THE UNHOLY TRINITY

She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself 'It's the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.'

'How are you getting on?' said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.

Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. 'It's no use speaking to it,' she thought, 'till its ears have come, or at least one of them.' In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.

'I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, 'and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak -- and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them -- and you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground -- and I should have croqueted the Queen's hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!'

I am not nor ever have been a professional journalist. I do read the British papers, either in print or on line, where the BBC is first port of call. With the current revelations, which still have to fully play out, beginning to reveal the full extent of the incestuous relationship between the press, the government and the metropolitan police there are still apologists who claim that ‘we need a free press.’ One such tabloid yob hack whose name I don’t remember nor care to said this on Question Time last night. By ‘ free ‘ he presumably means free to listen to other people’s private messages, free to set up ridiculous staged entrapments that add nothing to our knowledge of what is actually going on amongst those of power and influence but simply deflect attention and appeal to the base instincts and prurience. Free to behave with gross indifference to human decency and purely selfish motives, to create stories where none exist and to stoke up loathing and hatred of people that have already been caught and punished for certain types of crime, usually sexual.

As I say, not having been in professional journalism I was surprised when someone who is showed me his newspaper actually had an office within the Houses of Parliament, as did most of the others. At that time he worked for the Sunday Mail. Sky News have their political journalists in an office in Millbank Tower, the same building that houses Conservative Central Office and which was attacked in the protests against cuts. All the main papers except one, the Guardian, are commercial shareholder companies which exist primarily to make profit. In that way they are no different from a private utility company or any other business. The lack of regulation of the financial and banking sector, systematically dismantled over the 18 years of Conservative government and left virtually unregulated by the Blair and Brown led Labour Party produced the near economic meltdown and bail out that has been well documented. The lack of commitment to intervene in the precious free market led to the re-nationalisation of the railway infrastructure only after people were regularly dying in a series of crashes caused directly by the withdrawal of adequate maintenance by the more loosely regulated ‘ Railtrack. ‘ The new Labour spin merchants could not even bring themselves to utter the word Nationalisation, which is what it was, and even as of today the train operators, with one which again had to be Nationalised because of its failure to provide an adequate service, Southern, are a rag bag of private companies receiving huge subsides and charging outrageous prices.

Back to the unregulated, or rather self-regulated press. This self-regulation is precisely the absurdity that was first used in relation to the deregulated financial services ‘ industry‘. This is what News International say they are doing, with the CEO of News International leading an investigation into practices while she herself was the Editor of the News of the World. And that is what the Metropolitan Police have said they have been doing : investigating themselves as to why they did not prosecute anyone other than one ‘rogue journalist ’ for the last ten years. Remember Nick Leeson, the ’ rogue trader ’ who brought about the collapse of Barings Bank ? Remember that bullshit ?

Nothing was done to improve regulation as the free market is sacrosanct.

What the politicians have been doing is bugger all. The opposition have been given an empty goal with the frankly incredible appointment of Coulson as Tory’s spin doctor and Ed Milliband finally having found a voice, although as recently as a week ago he and members of his crew were still waiting on the newspapers, or rather the Guardian, primarily, to make the running. He has now been arrested. I would like to see Murdoch in the dock.

Again, as on so many issues, there has been a cigarette paper between the major political parties with supine acceptance and connivance with the major players in the news business being the the way of both Labour and Conservative leaderships, with Murdoch and his cronies having been especially revered and/or feared. Even the BBC do not look particularly good in the way they continually sit on the fence and fail to look outside the cosy self enclosed world of this unholy trinity of the press, the government and the police, who are given currently hours of airtime presenting them doing their work, which they are paid to do, completely uncritically and without any social context. They also routinely give important positions to ex-Murdoch employees such as Andrew Neil with his execrable politics programme in which he seems to be continually seeking to remind viewers that he is not being paid very much ( then fuck off back to News International ) and sinecures to ex-politicians such as the pompous creep Michael Portillo, who gets to swan around the country on First Class trains giving his deeply uninteresting observations and also appears as a pundit on Neil’s show. This nauseating spectacle is another supposed to present ' politics ' and its self-contained mirror of 'the media' is at last being shattered and exposed for the corrupt poxy sham that it is.

The next area that needs some illumination is corruption in local government where again there is far too close and cosy a relationship between certain private companies and Council officers and very little scrutiny from outside given that the local press is almost non-existent in its influence. I am thinking here about the Tory flagship Borough Wandsworth, where developers St George have been allowed to build pretty much anything they want in vast areas of the borough with no regard to the needs of the existing community. There is also a security company called ADT who seem to get virtually all contracts for CCTV throughout the borough. Nearly all Councillors are multiple property owners in the borough and have no declared occupation. I do not believe any sign on.

The Ecstacy of Communication

This seems particularly relevant and of significance given the growing obsession with so-called social networks and the intrusion of the internet into almost every part of contemporary life. It is a passage from ‘ The Ecstasy of Communication ‘ written by Jean Baudrillard published in 1983.

We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation ; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look, every image. The obscene puts an end to every representation. But it is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in pornography; today there is a whole pornography of information and communication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all functions and objects in their readability, their fluidity, their availability, their regulation, in their forced signification, in their performativity, in their branching, in their poly-valence, in their free expression…

It is no longer then the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure ; on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-the-visible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication.

The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contractual and motivational obscenity of today. The former clearly implied a type of promiscuity, but it was organic, like the body’s viscera, or again like objects piled up and accumulated in a private universe, or like all that is not spoken, teeming in the silence of repression. Unlike this organic, visceral, carnal promiscuity the promiscuity that reigns over the communication networks is one of superficial saturation, of an incessant solicitation, of an extermination of interstitial and protective spaces. I pick up my telephone receiver and its all there ; the whole marginal network catches and harasses me with the insupportable good faith of everything that wants and claims to communicate.

In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extroversion of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies.

…with communication and information, with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia. No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking, but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic : too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.

What characterizes him is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defence, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer produce himself as mirror.

He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence.