Paul Virilio and Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

Ground Zero by Paul Virilio and “This Is Information” by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, from 9-11: Artists Respond, Volume One, both attempt to organize arguments about the causes and ramifications of the attack on the World Trade Center perpetrated on September 11, 2001. Virilio’s argument traces the influence of a twin history, that of a dialogue between god and man, and that between the exceptional individual and monotheism. Calling both a history of life and death that advance together, he suggests that the history of man cannot find the sensible and the super-sensible to be mutually excusive, and one of the ways we can see this is in the prohibition of prohibitions evident in both histories: with the prohibition of likenesses of god and angels and devils in religion, and with the seemingly unstoppable destruction of limits in secularism. While it’s easy to condemn Virilio of some Luddite-loving, reactionary, and anti-technological rabidness, his argument has some interesting turns to it. Taking a concept like the doctrine of free will—sacred, pardon the term, to both camps—he shows how its influence has been felt in these various situations. (And as an aside, as I write this, my power is going on and off, nine times and counting, whenever the wind blows—sucks, and means I lose stuff I’ve not yet saved—hard to save on a line to line basis.) For instance, he traces the development of predestination from a life before life (prebirth) to a means of obviating the doctrine of free will, pointing up what imbricates scientific integrism with religion—its Gnostic duality. He is quick to point out the beyond of good and evil that eugenics, racist hereditary theories, and phrenology represented for (and especially the Nazi’s) totalitarian science. Iconoclasm (the prohibition of graven images) in religion is paired under this twin logic of historical progress toward death with the concept of disappearance that is the techno-scientific imagination’s structuring concept, that science strips down the world: god is disappeared that we might not look at it (for fear of knowing too much, about good/evil, and their post-tribal beyond) and the world is disappeared, so that we can look into it. Linking progress to acceleration (“To Progress Would Be to Accelerate” 15), Virilio moves from a utopian model of place and site-specificity to a temporal model of uchronia, a no-time. Forsaking the human body (which cannot exist [and progress] in the dimension of time), Virilio suggests that we’ve no choices left but to seek immortality, either in the technological solipsism of longevity or in the atemporal afterlife of faith’s disappearance. In the succeeding chapters Virilio pursues his thesis of twin histories of progress’s problems. In chapter 2 we see his elaboration of the prohibition of prohibitions that marks both the enlightenment narrative and the religious base (and recent theoretical turn, I’d add) with the introduction of the scientific hero: a conflation of scientist and terrorist, the prohibition of prohibitions seems to establish equivalencies between these usually disaggregate figures. Chapter 3 is about information, and this is where Alan Moore fits.
In “This Is Information” Moore and Gebbie begin with a silent panel (one in which there are no dialogue balloons or narration boxes) except for the title, set before a cloud of dust. Next panel is a pyramid of chards and two boxes: “matter is energy. Energy is information. Everything is information[;]” and “physics says that structures…buildings, societies, ideologies…will seek their point of least energy” (185). Things run down—the third law of thermo-dynamics. Moving through a series of closer and closer shots of rubble, a hand is discernable, but as Moore writes, “the jutting hand holds little information” (185). The next few panels run through the dissemination of the event of 9/11: have you got the telly on? Holy shit, images—symbols. And then we’re back to the pyramid, with its two narration boxes: “people build towers…marriages, careers, empires, fortunes, ideologies…intended to reach god[;]” and “the lightning bolt is information, putting our ideas of god into perspective” (186). Perhaps we’ll learn, Moore suggests. Gebbie’s butch-dykes plotting the attacks as a reaction to the cancellation of Ellen Degeneris’s show on TV feature buzz cuts, bad pants, and mullets, while her Reverend Jerry Falwell is not rendered by her; it is a TV still put into a TV set rendered in the panel—multi-media, remediation, what have you. Moore narrates the ambient of fear in Northampton, as well as an anecdote from his childhood: potty aunt strolling through the blackout with her accordion, uncle Albert, electrified by throwing water on an exposed power line he thought was a power cable. And by way of the musket-ball holes blown in the Northamptonshire Sepulchre Church’s door by Cromwell’s troops in the English Civil War, Moore goes to the Crusades. Pointing up the distance the English take from war, he takes us through the effects of information—the grays of morality, the disfigurations of aim, context; we face a “Mujahedin Moonraker, [who says] choose your next witticism carefully, western democracy. It may be your last” (189). And in the back of the panel—behind Gebbie’s Ossama bin Cufflink, complete with emerald eyed white kitty—there’s the multi-media: six miniature screenshots of cable-and-network newscasts. Moore and Gebbie end it on a humanist note, suggesting the widest context of understanding, in two boxes: “any single human life has more complexity, more energy bound up in it than our tallest towers” and “and any death simplifies that, horribly” (190). Refusing the either/or logic of the law of non-contradiction (x cannot also be non-x), Moore writes, “with all due respect, with all sympathy, with all love, some of us cannot make that [with us or against us] choice” (190). Gebbie’s hand has returned, grey, ashen, jutted, and the narration is in six boxes over three panels: “are we with the terrorists or crusaders? [a pink, living hand enters the panel;]” and “no[;]” and “we’re with you[;]” and “whoever you are [they clasp;]” and “squeeze once if you understand[;]” and “this is information” (190).
Virilio’s Ground Zero, especially chapters 3 and 4, suggest that, firstly, the multiple worlds of the mass-media edge out the factual world of political propaganda, and secondly, that the range of concurrent moves that attend that: from standardization of products to synchronization of opinion (his ludic democracy, which actually sounds cool to me, like play in a post-structural sense, a radicalized democracy—but Virilio’s not havin’ it), from intermittent democracy (representative) to continuous democracy (direct), the move from franchise (citizenship) to forecast—are for Virilio traces of the breakdown of democracy in the breakdown of information systems. In chapter 4 he suggests that the informational shift from WW II’s elevated morality to today’s gulf war concepts of technological superiority is just another station on a track that is always headed to spiritual demolition: both sides of this theater-less (more like the theater of this uchronic war is everywhere) conflict play out a war of images, two equally misleading and self-contradictory systems: ego-mysticism (self and god) and techno-scientific mysticism (exceptional individual and monotheism), both beyond the tribal notion of the good, both using communication as a compensatory function that obviates the painful encounter of self with self (39-40). Both participating in the strategic deployment of images: two hands, touching, one ash, one pink. He talks about the effect of the diasporic and intermittent nature of the battlefields in this war, though writing just after the 9/11, the war’d not yet begun (though Virilio could see its basic dimensions, to his credit). He suggests that the disappearance of any real battle field—the prohibition of its image—obviates any possibility of contact between forces: “in this way, the risks of fraternization between combatants, a well as any true proximity, were eliminated automatically, to the advantage of a global information system freed of any concern for verisimilitude…of anything elementarily human” (43-4).
So, do Moore and Gebbie offer us that contact, that verisimilitude? They give us contact, but it’s between the dead amid the rubble (of our thoughts) and the living of the artists they are, responding in the pink. Virilio goes on to call this cannibalistic mass-media machine Big Optics: multinational powers monopolizing appearances (59). Moore and Gebbie work in a realistic way, sometimes as satire, sometimes as melodrama, but overall—realistic. Is this to suggest, that among his many reactionary pronouncements, Virilio is against the avant-garde, too? He seems to suggest that the development of nuclear weapons was an advent of the avant-garde, the ultimate figure of progress (52). That’s easy, to come to the conclusion that if he’s against progress that he’s against the human. But he has it his way: progress is defined as disappearance of the world, and its effects are to separate humans (as with the disappearing battlefield above). In a way that echoes and deranges Benjamin, Virilio suggests that the age of mechanical reproduction of the image has nothing but deleterious effects—none of the emancipatory potential found in the artwork essay—and that “techno-scientific development has become an art of the false in the service of the art of the lie […] a tissue of absurdities” (67). But I still can’t figure Virilio out. Would he like Moore and Gebbie because of their pathos and communication of the human, or would he condemn them in believing in progress, in an infinite perfectibility? It’s easy to say that Virilio is anti-humanist, and that all ideas of progress are to him the way to ground zero, a path laden with deceit, moral ambiguity, and assaults on nature. He would no doubt rue the hope that “This Is Information” ends with—the repeated image of two hands touching, white, black, Caucasian, African, ashen grey, pink. This is because he’s making a historical argument insisting that iconoclasm is behind every progressive notion, and that what we base hope upon is in fact the same iconoclasm that motivates and subtends terrorists, thus to buy into hope is to buy into terrorist hope. And perhaps he’s right. Not ethically right, but right about the enlightenment narrative. (Ethically, I’d go to Derrida or Levinas, and those are theoretical figures Virilio would likely indict as humanist [but is that better than progress?]) Of course there are options: Adorno and Horkhiemer’s famous assault on the enlightenment narrative has it that it’s both good and evil, and while we progress in our thinking and ethical and moral behavior, we also tend to put reason up as a court against which there is no appeal, thus eliminating any appeal that can be deemed unreasonable. Virilio would only like half that book. Most post-structuralists tend to take some enlightenment narrative on—communism (Derrida’s Specters of Marx), mostly, but sometimes democracy (Laclau’s Emancipations)—but they usually reform it, or recuperate it in some way. Virilio seems to suggest no way out for progressive society, though he does seem to like people, just so long as they stay with their icons—and aren’t comic panels iconistic? This consists in the fact that they communicate by resemblance, re-presentation? Fuzzy little slip, I know, but I like to have it too.