Spectacles and More Spectacles...

With several billion eyes glued to the tele-spectacle of the Olympics, the power of media to galvanize an international audience seem strikingly obvious. Overwhelming observation was joined, on American TV, with the relentless advertising based on planetary metaphors-Planet Reebok, Planet Coke, Planet UPS, Planet AT&T, Planet IBM, Planet Internet, Planet... you name it, a kind of postnational campaign in which Speedos are as much in vogue in China as they are in California.

The International Olympic Committee obviously grasps the economics of sponsorship in terms of both production and profitability. Paralleled, and then followed, by continuing TV coverage of the TWA downing or crash, the Atlanta bombing, the computer glitches of IBM's Olympic scoring system, the crash of AOL, and now the Republican National Convention, the mobilization of media for programmed content that stands so caught between outright propaganda, bully pulpit ideology, and mixed messages about violence, terrorism, corporate new age multinational spiritualism, and technoaccess, makes for dizzying reflections. Not the least of which is the remark in a Texas representative's speech at the convention: "Isn't it time for America to return to the real world?" The robotic crowd, in resounding algorithmic unity, chanted a central political meme: "Yes!"

In a summer bracketed by the film Independence Day, NASA's wildly cautious speculations about Life on Mars, and on the Republican and Democratic conventions, the usual doldrums have been punctuated by sinister alien simulation, politically propitious scientific illusions, and perversely choreographed spontaneity more suitable for talk TV than for political or scientific debate. Surely the wild economic success of Independence Day (more than $100 million in the first week and 240 million+ to date) didn't go unnoticed by the lobbyists, soon to be allegorists, at NASA who could orchestrate a public relations coup that could sustain space funding in a time of promised defense cuts by the Democrats and the refunding of some version of Star Wars deterrence promised by Republican candidate Dole. On the legitimation more of science fiction than science fact, NASA could win either way -- by capitalizing on fascinating public interest in aliens or in the reinvention of a voodoo-military economy. Or Both! No surprise that candidate Bob Dole liked Independence Day (or Forest Gump) as a kind of feel good film. I guess he ignored the thousands of nuclear warheads detonated in the service of victory, and the hundreds of millions killed by the alien attack. Less reactionary than they are regressive, the interests of the quiet attacks on the values of Hollywood, reflect both an acknowledgement of the social power of media and a hint about the direction for the entertainment market being suggested by Bob Dole. As a NY Times editorial about ID observed: "space aliens are clearly going to be Hollywood's answer to the post-Communist villain shortage."

Then, in a coincidence of cosmic proportions, NASA "finds" "evidence" of "life" on Mars - well, finds a rock in Antarctica with tentative indications that could suggest organic matter. Not surprisingly, the distributor of Independence Day has immediately adapted its advertising campaign with a scene from the film in which Harvey Firestein is yelling in terror "life on other planets!!!" the scene cuts to a full screen shot of an exclamation of contemporary American culture: "Duh!." NASA, though more constrained, isn't far behind. Despite enormous media and public interest, the NASA News press release was strikingly cautious. Equivocal phrases abounded: "strongly suggests," "may have existed," "thought to be," "possible," "an apparently unique pattern of organic molecules," "the rock is believed," "may," "features that can be interpreted as suggesting past life," etc. The technical report, published in Science Magazine was more methodical in presenting evidence and justification for its position: "we conclude that they are evidence for primitive life on early Mars."

Indeed several months ago a tabloid paper (Weekly World News, April 30, 1996) carried a full front page headline: "Special News Bulletin from NASA: Heaven Photographed by Hubble Telescope." [illustration] Certainly not sanctioned by NASA, the article presented some wild ambiguities: "In spite of official silence, agency insiders conceded that NASA 'has discovered something that might alter the future of all mankind'." This environment sets a context for understanding some of the complexites of the dynamic relationship between the "instability" of a world reeling in the aftershocks of geopolitics, recent science, and the dispersion or denial of politics in a world of information. What better way to think about the link between the porous borders and the meaning of images in the information economy, one that is still, despite all the network hype, dominated by cinematic and broadcast media. Inebriated by planetary metaphors, the logos (in both senses of the term) of a networked info/ecosystem was fully in place-whether it was planet earth of planet mars!

Television, film, the imagination, and science linked by visualization technologies that can render what can so easily be construed as irrefutable evidence despite troubling presumptions, outright falsehood, or origin. It is this blurred boundary that haunts the role of representation across the social, scientific, historical, and aesthetic spectrum. What seemed so striking are the affiliations between these events are the media strategies that buttress and contextualize them. Increasingly driven by a kind of systems rationale, the scripting of behavior, the psychology of reception, or the control of the imaginary return to the forefront not as mere examples of a cyborg ideology, but as manifestations of a media environment in which the "triumphantly artificial" (as Frederic Jameson wrote) is allegorized without the constraint of judgement or fact. Rightly called 'infomercials,' so much of the programming ideology represented in the consolidation of media empires into public relations arms of the multinationals (ABC controlled by Disney, CBS by Westinghouse, CNN merging with TimeWarner, NBC becoming MSNBC, Gannett holding monopolies of print news, and the ) suggests an environment where information is in a stranglehold. This was particularly the case in the staging of the Republican convention where downsized reporting allowed pathetic trivialization to stand as national political debate, or in the scrutiny of NASA's funding initiative on the foundation of a rock the size of a potato. In the reciprocity between the epistemologies of science, politics, media, theology, teleology, or ontology, and the practicalities of coping with an increasingly porous 'reality,' the stability of the present seems a casualty. Little wonder that the comfort of reactionary politics, a veiled hope that we aren't alone in the cosmos, or that the metaphor of the olympic (like the global) village will unite and eradicate otherness in end of the millennium media.

Yet the decentering of the "anthropological monopoly" (as Peter Weibel remarks) in the midst of truly dynamic discourses of the relationships between representation and knowledge, cognition and epistemology, speculation and evidence, the self and technology, the actual and the possible, etc., both shake the foundations of western culture and provide an opportunity for both regressive and conceptual leaps. The fascination for the alien and the nostalgia for predictability stand on either side of the necessity to grapple with the issues in a less allegorical and more political form. The challenge is formidable, especially considering that one finds circus-like collisions of VR guru Howard Rheingold touting the virtual office in TV ads for a national chain copy shop (where reproducibility meets virtuality?) or where Absolut Vodka's campaign, Absolut Warhol, Absolut Haring, Absolut etc., is consummated, in its newest incarnation, by spiffy robotic flies buzzing in the pages of Wired Magazine, Absolut Kelly (that's Kevin Kelly) with the headline: "the future of machines is biology." Surely they couldn't have known that somewhere in planetary scientist David McKay's remarks about evidence for life on mars he says, "we are not claiming that we have found absolute ... proof." But don't be surprised if one appears!

So into the mix of scientific and cultural discourses of alife, syntheticDarwinism (both biological and philosophical!), connectionism, cyberspace, techno-advertising, economy, multinationalism, technology, or fact emerge political, allegorical, and evidentiary matters that strike at the core of contemporary experience and that are constituted in a media environment that is less and less capable of reflection or criticism. So much so that a scandalous "hoax" article appeared in the journal Social Text by NYU physicist Alan Sokal, an article placed to reveal 'postmodern' editorial credulity and exposed on the front page of the NY Times. [an essay on this is forthcoming] This amid the 'achievements' of planetary science, chipping away on a four pound, three and a half billion year old, meteorite found in Antarctica while the tons of cause of the TWA crash remains a mystery despite concentrated forensic investigation.

Media science, media politics, and media history have emerged from the behavioral models of mass psychology and sociology with continuing effect even as the network model, more bound to cognitive studies then behaviorism, dominates the critical discussions of media. Exaggerated claims of scientific discovery, outrageous spectacles of party solidarity, and passive journalism only fuel the pseudo-spectacles of a culture inebriated by instantaneity and resistant to debate. In a time when representation and economics are so closely allied, it would be a fatal error to fall into the mystification of information without some serious consideration of the virtualization of critical theory or the liberation of communication from ideology.

But 'memetic' Darwinism, cyborg liberation, noospheric illusions of totality, or the triumph of artificiality seem to jettison historical models in favor of systemic or technological ones, a symptom of radical contingency in the age of methodical chaos and algorithmic unity. Stephen Jay Gould contributed an op-ed essay to The New York Times in which he writes: "The origin of life may be a virtually automatic consequence of carbon chemistry and the physics of self-organizing systems - given favorable environments and requisite inorganic constituents...So if bacterial life arose so quickly on earth, and if Mars once possessed similarly favorable conditions, then we should also anticipate the evolution of some form of life at bacterial grade on Mars as well...A real Martian fossil would be a pearl beyond price, the lock on the case for life's universal generality (unless adjacent planets in our solar system can "seed" each other by the kind of meteoritic transfer that brought the Martian rock to earth). A hypothetical argument for the probable existence of Martian fossils, however, is scarcely worth the effort of an E-mail message...We have good reason to think that life in its least complex form represents a fully predictable extension of ordinary chemistry and physics, given planets with appropriate conditions. Complex, self-conscious life arises by the starkly different route of unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable historical happenstance. On earth only one fragile species in 3.5 billion years has evolved such mental power - and no general trends in this direction can be discerned on a planet still in the Age of Bacteria, and so thoroughly dominated by insects among the multicellular components...Martian life provides a first evidentiary step toward universalizing the Age of Bacteria; humans remain as gloriously accidental as ever."