Arundhati Roy, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (London: Flamingo, 2004), 160 pages.

It is not easy to speak to an empire of violence with an open voice, and gentle, seeing eyes. In a word, in a phrase, this is what Arundhati Roy seems able to achieve. Hers is a voice of disarming decency. It is a voice that has been able, through a behind-the-scenes transformation of which words are but the final mode of appearance, to change outrage into courage, and courage into empathy. Hers is a voice — as anyone who has heard her speak will attest — which reaches through the heart to the true seat of intelligence, the part within us that feels aggrieved by the events we have to witness not merely because they defy an abstract theory of justice, but because they offend that fragile, gentle but enduring, if unnameable, sense shared in moments of solidarity and love about the meaning and home of human dignity.

The courage that Roy turns into empathy is one borne in the resolute defiance of the paranoia and impunity that makes up the common fare of many of the world’s current, supposedly elected, governments. The dignity she defends is that of all peoples everywhere not to be confronted by lies, by manipulations, and not to have to live amid a barrage of petty fascisms. Dignity, to Roy, is not a museum piece of breathless elegance. It is something we must live. It is an urgent possibility. And in general, in the states and societies in which we find ourselves, it is set against the government.

Arundhati Roy is the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things, a debut novel as eloquent as it is profound. She lives and writes in New Delhi. Since 1997 — when The God of Small Things was first published — Roy has been almost exclusively devoted to political writing, that is, to writing in ways which urgently confront — and often reveal — key issues of social concern. As author of The Cost of Living (1999), Power Politics (2002), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), and War Talk (2003), Roy has become, alongside Noam Chomsky (on whom one of the present book’s essays is written), Robert Fisk, Eduardo Galeano, and the late Edward Said, one of the most revered essayists of our time. Her worth is measured not merely in style (like Galeano, Roy blends an impeccable political consciousness with a beauty of the writing hand that both astonishes and liberates). Beyond being a writer — or perhaps because of being a writer — Roy matches to her political sensibility a precision and fearlessness that all but devastates the would-be hegemonial discourse of multinational media.

In this sense, Roy is a contemporary embodiment of an ancient practice: parrhesia — the art of frank speech. She speaks truth to power. The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire is a collection of essays and speeches published or given between June 2002 and August 2003 and written in this vein. It will not make happy reading for the barons of Corporate America or the clones of Universal Empire. But it may be one of the most useful and educative books you could pick up this year, educative understood, particularly, in the meaning given to the word by Marshall McLuhan — as “civil defense against media fallout”.

It is a short book. It is not weighed down. It is a book clearly written as both an exercise in, and a roadmap towards, political liberation. Many things that are said are familiar: you may have thought as she yourself. At times it is repetitive. The raw and unadorned presentation of its contents (no celebratory preface, no context- providing introduction), gives the book an almost eerie or ghostly feel. One wonders how it will be used: where it will find its mark, and what its impact will be. Repeating, in a sense, Nietzsche’s old foreboding challenge, this is a book that dares its reader to poke her nose into the dark workshop of this world. The scene therein is disturbing. Disgusting, even. Roy’s book vibrates with an intense, unmistakable anger at how things are.

Seven chapters make up The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Roy’s subject matter spans from non-violent struggle in India to the run up to and aftermath of the 2003 war on Iraq; from the bankruptcy of “democracy” in a world where everything has a price to the betrayed legacy of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. But the meta-subject is “Empire”, by which Roy understands something both specific and amorphous. Her target is not only American hegemony (though time and again she reveals the hypocrisy and cynicism at the heart of plans for a “new American century”). Empire is more. Empire is the entire process of what is called “globalisation”; it is the entire rise of corporate power; it is the “lunatic asylum” in which we are reared; it is the buying up of countries and people by vested interests that reveals not so much the rise of one nation over others, as the normalisation of iniquity and a mode of division in the protection of privilege. As she says near the beginning of her book, “Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about nations and histories, it’s about power. About the physics of power.” Essentially, Roy’s target is a military-industrial-media class, transnational in reach, of outwardly fascistic tendencies.

The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire is a book of some quite astonishing and moving sections. Her essay on democracy and the “Free Press” — “Instant-mix Imperial Democracy (Buy one, get one free)” — is one of the best you can read on the subject. Democracy, writes Roy, “is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will”. How else can we explain that 10 million people worldwide protested plans for the destruction of Iraq (the global protests held on 15 February 2003), and yet it went ahead anyway? Meanwhile, her essay written for presentation around the time of the anniversary of the 11 September attacks in New York and Washington — “Come September” — is one of the most remarkable essays of the past three years. Here Roy struggles with the memory of other September 11ths: like the one in 1990 when George Bush Sr declared in Congress his intention to wage war against Iraq; the one in 1973 when the presidential palace of Salvador Allende in Santiago was bombed in a CIA-sponsored coup; or the one in 1922 when the British proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, effectively giving the green light for the future State of Israel to emigrate to someone else’s land. “None of us need anniversaries to remind us of what we cannot forget,” she writes. But in reminding us, and the world, that, “there can never be a single story,” Roy reaches out. “It’s not a clever enough subject to speak of from a public platform, but what I would really love to talk to you about is loss.”

“What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole peoples, who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?” Roy doesn’t raise the question as an accusation, or a provocation, she insists, only to “thin the mist a little”. To “say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: Welcome to the World.”

Systematically, through this book, Roy pulls together connections: the connection between market globalisation and new Imperialism (“Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neoliberal capitalism”); between impunity and global security (“the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, aka The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That’s Official”); between the rise of metaphysics in government rhetoric (“If you’re not Good, you’re Evil”) and the abolition of legitimate dissent, civil liberties and democracy at home. A good chunk of the book is taken up with Iraq; the distasteful, circular logic that had oil and engineering companies pitching in funding to a purchased presidency in order to secure contracts for reconstruction (following a war fought by America’s poor) which are basically funded on the back of cuts in social welfare. This aside from the horrible years of sanctions and forced disarmament that led only to one outcome: invasion.

“Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It’s more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.”

The disparity between rich and poor grows as “the connivance of state machinery” — police, courts, even the army — in protecting and furthering corporate interests deepens. The mega- machines of corporate media play their part: “The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.” In sum, “Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are playing for these wars of ‘liberation’ with their own freedoms.”

Is Roy alone? Is she the only one who sees this?

Perhaps this book needs to be seen and recognised as part of a growing critique, the formulation of a new language of critique, freed from past knee-jerk allegiances (international communism, nationalism, “freedom” as though it were virgin in all cases), one no longer fooled by the stated aims of states. In 2000 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published what remains a groundbreaking work, Empire. Here was perhaps the first philosophical and political compendium — a macro- analysis, as it were — of globalisation. It was springing forth from practice, not theory: the practice of the global social justice movement as it emerged in Chiapas, in Seattle, in Prague and in Genoa. Clearly the theme of “Empire” is now a recurring one, gathering strength in a new social formation of opposition. It is telling that this year’s World Social Forum in Mumbai — at which Roy was a keynote speaker — was shadowed by the publication of a book whose very title sums up the present issue according to Roy and a growing collective of intellectual forces at the head of the emergence of a much more vocal, demanding and determined global civil society: Challenging Empires.

In rooting our understanding of “Empire” to the everyday lives of local communities (her opening essay on the Save the Narmada Movement may be the shortest but it is not the least), Roy seeks to energise and liberate a vast constituency of peoples to confront and to “shut down” the march of what clearly to her, though understated, is something akin to the rise of a global fascism. It is not the old fascism of genocidal nationalism as such (though this fascism endures and is linked to the Empire she sees ascending). Rather, it is the fascism of righteousness and concealed structural power — the power of multinationals working in tandem with corporate-Imperial governments, and the challenge to the very possibility of thinking in an age of standardised and impoverished media. In a word, it is the fascism of “the system”, understood correctly, perhaps, as only a voice from the outside could see it. India may be open for business; it may be one of the most rapidly liberalising economies on earth. But for Roy, as was clear to the likes of Galeano in the 1970s when Latin America was in the crosshairs, the gaze of the “Market God” can be nothing but destructive to rights, dreams and lives. It is a system that when necessary believes death, like money, improves people.

If this book must have a downside — and after all, why should it? — it is that all but three of the seven essays have been published in book form already (in War Talk). Moreover, for children of the Internet, all of the present essays are locatable online. But this doesn’t negate the fact that it is a nice book to have in your back pocket. Though Roy is now widely circulated (and soon we’ll all be reading our email from the bathtub), choice of location for reading may in her instance gain importance. Unplug your cable modem. I recommend the outside world: the “aching, broken world”, in her words, that both she and we wake up to every morning.

When Roy draws the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, she means it. The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire is not a book about an imaginary planet. It would be funny, were it not all too real.

Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997), 144 pages.

“We’ve captured light”, boasts Qwest; a high-speed, broadband, fiber-optic network provider.¹ Nice dream. But if every vehicular advance carries within itself its own special accident – as Paul Virilio suggests – what ransom will be paid for technology’s latest hostage? Of the three barriers that make up and protect the physical universe (sound, heat, light) we’ve long broken two. Supersonic flight shattered the first; space rockets and orbital projectiles, the second. If the accident of flight was the contraction of the world (the telescoping of continents, the obliteration of geography), and of rockets the violation of the vertical littoral (universal attraction, the great escape from the Earth, from the ‘pull toward matter’), what possibly awaits our mastery of light? What pathology will be borne of this critical transition? Can we be sure of the subject and object of this third ‘captivation’? Have we captured light, or has light captured us? Enter Paul Virilio with the radical and political Open Sky; his take on the illusion of man’s liberation. It is the most important critique yet written of the ‘age of information’ and the coming paralysis of the virtual dimension.

Virtuality. Rapidity. Globalism. Universalism. Not quite the field of dreams we were told they would be. Indeed, Virilio argues the reverse; the counter-world into which we’re slipping is actually incarcerating us. Not content to destroy dimension we’re now set on eradicating duration; the two in their absence defining the ‘no-place’ of light-speed existence (cyberspace, cyberpace). This ‘slip’, argues Virilio, is felt not only by civilians. The codification of real space, that until our own century was the first principle of urban planning (infrastructure) and population control (biopolitics), is now giving way to the urgency of managing real time (the ‘infrastructure’), with its own array of blockages and asperities, viruses and delinquencies. From a culture of imperial geophysics (the politics of territory; its regularization and mapping) we pass into the ‘state of emergency’ of chronographics (ubiquity, immediacy, information intensity); all of us passive witnesses to the radical recasting of governance and citizenship alike.

This passivity is, for Virilio, latent within information technology. Now that everything arrives on the screen without the incumbent having even to leave, only the control of the real instant will remain; an illusive control that we have already passed over to the domain of sensors, captors and various microprocessing interfaces (DataGlove, DataSuit, trackpad and so on) allowing us to “meet at a distance” (telepresence); indeed, see, hear and feel at a distance (television, teleaudition, tele-tactition). This new generalized remote control, made possible by electromagnetic, now optoelectronic communications, is revolutionizing – argues Virilio – man’s relation to himself, to others, to technology, to politics, and most particularly to the planet itself. Where the last century’s revolution in transportation gave rise to an age of generalized mobility, our own tools of instantaneous transmission are reversing the tendency. With the dissolution of the scale of our human environment (prefigured by the telescope and radicalized by the satellite), the very reality of the world is reduced to nil (or next to nothing), leading inevitably to a ‘catastrophic sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon’ (p. 41). Having lost our sense of the journey in the commutation of space during the industrial age, we now lose departure in the age of electromagnetics and the speed of light.

‘Behavioral inertia’ sets in. A rigor mortis all-too-evident in the soon-to-be-ideal ‘terminal-citizen’; ‘decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the ‘spastic’, wired to control his or her domestic environment without having physically to stir’ (p. 20). In obliterating space, this ‘armchair navigator’ (p. 124) replicates the experience of the astronaut in breaking through the vertical littoral of universal attraction – poking a hole through the sky – only to find that ‘beyond Earth’s pull there is no space worthy of the name, but only time’ (p. 3); a universal inert time, patently self-evident to the passengers of Apollo I1, landing on the lunar region named so aptly thereafter, Tranquillity Base. Back here on Earth, optoelectronics, having exhausted all possible forward acceleration (nothing moves faster than light), will have secured for us all a kind of brutal tranquillity. Walled-in at home with our various interactive apparatuses – a veritable life-support system – and soon even an ‘electroergonomic double’ (the Datasuit, our virtual alter ego), we find ourselves the unwitting victims of a domestic enslavement identical to that of the para- or quadriplegic (p. 16). Our only salvation is to be found in illusion, in ‘flight from the reality of the moment.’² Hence the masochistic popularity of the ‘virtual dimension’; which is of course nothing of the kind, ‘existing’ as it does quite literally nowhere. The circle is squared. A perfect panopticism where the inmate runs to the prison guard for protection against the institution within which he finds himself!

A radical dislocation, indeed physical removal from the space of politics and political existence. An individualism, as Virilio suggests, that has ‘little to do with a liberation of values’ (p.11). ‘Service or servitude, that is the question’ (p. 20) No one, of course, is informed in advance of this informational downside, nor of the immediate physiological pathology of having ‘everything within one’s reach’: the surreptitious obsolescence rendered on the body (in particular the muscles, but soon also memory and consciousness) through the proliferation of ‘remote control’. Much of Open Sky is in fact devoted to this very question; the revolution that follows that of transportation and transmission (bear in mind that we’ve scarcely come to terms with either of these, especially the latter). This ‘third revolution’ – that of transplantation – is, for Virilio, a natural consequence of the commutation of real space and the universalization of real time associated with the proliferation of transportation and transmission technologies respectively. Having nowhere left to go by way of extension, and no time by which to get there in duration, we find suddenly an inversion of the technological trajectory. Reductionism and miniaturization take over where networking and urbanization left off; mechanical communication supplanted by ‘electromagnetic proximity’.

The profound nature of this inversion is, for Virilio, seen best in the microphysical invasion of our very bodies by the ‘nanomachines’ of biotechnology. This invasion – of all kinds of stimulators, grafts and implants, quite apart from the usual array of prostheses – is reversing, he argues, the very principle that has hitherto determined the social history of technology. Instead now of inhabiting machinery (the motor car, the elevator, the moving walkway, etc.) for the sake of conserving one’s own energy (what Virilio calls ‘the law of least effort’), now – in the age of telepresence – it is energy that instantaneously inhabits andgoverns us (p. 54). The “tragedy of the fusion of the ‘biological’ and the ‘technological” (p. 57) is thus that we lose – potentially – the very being of intentionality. Convenient for those that profit, politically, socially and economically from this “total, unavowed disqualification of the human in favor of the definitive instrumental conditioning of the individual.”³ We shouldn’t forget that such ‘self-reproducing automata’ were the very dream of cybernetics in the first place.⁴ And hasn’t the idea of ‘zero-intelligence’ not gained a certain currency in mainstream economics?⁵

Such coincidences are hard to swallow. But those that govern might be losing out also. As Virilio writes; the ‘journey without a trajectory’ becomes ‘fundamentally uncontrollable’ (p. 19). Like the Formula I racing cars outgrowing the capacity of the circuits upon which they compete, so information at light speed is not only eliminative of the civitas. It also provokes a radical insecurity at the very heart of the pentagon of power; though who, we might ask, is better equipped to cope with such ‘information shocks’? The possibility nonetheless is opened, argues Virilio, of a ‘generalized accident’ supplanting the ‘specific accident’ that has hitherto dogged our experience of rapidity (the shipwreck, the derailment, the car crash). Though good news for no one, it is interesting to speculate as to what use this new social threat (the information bomb that replaces the atomic one) will be put, perhaps not so much by the terrorist-hacker as by the State itself. Could it be that the accident of instantaneous interactivity is working as a new form of social deterrence, akin to that which accompanied the nuclear umbrella; ensuring the hyperproductivity of whole societies through a constant regime of displacement for the fear of being ‘caught’ in the wrong time and place as the accident happens? Not so much a vision of the sedate paraplegic as a hyper-frantic DataGlove making all sorts of weird gestures in the effort to endlessly delocalize the individual who was in fact nowhere anyway.

What Virilio proposes in response to all this–to the desertification of the world’s surface (inherently dematerializing duration), to the inertia-point of collision with real-time (entailing not only behavioral immobilism but the end of history itself), to the inward turn of technology on the human organism, not to mention the virtualization of perception and the frightful demographic consequences of not only acting at a distance but now even loving at a distance (cybersex)–is a radical new ecology and ethics of perception. New, for as Virilio sees it, environmentalism has consistently failed to question the ‘man-machine dialogue’, and most especially the birth of machinic temporality. By way of a corrective, Virilio asks that we engage the event at the speed it occurs; bringing forth not only a ‘true sociology’ of interactivity, but a ‘public dromology’ of the pace of public life (p. 23). A ‘grey ecology’ (‘speed destroys color’) would no longer deny the pollution of the ‘lifesize’ or ‘scope’ of the planet – or matter in general – by our various tools of technological proximity. On the other hand, an ‘ecology of images’ would mark a ‘conscientious objection’ to the hold of the public image by photo-cinematographic and video-infographic “seeing machines’. For with the speed of light we are not only talking of the de-location of the event (the confusion of here and there, now and then), but also a radical visual distortion of the event. As Virilio reminds us, until our own century man’s perception of existence – of time and space, the Earth in its detail – was bound, acknowledged or not, to universal gravitation: precisely the force by which we measure the world, seeing with our own eyes the near and the far, the high and the low, depth and perspective, extension and duration, dimension and position. An ‘ethics of perception’ engaging the event necessarily would question the ‘immediacy’ of an image whose speed far outstrips the ‘escape velocity’ hitherto necessary to launch a vehicle off the Earth and into the stratosphere (now infosphere); breaking open the sky, stripping all weight (and meaning), a radical ‘flattening’ of reality and perception.

Taken together Virilio’s grey ecology and ‘hyper-vigilance regarding immediate perception’ constitute a bold reaffirmation not only the life of the planet, but our own lives, our memories, the anima of our souls; everything that distinguishes us from mere automata. The right not to be rushed. The right to find distances – the true measure of the world – in one’s own heart. The right to screen-out motorized appearances; to affirm one’s freedom of perception and imagination. The right to protect the meaning of our immediate environment, our loved ones, the very bodies around us, from the stream of sequences rendering reality less than relative, if not irrelevant by optoelectronic fetishism (p. 90). Ultimately, Open Sky is about a kind of politics that is not so virtual. What Virilio ends up taking on – and he says as much himself – is the whole question of being; ‘of being hereand now, being located in this world’ (p. 67). His re-reading via ‘dromology’ (his own neologism for the ‘science of speed’) is both courageous and profound, taking its place alongside the nomadic materialism of the likes of Deleuze, the pataphysical irony of Baudrillard, as well as the microphysical, resolutely political investigations of Foucault, as one of the most important of all rethinkings of the nature of the question of man and technology.

It is this rethinking that will secure Virilio’s reputation as one of the most innovative and challenging writers of our time. In the shorter term, Open Sky is yet further evidence of the practical and immediate significance of this rethinking: taking on, as it does, the present in the name of returning truth; liberating the reader from the radical dissimulations of the age of information; swimming back stream in the defense of society. When the stakes are so high – the future political view of community, the very horizon of the species one can only hope that the voice of Paul Virilio will not be lost in the endless noise of media pollution faced by us all in this age of universal communication.