Media and the Death of the
Author
Tactical
Embarrassment
Jen
Liu
By catching powerful entities off-guard, you can
momentarily expose them to public scrutiny. This way, everyone sees how
they work and can figure out how to control them.
- ®TMark, Working Tactics Poster
People still believe in news media It’s a
tenacious faith, possessed by many: the equivalence of "news" and "truth"
in which representation is the product of a thoroughly investigated
physical reality. However, there’s the progress of increasingly
consolidated information-centers and the refinement of communication lines
across vast distances. Through this a technological situation develops
which favors the homogenized trickle-down dissemination of world events,
with a media increasingly dependent on internal sources for information
(as factoids pass from the Associated Press, to CNN, to large networks, to
small town papers). Facts are not checked and new information is not
added, as text-snippet are passed intact from source to
source.
Contemporary media, reduced to a game of Operator, cannot
provide the truth of our tenacious faith. It has few, if any, checks
against misinformation and ‘spin’, and one of several consequences is
susceptibility to use as mouthpiece for select power centers. In the lack
of multiple viewpoints, ideology and economic alignments are expressed not
through deliberate misinformation, but strategic (non)coverage. The
results are brief and partial glosses of world news that are identical
between sources, balanced out by detailed car chases, inner city
shootouts, and puppy-saved-the-day anecdotes — regional, entertaining
stories that reliably dominate the majority of
airtime/print.
®TMark, aware of the dynamics of
contemporary media, exploited this most effective but capricious method of
meaning production. Their mission, to battle corporate America through
"tactical embarrassment", is dependent upon media dissemination. With it,
®TMark, who targeted high-profile entities such as George W.
Bush, Barbie, Beck/Geffen Records, and the New York Stock Exchange, rose
to the status a David giving the big guy a bad migraine.
Here’s a
description of an ®TMark event, according to rtmark.com:
In
April 1999, ®TMark constructed GWBush.com, a website that at
first glance appeared to be that of Republican Presidential candidate
George W. Bush (his website is GeorgeWBush.com).
®TMark's first
version incurred Bush's wrath, and his lawyers sent a threatening letter. . . . By the
time ®TMark's second
version of GWBush.com was published, with much more content, the Bush
campaign had complained to the
Federal Elections Commission.
These attacks resulted in a major international news story,
which was then magnified by Bush's televised response to a reporter's
question about the site: "There
ought to be limits to freedom,". . . . The Bush campaign's
intimidation tactics raised the eyebrows of several constitutional
lawyers, who [argued] that although there ought indeed to be ‘limits to
freedom’, restricting free speech and limiting citizens' access to the
political process was not the proper place to draw the line.
Of
course, ®TMark’s Bush site included some "challenging" content,
like this:
First there was his rambunctious youth, in which he
doesn't deny there was use of cocaine and other drugs. Then, as an
unsuccessful Texas businessman, he was bailed out with millions of dollars
from friends of his Vice-President father. As President, G.W. Bush wants
to create an America in which everyone gets as much forgiveness, and as
many chances
to grow up, as he had.
One of ®TMark’s operational
strategies was to piss off the target enough (through intellectual
property infringements like mirror sites and name usage) that legal
retaliation was guaranteed. Then any and all documents of intimidation —
letters and emails — were handed to news media, in combination with
polished press releases written by ®TMark. Media - print,
network, cable - devoured these newsbites and disseminated
enthusiastically. Retreat on the part of the corporations usually
followed, due to the inevitable friction between their power exploits as
publicized and their long-range PR plans.
®TMark
revealed the corporate obsession with the name, tantamount with
image-management and ownership. But more importantly, ®TMark
revealed the ways they wield control: through active suppression, legal
intimidation. And media served as the voice. With that, it’s possible that
media’s servicing of these provocateurs ran into direct conflict with
classic Marx & Engels on media. M & E on the subject: "The class
which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at
the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby,
generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental
production are subject to it." (The German Ideology) How could
media allow itself to participate in the subversion of the kingpins of
material production (Geffen, Mattel) — which is equivalent to
treason?
If mass media essentially exists to serve corporate
interests, were they fooled by ®TMark, i.e. are they dumb pups
who’ll eat whatever’s steak-shaped — even if it’s poo? Did
®TMark’s mastery of the language/look of the official press
release obliterate media’s ability to see themselves as distributors of
"subversive" content? For this to be true, we must assume that media
follows this line of thought: if it sounds official, it has been
allowed to be official — in process, passing through various
checkpoints of institutional power, or even originating in some node of
institutional power.
Well, yes, in part. That much was clear with
Barbie Liberation, which was nothing more than a slick dupe designed for a
media that would look no further than CNN for a reality check. However,
I’d like to give media-makers a little credit. True or untrue,
®TMark events had the same "entertainment hour" ratings value
as any feel-good anecdote. The stories were novel, flashy, and no one
would piss off the powers that be in giving airtime to these quirky
stories about Big Brother getting a touch hot-headed. As Steve Silberman
of Wired News stated on his coverage of Deconstructing Beck, "it
was, I thought, a piquant little item for a Wired News Friday. I had
written much more weighty stories early in the week; every day can't be
the apocalypse." Plus, the public has an unquenchable appetite for stories
of Big Brother faltering in limited, unthreatening ways, a hallmark of all
stratified societies — from Zeus to OJ. With stories like this, viewership
increases - which directly impacts leverage with sponsors - those big time
corporations.
®TMark offered media news bites on media’s
own terms. This itself starts to destabilize their claims for straight-on
resistance. For ultimately, their attacks on corporations and government
conglomerates, while amusing, didn’t even slightly affect big money’s
ability to exact its needs on a global populace. And of course, the idea
that one might control "powerful entities" by merely knowing "how they
work" is willful hyperbole. The effect they did produce was a media that
was able to preserve their symbiotic relationship with corporate
interests, whilst providing a pressure-cooker vent for the public’s
frustration with the powers that be. However, anything other than a
hard-line critique would concede that ®TMark is more than a
group of apolitical opportunists. They’re tricksters, good at making the
big boys make themselves look very, very bad. In a mainstream art/cultural
climate loathe to touch anything resembling a coherent politic, they’re an
apt model for voicing dissent and dissatisfaction with the economy of
America, preserving baldfaced literalness while striking a balance between
manipulation of and pandering to mass media.
But on the
baldfacedness of ®TMark: they turned the most pomo-chic trick
of all: they chose to be anonymous. Is it practical? Maybe. It’s a lot
harder for corporations to issue a string of threatening phone calls and
fist boys to front doors, if they don’t know what or who ®TMark
is. But what is the link between anonymity — their interpretation of
"corporate branding" - and a critical stance on corporate power? They
appropriate a hallmark privilege of conglomerate power — the power to be
unknown — why, exactly? Does one have to act like a corporation to
fight a corporation? (— no.) Or in dogging corporate posing, are we
looking at just that — posing?
None of us can imagine anything less
mysterious, less sexy, than a bunch of people picketing outside a
corporate office - pimpled and ill-dressed identities splayed out for
public viewing. If, just like ®TMark product, anonymity is
purported to be an appropriation towards the end of critique - it also
eludes a transparency that would have marked the death of
®TMark as not just politics. Who wants to be a po-faced
Protester when one can be an artworld Trickster? Anonymity gives them the
sexy air of the secret agent — we imagine corporate mensches by day,
politicos by night, a Batmanned Bill Gates schooled in media spin. This
translates as a slickly packaged subculture, which the art world, like the
fashion world, desires as its meal-of-choice. Anonymity, a pastiche of
otherness, provides the idiosyncrasy that artishness demands.
Death of the Author
The writer is the blind spot on
any system, adrift; he is a joker, a mana, a degree zero, the dummy in the
bridge game.
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the
Text
Anonymity speaks to a larger
reality of ours of late, a swill of (sub)urbanized individuation,
increasing cultural hegemony, and globalization on various fronts that
strikes at traditional constructions of identity and localized
communities. In an anonymous and atomized citizenry, one is only as one
appears to be, as mediated and produced by various cultural/material
circumstances — and these circumstances are often multiple and partial at
any given point. The Sartrean symptom, alienation from a cohesive sense of
self, blossoms as the pre-industrial triumverate of identity, ownership,
and labor is split.
All of this is intimately linked to a classic
pomo tenet: the author is dead. With alienation from one’s product, the
relationship of product to authorial point of origin is a tenuous link
forever located in the past. For the present and future existence of the
document is owned by its readership - any and every act of consumption
exacted in variable circumstances. This renders meaning a process of
"forever becoming", the stuff of academic nightmares, but also wet
dreams.
With ®TMark, there is an apparent acceptance of
this tenet, and a move to take it further, by unmanning the post of author
altogether. Anonymity and mimicry displace author status. More traditional
models of art or political activism, dependent on polarized interactions,
are replaced by the multiple and contingent. Opposition is preserved, but
it’s manifested in mockery, and the notion of confrontation becomes
convoluted in a play of invention, mass media priorities, and corporate
methods (on the sides of both ®TMark and real corporations).
- Anybody could have performed the initial offensive
acts.
- Everybody talks about it, bringing each piece to
fruition.
- Nobody will claim stake on these acts, except under
the corporate veil of "®TMark".
Anybody, everybody, or nobody, these are the
players at hand.
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