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Tactical Reality Dictionary: Cultural Intelligence and Social Control
Culture is not just the expression of individual interests and orientations, manifested in groups according to rules and habits but it offers identification with a system of values. The construction of cultural memory and establishing a symbolic order through setting up mental and ideological spaces is a traditional practice of cultural engineering; symbolic scenarios generate reality by mediating an implicit political narrative and logic. Maps of the world radiating an aura of objectivity and marking out the ways of life are exploited as cognitive tools. An image of the world as simulation or map of reality can be highly inductive and that explains the investment in cultural representation. From historiography to education, perception is influenced by mental scenarios that establish the symbolic order. According to Edward Bernays, a pioneer of modern public relations, the only difference between education and propaganda is the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don t believe is propaganda. The development in electronic communication and digital media allows for a global telepresence of values and behavioral norms and provides increasing possibilities of controlling public opinion by accelerating the flow of persuasive communication. Information is increasingly indistinguishable from propaganda, defined as the manipulation of symbols as a means of influencing attitudes. Whoever controls the metaphors controls thought.
96 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2002
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March 13, 2009
Becker, in addition to any other talents he might have (being European?) is also a minimalist electronica artist, releasing under the name "Monoton". With such exciting album titles as "Montonprodukt 07 20y++" (Identified by Wire magazine as one of the 100 most important albums of the 20th century), it is clear that Becker has his own visions of electronic culture's gap between style and substance.
It could be that he determines himself to be its redeemer - styled by some, perhaps himself, as a Hypermedia Researcher, Becker does impress on paper, being curator of many museum-quality works exploring the newly-formed cultural connections provided us by the electronic age - but Becker will need to make a better argument than those afforded to us in the Tactical Reality Dictionary, which is little more than a cleverly-shuffled pack of Anarchist playing cards.
In styling this work a "dictionary" and arranging its treatises alphabetically, he hides a skeleton of a zero-government manifesto while simultaneously (though I'll admit cleverly) giving a false sense of authority to his claims - after all, how could you doubt a *dictionary*?
But doubt you should: specious, with no citations, footnotes or references to other published research, Becker's book reads like a paranoid's guide to everything you encounter on your way to get your driver's license: corporations, surveillance cameras, re-packaging and fuzzing of myth and metaphors, and the ever-present but unnamed "intelligence agencies" are what's *really* wrong with the world, says Becker.
His prose reads like the very worst of the Beat generation strained through mescaline coffee grounds: "Towards the united international hedonistic diversification, critical escapism will dance at the grave of ordinary pancapitalism." What? It's not an error in translation; Becker wrote this book in English. I'm not kidding.
There's a lot worse in this world than having an agenda (and his is clear on a passage on Critical Hedonism: "Humans need to find ways to escape the vicious circle of forced work for wages and imposed leisure..."), but you've got to earn it. There's so much research, so much we have sewn neatly and fairly into the patchwork quilt of empirical human knowledge about how we think and transact as a society, so much Becker could have used to further his case about his claims to social control. And yet, he doesn't.
Not even so much as a description of the Milgram Experiment. Instead, we get headings like "Mezmerized Data", "Hyper Topology", and "Telepresent Contagious Postures" - so many bad portmanteaux in each page, in fact, that I suspect Becker was trying to see how many of them he could get made into shiny new pages on Wikipedia.
I understand that Becker is an artist. I also understand that he has a right to publish in any medium he wants. But to publish a radicalist manifesto under the guise of a dictionary and imply therein that his findings have firmer footing than mere speculation reminds me, and not kindly, of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.
With his dictionary shtick, maybe Becker is seeking to employ the tools of information control he so shrilly decries in his own work. If it's a clever, self-referential joke, I get it. If it's how a futurist climbs the slippery rungs to the top, I get that too. Toffler has been described as "the world's most famous futurologist" by the Financial Times, indicating to me that he's probably the richest, too.
Go get 'em, Konrad. There are a lot of suckers out there.
It could be that he determines himself to be its redeemer - styled by some, perhaps himself, as a Hypermedia Researcher, Becker does impress on paper, being curator of many museum-quality works exploring the newly-formed cultural connections provided us by the electronic age - but Becker will need to make a better argument than those afforded to us in the Tactical Reality Dictionary, which is little more than a cleverly-shuffled pack of Anarchist playing cards.
In styling this work a "dictionary" and arranging its treatises alphabetically, he hides a skeleton of a zero-government manifesto while simultaneously (though I'll admit cleverly) giving a false sense of authority to his claims - after all, how could you doubt a *dictionary*?
But doubt you should: specious, with no citations, footnotes or references to other published research, Becker's book reads like a paranoid's guide to everything you encounter on your way to get your driver's license: corporations, surveillance cameras, re-packaging and fuzzing of myth and metaphors, and the ever-present but unnamed "intelligence agencies" are what's *really* wrong with the world, says Becker.
His prose reads like the very worst of the Beat generation strained through mescaline coffee grounds: "Towards the united international hedonistic diversification, critical escapism will dance at the grave of ordinary pancapitalism." What? It's not an error in translation; Becker wrote this book in English. I'm not kidding.
There's a lot worse in this world than having an agenda (and his is clear on a passage on Critical Hedonism: "Humans need to find ways to escape the vicious circle of forced work for wages and imposed leisure..."), but you've got to earn it. There's so much research, so much we have sewn neatly and fairly into the patchwork quilt of empirical human knowledge about how we think and transact as a society, so much Becker could have used to further his case about his claims to social control. And yet, he doesn't.
Not even so much as a description of the Milgram Experiment. Instead, we get headings like "Mezmerized Data", "Hyper Topology", and "Telepresent Contagious Postures" - so many bad portmanteaux in each page, in fact, that I suspect Becker was trying to see how many of them he could get made into shiny new pages on Wikipedia.
I understand that Becker is an artist. I also understand that he has a right to publish in any medium he wants. But to publish a radicalist manifesto under the guise of a dictionary and imply therein that his findings have firmer footing than mere speculation reminds me, and not kindly, of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.
With his dictionary shtick, maybe Becker is seeking to employ the tools of information control he so shrilly decries in his own work. If it's a clever, self-referential joke, I get it. If it's how a futurist climbs the slippery rungs to the top, I get that too. Toffler has been described as "the world's most famous futurologist" by the Financial Times, indicating to me that he's probably the richest, too.
Go get 'em, Konrad. There are a lot of suckers out there.
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