Message force multipliers

The true highlight of the statement of the obvious news of Pentagon-organized and defense industry profitting former generals shilling for the Bush administration by pushing for war with Iraq and lying about military 'progress' there is the notion of 'message force multipliers.' It's a wonderful insight into the politics of drive in the circuits of communicative capitalism.

The term can be accented in at least two ways: the force multiplication of messages or the multiplication of message forces.

The force multiplication of messages seem tres militaristic, like adding lots and lots of forces, sending in more and more troops. It's like spam for television (and this is not the same as propaganda; the term isn't useful in an add of constant media, ever present advertising, unavoidable spin). And, what makes it particularly great is that it is spam that is requested, "please, sir (Mr. Bush), I want some more!" It's the ultimate perverse relation to media, wherein the msm are positioned so as to ask to be bearers of the regime's message, they want to be its tools, its instruments. They are the means/medium for it, after all. That's their role, instruments/media for disseminating messages. Force multiplication makes them all the more effective. It enables them to better do what they do, better to serve man (citational gesture to old "Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits" episode).

But the multiplication of message forces may be even better. This suggests a concrete awareness of the affective dimension of media in communicative capitalism. Of course, the Bush administration has excelled in excepting itself from the signifying aspect of language and relying instead on affective. It knows full well that repetition exerts a force, a compulsion, that it has effects independent of any meaning of what is repeated. The impact comes from the repeating.

Likewise, the Bush administration knows how to tie together seemingly stable meanings in ways that rely on these meanings, disrupt them, and generate affects from the tension surrounding the combustion of meaning and non-meaning. One of the most noticed early examples of this was the term "axis of evil." John Stewart mentioned another term last night "non-Iraqi terrorists responsible for 9/11." At any rate, the idea of multiplying message forces is useful because it fully acknowledges that the message is the carrier of a force, an affective force. The goal isn't just 'getting our message out there.' That's so old school, as if people read, think, consider, and understand. The goal is spreading and intensifying the message force. The generals were excellent vehicles for this spreading and distributing. Message force genbots.

Comments

[chakira]

I read the message force multipliers thing totally differently from you. I saw it as using military terminology (psyops was also in there) to define non military problems. To me this highlights the cloistered idiocy of our current military men and not their great brilliance. It is symptomatic of the deep reservoir of faith these folks have for force that they have lost the peace in Iraq after managing to unseat the regime in a matter of days. This really has less to do with spam and systems like that and more to do with cloistered thinking that makes abu ghraib and gitmo seem possible; with people who BELIEVED that the amount of money spent on Guantanamo meant that it was all under control.
The lesson here is that brute force or its army of metaphors approach language and thinking with all the subtlety of a MOAB, that such groupthink aids and abets the creation of the conditions of possibility for atrocities and crimes against humanity and finally that those of us with something to say need only to surreptitiously act in the dead of night, as linguistic terrorists, to inflict unacceptable casualties on these heavily armored but lumbering vehicles of thought. Perhaps there is a need to build critical IEDs.

[Jodi]

What is MOAB and IED?

I disagree, pretty much down the line.

For the military, support for the warfare is a military problem, part of the larger theater of conflict: will the attacking country have the ability to stay in the war? or, will that country's failure to achieve a quick victory enable an effective counter-strategy by the attacked country based on the idea of drawing things out.

Cloistered thinking--again, I disagree. After 9/11 there was strident debate about torture in US media, in US legal circles, and in popular culture (Jack Bauer, anyone?).

Need only act as linguistic terrorists? I don't know what this means, but this sounds way, way too optimistic.

[bob allen]

"better to serve man", "Genbots", I see an (albeit unintended) gendered aspect here, a reification of patriarchy- would it have the same effect if the force multiplier was effected by women? Is the idea of war something like the idea of rape? Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, even the American prison system itself seems grounded in this quasi S&M trip- or would female generals morph into "tough guy" Bonapartist figures, Condi Rice and Hillary in jackboots?

[Jodi]

"better to serve man" is the name of a book that appears in the closing frames of either The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. The joke is that this a cookbook, a book for cooking and serving men.

That the generals were all men isn't surprising given their age and this country. But Madeline Albright, Condi Rice, and, Hillary Clinton are all sufficiently militaristic to slide seamlessly into the role. They don't even need the boots.

Basically, I don't think the term patriarchy applies well to gendered and familial relations today.

[chakira]

Cloistered thinking--again, I disagree. After 9/11 there was strident debate about torture in US media, in US legal circles, and in popular culture (Jack Bauer, anyone?).

I think this only proves that you can have a 300 million person groupthink.

[Jodi]

that's a pretty big cloister.

[Bob Allen]

obviously this "cloisterf**k" is another manifestation of the "decline of symbolic efficiency".

[chakira]

if all the people think the same way then how is it not groupthink

[Jodi]

cloister makes it seem small; groupthink makes it seem like a small-ish group of likeminded people who are wrong because they are like-minded; 300 million people isn't what I'd call a group (it's barely a count). Even if it were a group, saying that they think identically is rather nonsensical, unless what they think is obvious: we think American Idol is broadcast on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.