FA-weblog

7-11-13

24 (Fox Network 2002-2010)

Last week Steve showed a clip form the U.S. TV series 24. In this show the protagonists have access to, or are denied access to, a code. This code will allow our hero (Jack Bauer) to disarm an atomic bomb or neutralize a flesh-eating virus (and any number of 'clear and present dangers). The plot always centers on Jack getting the code through some clever trick, and finally through torture. The body in 24 might be understood as an encumbrance to the free flow of information, an imperfect medium for information exchange. In the show the body is often disposed of once the information has been imparted. The body is reduced to an informatics.

See: The Internet Effect, A.R Galloway, Polity, 2012

The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973

There are some significant differences and similarities to the way the body is treated in The Holy Mountain. Here the ‘thief’ undergoes a process of purification – an array of ‘technologies of self’- before setting off to find the Holy Mountain. We are introduced to the nine ‘thieves’ who accompany him on his journey. These include an arms manufacturer who makes weapons for hippies and various types of religious armaments; a toy manufacturer who trains and conditions children to hate. Aversion and electro-shock therapy is used to fashion the development of the children’s psychological life. Jodorowsky presents us with a society in which production and consumption is regulated by a huge computer. The economy is ‘upwardly integrated’ to produce and condition citizens to continue the cycle of production and destruction. The film was made in the year of the CIA instigated coup in Chile. Allende, the elected socialist president, was deposed. A ‘free market’ economic system was instituted. Resistance was violently repressed by the Pinochet regime.

At the time 1973 Stafford Beer (on the request of Allende) was developing a computer system (cybersyn) design to regulate the Chilean economy and facilitate economic and democratic transparency. Pinochet abruptly discontinued this program on gaining power, preferring a ‘free market’, Chicago School economic system, mixed with ‘psyops’ techniques of repression imported from the United States. For Steve, The Holy Mountain demonstrates the protean nature of cybernetic ideas (control and communication - feedback systems &c). These ideas were active across the divides of left and right – they were simultaneously called into the services of liberation and oppression. These ideas live on in shows such as 24 where the body is, in the final event, a carrier of code (knowledge, DNA &c). The subject is understood as an information machine, exchanging information with other information machines. See: Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, E. Medina, MIT, 2011; The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2007, N. Wiener, Cybernetics, or The Control and Communication in Animal and Machine, MIT, 1965; M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (see chapter, care of the self), Penguin, 197?;

Link. Susanna Kriemann interviews Steve about cybernetic ideas in contemporary culture:

http://www.roddickinson.net/pages/pre_reviews/SignalNoise-Bulletin.pdf