In our globalised world when received wisdom is that few issues can be resolved effectively outwith supra national and macro economic interventions it was startling and uncomfortable to read about the current situation in the Lebanese city of Tripoli where we are told tensions between Sunni and Alawite communities are spilling over from Syria. I was looking at a map of the territorial boundaries of each community and it was a moment before I took in the scale at the bottom left- showing, at 250 metres, almost the entire width of Alawite territory- a pivotal destabilisation with likely serious impacts on global politics measured in a struggle for 250metres of territory. It is as if the giant state military machines of the twentieth century no longer exist. Does this mean anything? I don ‘t know, if you are old enough to remember the 70’s in the UK it is a model that has a certain familiarity, the micro territory marked out street by street between Protestant and Catholic in six hundred year old iconography and rhetoric. It does seem to suggest that post cold war state military might has taken on a recondite and ritualistic meaning incomprehensible to all but its progenitors, enfeebling it; even where it is deployed, for example in Libya, it appears no longer capable of determining an outcome against an enemy for whom its might is in some sense invisible even as death rains down.
The map of Lebanese Tripoli I was looking at was watermarked proudly with the Microsoft logo, a piece of branding on a map of fear, loathing and death that seemed terribly out of place, all the more so because it struck a discordantly contemporary note in a medievally rooted picture.
Following on this painful but glib segue from conflict to corporate logo I am reminded of a couple of other digital issues I encountered this week, I was speaking to a journalist who works for the Times, a media commentator who was bemoaning that fact the his newspaper’s online edition was behind a paywall, that in effect his journalism was being buried in deathly print whereas his rival who writes for a paper whose online content is free had greater influence and was more likely to be given interesting leaks because of its instant echo in the twittershpere. Self evident but somehow heretical.
On a more positive note I read in the Telegraph a description of Britney Spears as one of the most vague avatars in pop. While the world is full of trite metaphors drawn from the the language of digital media the idea that a pop star is an avatar, an incarnation of themselves but not actually themselves is, I think, a very useful one. The Telegraph felt that vagueness was a negative but It may be that being a vague avatar is smarter then being a precise avatar, leaves a bit more room for interpretation by your followers, more room for them to make of you what they wish. (An aside on vague’s presence in rock- check out Your So Vague by Queens of the Stoneage- a riff on You’re so Vain)
Is it completely unacceptable to cycle from Sunni/Alawite tension to Britney Spears and back to military matters, probably. Perhaps the industrial state military machines are ever more vague avatars of power. Whatever I think I prefer vague Britney to precise death.