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CULTURAL POLITICS 339 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2005 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 1, ISSUE 3 PP 339–352 DEMOCRACY OF EMOTION PAUL VIRILIO Translated and Introduced by Julie Rose “Democracy of Emotion” seems almost eerily apt in the wake of the global disaster that occurred around the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004.1 Now known as “the Asia Tsunami”, the series of tsunamis that were thrown up by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra represent a global accident by anyone’s definition. An ecological accident, though, and not one of the Chernobyl kind, which was entirely man-made, but an act of God. That makes it an interesting kind of “test case” for Virilio’s pivotal notion of how the electronic relaying of our reality has hijacked democracy in a mediatized, claustrophobic world in which we all see the same images at the same time on the screens that have become our ubiquitous horizon and accordingly feel the same emotions – instantly, and with panic dominant among them. With close to 300,000 dead – the exact toll will never be known – the “Asian tsunami” was of a magnitude of approximately one hundred times that of September 11. It was on an intercontinental scale, directly hitting Indonesia, Thailand,Sri Lanka,India,parts of western Africa and sundry islands scattered about the Indian Ocean. It also directly hit PAUL VIRILIO TAUGHT FOR MANY YEARS AT THE ECOLE SPÉCIAL D’ARCHITECTURE IN PARIS. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF, AMONGST NUMEROUS OTHER BOOKS, WAR AND CINEMA: THE LOGISTICS OF PERCEPTION, OPEN SKY AND ART AND FEAR. > CULTURAL POLITICS 340 PAUL VIRILIO the world at large, as the many thousands of locals going about their business were joined, as victims, by international travelers enjoying the resort life offered by some of the poorest tropical paradises on the planet. Indirectly,as per Virilio,the entire “global village” gasped,as print media and television relayed images of every phase of what looked like a Biblical curse unfolding, from the sucking back of the seas on beaches suddenly frozen in time, to the onslaught of the roilng waves, with people flailing about in the foam, many of them soon to disappear, and rivers of shattered building materials, cars, white goods – the flotsam and jetsam of civilized life – surging through reconfigured landscapes to end in a limbo of mud that answers perfectly to the kind of “expressionism” Virilio describes here. Such images were relayed on a loop, a panic replay, reminiscent of the WTC sequence that has never stopped popping up since that terrorist attack – though with much greater restraint as befitting a humanitarian crisis so excessive as to be unfathomable – and this televisual notion of a repeat has been joined by an actual physical repeat, three months down the track, with a fresh earthquake not far from the last killing, to date, at least 1500 people, nine of them Australian rescue workers whose “Sea King” helicopter went down during a mission. Such sudden and shocking loss of life, in “natural” or man-made terror, has become so commonplace, so much a part of our mental landscape, that Australian surfers have evolved their own mourning rituals, involving the observance of silence by boardriders in ring formation out on the water. What kind of democracy such acts might represent is hard to define and clearly not all gloomy. But the line between orchestration of emotion – for a specific campaign – and synchronization of emotion – as a condition of reality – is a very fine one, easily swamped, when everything is spectacle. Was the global relief effort the tsunami devastation spawned one of the most heartening expressions of solidarity and compassion we have seen recently? Or was it a large-scale manifestation of the administration of “humanitarian” aid from the haves to the voiceless have-nots, reinforcing that divide? It was no doubt democratic, but in the vacant sense of a cheerful consensuality overcoming, for perhaps only a moment, a denial of humanity that has become a general rule as the democratic stage is transformed into a humanitarian stage. It is also political despite such...

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