Towards A Furious Philosophy Of The Discrete

The Culture Of War

 The danger of immediate annihilation between the once great powers is now only a dull remembered bludgeoning. Perpetual war has come home to rest as perpetual un and underemployment and the struggle for subsistence under the auspices of the agenda of the New Right. Subtly inforcing a monomaniacal vision of the Market Rules O.K...A lie that perpetuates a strangulation of real change... The insane of greed being the primary encouragement and reason to be.

As international capital re-configures itself into newly defined power blocks, the left flounders in local struggles unable to grapple away the descriptive and prescriptive power of the agenda and its thoroughly media pedaled persuasiveness.

Speed Is The Essence Of War- Sun Tzu

"The democratic assembly is a military-political assembly and not vice versa. The exercise of power by the state is a permanent conspiracy, which marks the stages of the military revolution, the passage from the fragmentary and unsophisticated production of the war enterprise to its technological, industrial and scientific development. The historical effort of the west is thus the distribution and management of independent,increasingly numerous human groups by the state war machine." Paul Virilio

Progress as nothing more than technological gimcrackeries of one sort or another.

Reason as no more than the instruction for applications.

The psyche as a mechanism to be conditioned to proper functionings within the technological state.

A kind of slavery to productive efficiency to a machine that rotates upon the same spot... without thought...

The central application is the confinement of the imagination and the suppression and perversion of the drive to ecstasy.

World as war machine.

The production of speed and the white spinclatter of political patch work.

The technological adventure personified as the goal of control and advantage.

Control over the space of the earth and advantage over Time itself. <

Virilio is correct: All of us are already civilian soldiers.

We don't recognize the militarized part of (our) identity, of (our) consciousness."

And anyway, what is so dangerous about the Mohawks, about the sovereignty claims of the First Nations? Virilio states that the war machine is the crystallization of science as the language of power, of the depletion of the energies of society, and their draining away into the war machine. Maybe this is what is so threatening about the struggles of the First Nations. It violates and refuses the genetic logic of the technological dynamo." Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual.

The disappearance of place replaced by the simulations of the screen. The eternalizing heaven of the simulacrum.

Think of Chiapas...

With the instigation of the North American Free Trade Agreement Mexico has been gearing it's economy to suit the interests of International capitalism. The reforms of past decades have been rolled back. Citizens of sovereign states are really only of use if they can be of use to the global economy; read this to mean the technological imperiatives of ever increasing speed and dislocation. Land based societies are the obvious barricade. Dislodged from their ancestral homes, the aboriginals revolt against their 'international' overlords. ----

Total war as the creation of the total work of art. The punks were right, there is no future though there is a repeat broadcast. Sanitized and aesthetically pure and unadulterated perfect kills.

On target.

Already available the Gulf War as a interactive video game. Television feeding puerile fascination with the technical wonder of the machinations of destruction,

While withholding the smell of the corpses.

We become disembodied.

We watch from on far. Much like the interest one may have in hockey cards: the statistics, diagrams, and witty authoritarian monologues of our power to examine at our leisure

- war as spectator sport -

We of the industrial world the powerful gods who can rain destruction from the comfort of our Eze boy chairs.

The joy stick of the western democracies Has become encrusted with the blood of its wonderful freedom From responsibilities. Everyone, everyone plays and someone else pays.

The question of war, what it means and how it relates to peoples and political and media institutions is a crucially important subject for democratic societies. The intellectual analysis offered by the work of semiotician Paul Virilio is uniquely informative, manifesting a strident contemporaneous awareness of the ramifications of new technologies and media on world political affairs.

Read Virilio.

War.html/cisr/oliver@cisr.bc.ca