The terroristic hypperrealism of our world, a world where a 'real' event occurs in a vacuum, stripped of its context and visible only from afar, televisually. Here we have a sort of surgically accurate prefigurement of the events of our future: events so minimal that they might well not need take place at all — along with their maximal enlargement on screens. No one will have directly experienced the actual course of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them. A pure event, in other words, devoid of any reference in nature, and readily susceptible to replacement by synthetic images. -- Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil
I pilfered the above quote from a passage in which Baudrillard described a 1987 football match between Real Madrid and Naples. The match was not an ordinary match. It was a European Cup match. It took place at night. And, it was played in an empty stadium. The International Federation barred fans from the stadium because of the actions of over-zealous Real Madrid supporters at an earlier match. Fans besieged the outside of the stadium. They struggled to break through the barricades. They wished to experience the game from inside the stadium. They didn't get in. They were erased. The match went on as planned and was televised throughout the world.In this example of "the terroristic hyperrealism of our world," the fans were "surgically" removed from the context of the event. No fan "experienced" the event. But millions of fans, crowded around a television, the center-piece of the postmodern household, watched an image of the event.
The image became reality."It Isn't Magic: Putin Opponents are Made to Vanish From TV," which appeared on the front page of today's NY Times, reminded me of Baudrillard. In a brazen attempt to create Russian political reality, Putin's political opponents, like Mikhail G. Delyagin, have been airbrushed from television screens. Clifford J. Levy writes, "Not only were his remarks cut — he was also digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily, leaving his disembodied legs in one shot.)
"The "airbrush" is a weapon of "virtual assassination." : CYBER WET JOBS
The incomplete, partial airbrush is not the "hasty" work of technicians, but a calculating message. The partial erasure is both a threat and a promise. It functions as a warning to other dissidents. It calls attention to Delyagin's erasure to instill fear in the minds of potential dissidents. In addition, his incomplete elimination subverts itself by suggesting that dissent can occur "televisually," on the sly, as a partially veiled "synthetic image.
"The Kremlin's "airbrush" infects all of Russia's television culture. Television networks, ones controlled by the government and ones nominally independent from the government, have begun to self-censor. They have begun to tell TV personalities who they can and cannot interview. The "airbrush" functions not as a technology of discipline, but as a technology of control. When the "airbrush," or at the very least, the threat of the "airbrush," functions efficiently, individuals control themselves:
"It would be stupid to say that we can do whatever we want," said Mikhail A. Ponomaryov, a network news director. "If the owner of the company thinks that we should not show a person, as much as I want to, I cannot do it.
"The government that controls the media, controls reality. Through the strategic use of mass-media, governments perpetrate terroristic acts against the "real." The real is dead, it has been "surgically" replaced and re-figured as "synthetic images." Unsurprisingly, few people have noticed, and even fewer care.
