lalala Manel’s Reviews > The Gulf War Did Not Take Place > Status Update

The passage to action suffers widespread infamy: it supposedly corresponds to a brutal lifting of repression, thus to a psychotic process. It seems that this obsession with the passage to action today governs all our behaviour: obsession with every real, with every real event, with every real violence, with every pleasure which is too real. Against this obsession with the real we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows us to pass to the act “in vitro” (this is true even of procreation). We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real.

“War has not escaped this virtualisation which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted war, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge (as we saw at Timisoara). Even the military has lost the privilege of use value, the privilege of real war. Deterrence has passed by that way and it spares no-one. No more than the politicians, the military personnel do not know what to make of their real function, their function of death and destruction. They are pledged to the decoy of war as the others are to the decoy of power”

“We should have been suspicious about the disappearance of the declaration of war, the disappearance of the symbolic passage to the act, which already presaged the disappearance of the end of hostilities, then of the distinction between winners and losers, then of operations themselves. The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual, and we must be content with this extreme virtuality, virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to factual, but in a hyper-realistic logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual. In this process, the hostages are once again revealed, It is their virtual death that is at issue, not a real death. Moreover, they never die. At best, they disappear.”

WW3 did not take place and yet we are already beyond it

Thanks to this war, the extraordinary confusion in the Arab world is in the process of infecting the West- Just revenge. In return, we try desperately to unify and stabilize them in order to exercise better control. It's an historic arm wrestle: who will stabilize the other before being destabilized themselves?Confronted by the virulent, violent, and ungraspable instability of the Arabs and of Islam, whose defenses are that of the hysteric in all its versatility, the West is in the process of demonstrating that its values can no longer lay claim to any universality than that (extremely fragile) of the UN. Faced with the Western logic of undercompensation (the West tends towards the euphemization and even the inhibition of its power) the oriental logic of Saddam responds with overcompensation. Although far from having proved himself against Iran, he attacks the West, he operates beyond the reach of his own forces, There where only God can help him. He undertakes an act of magical provocation, and it is left to God or some other predestined connection to do the rest. This was in principle the role alluded to the Arab masses. By contrast, through a kind of egocentric generosity or stupidity, the Americans can only imagine and combat an enemy in their own image.

“This is the rule of the American way of life: nothing personal! And they make war in the same manner: pragmatically and not symbolically. they thereby expose themselves to deadly situations which they are unable to confront, but perhaps they accept this in expiation of their power, in an equivalence which is after all symbolic?”

Just as the physical or the screen of the psyche transforms every illness into a symptom, (there is no organic illness which doesn't find its meaning elsewhere, an interpretation of the ailment on another level: All symptoms pass through a sort of black box, in which the psychic images are jumbled and inverted. The illness becomes reversible, ungraspable, escaping any form of realistic medicine) so war, when it has been turned into information, ceases to be a realistic war and becomes a virtual one, in some ways symptomatic

so everything which is turned into information becomes the object of endless speculation, the site of total uncertainty. We are left with the symptomatic reading on our screens of the effects of the war, or the effects of discourse about the war, or completely speculative strategic evaluations which are analogous to those evaluations of opinion provided by polls. In this manner, we have gone in a week from 20% to 50% and then to 30% destruction of Iraqi military potential. The figure fluctuates exactly like the fortunes of the stock market.

Whom to believe? There is nothing to believe. We must learn to read symptoms as symptoms, and television as the hysterical symptom of a war which has nothing to do with its critical mass. Moreover, it does not seem to have to reach its critical mass but remains in its inertial phase, while the implosion of the apparatus of information along with the accompanying tendency of the rate of information to fall seems to reinforce the implosion of war itself, with its accompanying tendency of the rate of confrontation to fall.

The fact that the production of decoys has become an important branch of the war industry, just as the production of placebos has become an important branch of the medical industry and forgery a flourishing branch of the art industry—not to mention the fact that information has become a privileged branch of industry as such—all of this is a sign that we have entered a deceptive world in which an entire culture labours assiduously at its counterfeit. This also means that it no longer harbours any illusion about itself. just as lobotomy is a way of not recognising madness as such. And then all that technical virtuosity finished up in the most ridiculous uncertainty. The isolation of the enemy by all kinds of electronic interference creates a sort of barricade behind which he becomes invisible. He also becomes “stealthy,” and his capacity for resistance becomes indeterminable. In annihilating him at a distance and as it were by transparency, it becomes impossible to discern whether or not he is dead.

The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged of any carnal contamination or warrior’s passion.

ALL THAT WE CAN HOPE FOR IS TO SEE THEM DIE LIVE, IN OTHER WORDS THAT SOME EVENT OR OTHER SHOULD OVERWHELM THE INFORMATION INSTEAD OF THE INFORMATION INVENTING THE EVENT AND COMMENTING ARTIFICIALLY UPON IT. THE ONLY REAL INFORMATION REVOLUTION WOULD BE THIS ONE, PRESUPPOSING A REVERSAL OF OUR VERY IDEA OF INFORMATION. IN THE MEANTIME WE’LL CONTINUE WITH THE INVOLUTION AND ENCRUSTATION OF THE EVENT IN AND BY INFORMATION, AND THE CLOSER WE APPROACH THE LIVE AND REAL TIME, THE FURTHER WE WILL GO IN THIS DIRECTION.

Como assim aproveitamento político em Leiria, a calamidade foi mais informática que outra coisa, responderam da única maneira que sabiam, tentaram aproximar se do evento e só descobriram estradas da periferia a precisarem de serem limpas, ajudas mais simbólicas e meditaticas que materiais(vídeo promocional político do ministério, Ventura a carregar garrafas de água) pois o próprio evento foi neutralizado informaticamente e o real do espaço destruído fui substituído por um espaço imagem-inário que implicava sempre este tipo de ações, ao tentar chegar ao centro da tempestade o remoinho tecnológico afastou os para o único espaço que resta: o simulacro da catástrofe, sobre o qual a única ajuda possível é também ela simulacrada, apenas a forma ou modelo da ajuda, mesmo que não tenha nenhum objetivo concreto ou ajude alguém em particular ela cumpre a sua função significativa. O virtual ultrapassou o real, os militares fazem campo numa estrada de terra batida, limpam árvores e vão se embora: o problema acabou, o resto são os vestígios do real insimbolizavel constituído como o verdadeiro objeto da limpeza. Como pode o governo central aplicar medidas sobre algo que não existe? Podem apenas ver televisão. A verdadeira destruição foi a ficção da representação, ninguém sabe sequer onde é Leiria, e as estradas pra lá chegar estão alagadas

Só da pra interagir com o evento dentro da lógica do espetáculo, pelas lentes da câmara pois fora delas ele não existe

Substituir remoinho por furacão tecnológico

Informativo não tecnológico

Profusão de imagens e informações sugam real como os ventos sugam oxigénio em ciclones, the letter kills the image kills and media massacres

The information overwhelms the event

Impotência do espectador exacerbada pelo tom culpabilista do presidente da câmara e fregueses Leiria

lalala Como assim aproveitamento político em Leiria, a calamidade foi mais informativa que outra coisa, responderam da única maneira que sabiam, tentaram aproximar-se do evento e só descobriram estradas da periferia a precisarem de serem limpas, ajudas mais simbólicas e mediáticas que materiais (vídeo promocional político do ministério, Ventura a carregar garrafas de água) pois o próprio evento foi neutralizado informativamente e o real do espaço destruído foi substituído por um espaço imagi-nário que implicava sempre este tipo de ações. Só dá para interagir com o evento dentro da lógica do espetáculo, pelas lentes da câmara pois fora delas ele não existe. Ao tentar chegar ao centro da tempestade o furacão tecnológico afastou-os para o único espaço que resta: o simulacro da catástrofe, sobre o qual a única ajuda possível é também ela simulacrada, apenas a forma ou modelo da ajuda, mesmo que não tenha nenhum objetivo concreto ou ajude alguém em particular ela cumpre a sua função significativa.
Profusão de imagens e informações sugam o real como os ventos sugam oxigénio em ciclones, the letter kills the image kills and the media massacres- the information overwhelms the event.
O virtual ultrapassou o real, os militares fazem campo numa estrada de terra batida, limpam árvores e vão-se embora: o problema acabou, o resto são os vestígios do real insimbolizável constituído como o verdadeiro objeto da limpeza.
Como pode o governo central aplicar medidas sobre algo que não existe? Podem apenas ver televisão. A verdadeira destruição foi a ficção da representação, ninguém sabe sequer onde é Leiria, e as estradas pra lá chegar estão alagadas.
Impotência do espectador exacerbada pelo tom culpabilista do presidente da câmara e fregueses Leiria.

A tempestade em Leiria não aconteceu!!!

Como assim aproveitamento político em Leiria, a calamidade foi mais informativa que outra coisa, responderam da única maneira que sabiam, tentaram aproximar-se do evento e só descobriram estradas da periferia a precisarem de serem limpas, ajudas mais simbólicas e mediáticas que materiais (vídeo promocional político do ministério, Ventura a carregar garrafas de água) pois o próprio evento foi neutralizado, o real do espaço destruído foi substituído por um espaço imagem-nário que implicava sempre este tipo de ações, só dá para interagir com o evento dentro da lógica do espetáculo, pelas lentes da câmara pois fora delas ele não existe. Ao tentar chegar ao centro da tempestade o furacão informativo afasta nos para o único espaço que resta: o simulacro da catástrofe, sobre o qual a única ajuda possível é também ela simulacrada, apenas a forma ou modelo da ajuda, pois mesmo que não tenha nenhum objetivo concreto ou ajude alguém em particular ela cumpre a sua função significativa, em par com a profusão de imagens e informações que sugam o real do evento como os ventos sugam oxigénio em ciclones- the letter kills, the image kills and the media massacres, the information overwhelms the event. O virtual ultrapassou o real, os militares fazem campo numa estrada de terra batida, limpam as árvores da via e vão-se embora: o problema acabou, o resto são os vestígios do real insimbolizável constituído como o verdadeiro objeto da limpeza. Como pode o governo central aplicar medidas sobre algo que não existe? podem apenas ver televisão. A a verdadeira destruição foi a ficção da representação, ninguém sabe sequer onde é Leiria, e as estradas pra lá chegar estão alagadas. A impotência do espectador é exacerbada pelo tom culpabilista do presidente da câmara, sentimento que contém uma verdade mais profunda do que aparenta, todos são responsáveis pelo novo estatuto da imagem, e no entanto ninguém é, e no entanto um certo prazer é retirado disto tudo, o espectador em frente à televisão é o voyeur preverso até que lhe caio o teto em cima, ou fique sem luz.
Texto de um barbudo esquerdista anarquista lisboeta com uma conta de instagram semi viral

Como assim aproveitamento político em Leiria, a calamidade foi mais informativa que outra coisa, responderam da única maneira que sabiam, tentaram aproximar-se do evento e só descobriram estradas da periferia a precisarem de serem limpas, ajudas mais simbólicas e mediáticas que materiais (vídeo promocional político do ministério, Ventura a carregar garrafas de água) pois o próprio evento foi neutralizado, o real do espaço destruído foi substituído por um espaço imagem-nário que implicava sempre este tipo de ações, só dá para interagir com o evento dentro da lógica do espetáculo, pelas lentes da câmara pois fora delas ele não existe. Mesmo que quisessem ajudar não conseguiam descobrir um sítio onde a ajuda fosse realmente precisa, e não apenas simulada, isto porque o próprio espaço é posto em causa, disperso pelas fortes rajadas. Ao tentar chegar ao centro da tempestade o furacão informativo afasta-nos para o único espaço que resta: o simulacro da catástrofe, sobre o qual a única ajuda possível é também simulada, apenas a forma ou modelo da ajuda, pois mesmo que não tenha nenhum objetivo concreto ou ajude alguém em particular ela cumpre a sua função significativa, em par com a profusão de imagens e informações que sugam o real do evento como os ventos sugam oxigénio em ciclones — the letter kills, the image kills and the media massacres, the information overwhelms the event. O virtual ultrapassou o real, os militares fazem campo numa estrada de terra batida, limpam as árvores da via e vão-se embora: o problema acabou, o resto são os vestígios do real insimbolizável constituído como o verdadeiro objeto da limpeza. Como pode o governo central aplicar medidas sobre algo que não existe, ainda por cima sendo já tradicionalmente toldado pelos filtros difusos da burocracia, quanto mais tendo em conta os da imagem (democrática?) ?
Podem apenas ver televisão. A verdadeira destruição foi a ficção da representação, ninguém sabe sequer onde é Leiria, e as estradas pra lá chegar estão alagadas. A impotência do espectador é exacerbada pelo tom culpabilista do presidente da câmara, sentimento que contém uma verdade mais profunda do que aparenta, todos são responsáveis pelo novo estatuto da verdade, e no entanto ninguém é, e no entanto um certo prazer é retirado disto tudo, o espectador em frente à televisão é o voyeur perverso até que lhe caia o teto em cima, ou fique sem luz. A tempestade Kristin não existe!!!

Texto de um barbudo esquerdista anarquista lisboeta com uma conta de instagram semi viral

The same illusion of progress occurred with the appearance of speech and then colour on screen: At each stage of this progress, we moved further away from the imaginary intensity of the image. The closer we supposedly approach the real or the truth, the further we draw away from them both, SINCE NEITHER ONE OR THE OTHER EXISTS. The closer we approach real time of the event, the more we fall into the illusion of the virtual. God save us from the illusion of the war.

We are a long way from annihilation, holocaust and atomic apocalypse, the total war which functions as the archaic imaginary of media hysteria. On the contrary, this kind of preventative, deterrent and punitive war is a warning to everyone not to take extreme measures and inflict upon themselves what they inflict on others (the missionary complex): the rule of the game that says everyone must remain within the limits of their power and not make war by any means whatever. Power must remain virtual and exemplary, in other words, virtuous. The decisive test is the planetary apprenticeship in this regulation. Just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in which capital moves.
While this conjuncture does not exclude all accident (disorder in the virtual, it is nevertheless true that the probability of the irruption of those extreme measures and mutual violence which we call war is increasingly low.

The hysteric is irreducible. His means are decoys and the overturning of alliances. Confronted with this lubricity, this duplicity, the paranoid can only become more rigid, more obsessional. The most violent reproach addressed to Saddam Hussein by Bush is that of being a liar, a traitor, a bad player, a trickster. Lying son of a bitch! Saddam, like a good hysteric, has never given birth to his own war: for him, it is only a phantom pregnancy. By contrast, he has until now succeeded in preventing Bush from giving birth to his. And, with the complicity of Gorbachev, he almost succeeded in fucking him up the ass. But the hysteric is not suicidal, this is the advantageous other side to Saddam.
He is neither mad nor suicidal. Perhaps he should be treated by hypnosis?

The Iraqis and the Americans have at least one thing in com-mon, a heinous crime which they (and with them the West) share. Many things about this war are explained by this anterior crime from which both sides sought to profit with impun-ity. The secret expiation of this crime feeds the Gulf War in its confusion and its allure of the settling of accounts. Such is the shared agreement to forget it that little is spoken about this prior episode (even by the Iranians), namely the war against Iran. Saddam must avenge his failure to win, even though he was the aggressor and sure of his impunity. He must avenge himself against the West which trained him for it, while the Americans, for their part, must suppress him as the embarrassing accomplice in that criminal act.

Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they come. Turn deterrence back against itself

Information has a profound function of deception. It matters little what it
"informs" us about, its "coverage" of events matters little since it is precisely no more than a cover: its purpose is to produce consensus by flat encephalogram. The complement of the unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra.

Abolish any intelligence you the event

We should escalate in the virtual (of destruction) under penalty of de-escalating in the real, This is the paradox of deterrence. It is like information, culture or other material and spiritual goods: only their profusion renders them indifferent and neutralises their negative perverse effects. Multiply vices in order to ensure the collective good.

Whence this impunity? Why are we content to inflict a perfect semblance of military defeat upon him in exchange for a perfect semblance of victory for the Americans?

Alas! the problem always remains the same and it is insoluble: where does real violence begin, where does consenting violence end? Bluff and information serve as aphrodisiacs for war, just as the corpses at Timisoara and their global diffusion served as aphrodisiacs for the Romanian revolution.
But, ultimately, what have you got against aphrodisiacs?
Nothing so long as orgasm is attained. The media mix has become the prerequisite to any orgasmic event. We need it precisely because the event escapes us, because conviction escapes us. We have a pressing need of simulation, even that of war, much more than we have of milk, jam or liberty, and we have an immediate intuition of the means necessary to obtain it.

Instead of discussing the threshold of social tolerance for immigration we would do better to discuss the threshold of mental tolerance for information. With regard to the latter, we can say that it was deliberately crossed.

fakelalala muito bom

macacooo

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