj Žižek would have it in a particularly witty piece in the Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Eastern art and philosophy have become a supplement to the acceleration of capital. This would also mean that the ideological center has shifted from the West or mere whiteness to a variety of privileged nodes of acceleration. What we see today is then an ostensible ambiguity: East-West border-crossing plays a role in the sustenance of the speed-elite, and as such, identity markers of ‘East’ or ‘West’ do no longer run parallel to markers of poverty or wealth within the speed-elite. We can see this new logic clearly in Singapore and India. At the same time however, these identity markers still play a major role for the lower and ‘slower’ classes, as the negative fallout of acceleration works along the ‘old’ axes of Eurocentrism. Hence, I guess, my growing confusion: in the era of hyper-mediation, concepts like East and West are extremely meaningful qua consumption, but increasingly meaningless qua the availability of alternative discourses vis-à-vis the right.

Might the recent left-wing exaltation of a ‘black’ Obama winning the US elections over ‘white’ right-winger McCain be subject to a similar logic? To be continued in my next installment…

Image Credits:

1. The left-wing anti-globalist video We on Arundhati Roy’s famous “Come September” speech
2. Arundhati Roy: Author screen shot
3. No War For Oil

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