Signals of Barbarism

Night attack with phosphorous bombs, Gondrecourt, Aug. 15, 1918 | Signal Corps photo by Sgt. J.J. Marshall. Library of Congress.

Between 1914 and 1918, planet Earth emitted an extended electro-radio signal, the kind capable of a one-way transmission of information through space. The signal was not emitted intentionally to communicate the presence of human civilization on planet earth (as was the case of the 1974 Arecibo message) but unintentionally as a byproduct of the efforts of the nations of the world to modernize in the course of the First World War. During this interim, so large a percentage of industrialized nations had achieved such a high level of technological advancement that the planet would soon qualify as hosting a Type I civilization, a designation created by the Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, and reserved for those civilizations that possessed the capacity to harness the energy of the planet. Were that energy to be directed toward catastrophic ends—that is, utilized for warfare as it was in those fateful four years—then it could be said that the ensuing devastation would indicate that there is no signal of civilization that is not at the same time a signal of barbarism.

My claim derives from one made by the German critic Walter Benjamin, who asserted in “On the Concept of History” (1940) that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But even before then, Benjamin had already observed just this irony in terms of one-way signaling and cosmic radio-frequency emission. In a section of One-Way Street (1928) entitled “To the Planetarium,” Benjamin addressed the aura of technologically advanced warfare, arguing that discoverable “in the spirit of technology” was an “immense wooing of the cosmos...enacted for the first time on a planetary scale.” Following Benjamin, we might recategorize planet earth as an example of Type I barbarism, especially given its civilization’s ongoing tendency to direct planetary resources toward total destruction.

Despite technology’s capacity to effect annihilation on a planetary scale, Benjamin’s understanding of technology as enabling an “immense wooing of the cosmos” expressed his search for “sacramental possibility” in such technologies (as Eugene McCarraher has proposed). Moreover, Benjamin’s expanded definition of the sacramental informed his genealogy of modernity’s religious origins. A boosted signal might reinitiate a premodern intercourse with the heavenly, one which had, in modern times, devolved into merely observing the starlit sky from an analytic distance. Closing the gap, Benjamin argued, would result in a “commingling of cosmic powers.” Such an achievement would be enabled by the unrivaled harnessing of energy for the battles of the First World War, a massive production that was fueled by the internal combustion engine—which powered tanks, aircraft, and submarines—and by hydropower and coal fields—which provided energy for high-frequency currents of telegraph, telephone, and wireless communications. As Benjamin provocatively asserted, wartime energy extraction—from aerial space to ocean depths—could paradoxically be seen as deployed in the service of a sacramental order.

One reading of this section of One-Way Street might suggest that a technologically assisted monitoring of the cosmos is a continuation of, rather than a departure from, the magical thinking and superstition that informed a premodern attitude toward the cosmos, only at a more advanced and rationalized level. As Benjamin put it, “In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form....” The technological reorganization of human apperception—or physis—does not deny the “sacramental possibility” of cosmic coalescence, however. Throughout his account of cosmic wooing in “To the Planetarium,” he implied the ecstasy of heavenly contact, suggesting that such an experience was potentially available to the modern individual. I emphasize “potentially” here, because Benjamin acknowledged that such an experience was nowhere obviously available to the modern individual, due in no small part to materialist attempts to dismiss the idea of cosmic contact as metaphysical fallacy. To deny the human desire for such an experience was, as Benjamin remarked, to commit a “dangerous error.” At the same time, he admitted that the pursuit of sacramental union had become soaked in blood. Technology had not eliminated a human desire for cosmic connection, but it had, without a doubt, contributed to a pervasive sense of alienation.

For example, Benjamin observed that early modern science had emphasized “an optical connection to the universe,” making its brilliance appear close enough to touch. Tragically, this optical achievement had, at the same time, consigned the individual to reflect on an unbridgeable distance, thus undermining what had once been experienced as the ecstasy of communal contact with the cosmos. But this did not extinguish the human individual’s desire to connect with the starry sky nor to seek out communal experience.

Throughout One-Way Street, Benjamin referenced the dialectical play between distance and proximity in post-war expansion of military technology for peace time applications and energy production by invoking, among other examples, a red neon sign and the “fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt” and “a telephone on the desk shrills at every moment.” Like the ringing telephone on the desk, the intensification of wooing “strikes again and again” in a ceaseless striving for cosmic commingling by means other than war (even as Benjamin’s descriptions of these technologies implicitly recall the war). Echoing the optical connection to the universe described in “To the Planetarium,” Benjamin later explained in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” (1936-39) that there existed along with the development of new technologies an “urge [that] grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range.” Advanced communications technologies in the postwar era—whether in the form of photography, cinema, radio, or telephone—may have bridged great distances and provided opportunities for communal experiences, but the continuation of cosmic wooing had yet to be consummate cosmic rapture. Lamentably, the energy resources that had been mobilized for war were now put in the service of sustaining a Type I civilization that was no less barbaric in the war’s aftermath and would contribute to the brutalities of subsequent wars. It is this sense of prolongation—or the forestalling of the “cosmic commingling” that Benjamin had spoken of—that provides a means to trace the continuity of techno-civilizational barbarism from H. G. Wells’ infelicitous aphorism “the war to end war” to our digitally enhanced culture war of a Hobbesian “all against all.”

In keeping with this delay of a transcendent salvation and end of time (the deferred eschaton), Benjamin’s reckoning with the energetic efflorescence of the battlefield anticipated a coming perpetual war, that was, and continues to be, perpetrated through the means of energy capture and electronic communications. If, as Carl von Clausewitz famously theorized, war is the continuation of politics by other means, then, Benjamin’s prolepsis reverses the Prussian general’s thesis—politics is the continuation of war. (Such a reversal was explicitly stated by Michel Foucault, who inverted Clausewitz’s proposition in Society Must Be Defended.) By exposing military infrastructure and its pulsations, Benjamin provided a glimpse at what lay beneath the future (dis)ordered surface of so-called peacetime politics. The annihilations of the previous—and supposed last that turned out to be only the first—world war continued on in the form of a technologically advanced civilization, where a reduction of violence provided an excuse for overt expressions of aggression.

It may seem that the dialectics of technologically enhanced calamity and idyll never ends, but the ongoing wooing of the cosmos tends to take on perturbances, as exemplified by our present-day culture wars. Here, an all-against-all digital battleground and its symmetry of outrage has captured the political classes and provides the basis for an ongoing threat of mutual destruction. Energy capture powers signals that crisscross the planet and infrastructural order engenders political disorder, sustaining the vitalities of petty vindictiveness and moral indignation. In keeping with the premise of an ongoing “commingling of cosmic powers,” but in not fulfilling its sacred promise, our current culture wars continue to generate “isotropic emissions” (radio-frequency signals that radiate with equal intensity and in all directions), thereby further intensifying and prolonging the earth’s transit signature.

Perhaps the figure that receives these signals is none other than Benjamin’s famous “Angel of History,” as described in his “On the Concept of History.” Only, by my account, the Angelus Novus is a fully equipped cosmonaut, capable of taking readings of planetary information transmissions. From the view of the cosmos, what inhabitants of planet earth take to be indications of progress—or a causal “chain of events,” observed from on-high—is to the angel-cosmonaut merely the atmospheric “storm” that constitutes the electronic leakage from “one single catastrophe,” reverberating beyond the battlefields of Verdun and Somme. Indeed, there is no signal of civilization that is not at the same time a signal of barbarism.

Michael J. Golec is Associate Professor of Art and Design History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.