Powdered faces. Footlights. Feminist women conversing. The topic turns to Gandhi, to Gandhi’s difficult – for the woman at his side – marriage, and his sexuality, based on ascetic abstinence. After a while, the woman speaking explains: »I’m not concerned with India at the present moment. It’s more a matter of showing how men make their sexuality, embedded, as it were, in cement blocks, […] a vehicle for seizing power. Empires of this kind«, she continues, »are not established affirmatively by taking possession, but negatively, through renunciation, through a ban on touching.«

Negative imperialism

Alexander Kluge tells this story (1) to bring back to mind one of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas: »negative imperialism«, as the Marxist theorist and politician called the principle of »first steal, then throw away« in her diary in 1917. The notion encapsulated in these cursory words can also be read as a motto that is extremely appropriate with regard to countries recently conquered in the allegedly »new« mode of war, such as Kosovo, Afghanistan and soon probably Iraq – the reason the recent demonstrations of power have been so high-handed (2) is probably that the empire has renounced its claim to power at the material level. This would mean that in »negative imperialism« power is structured as a paradox. This structure can be described analogously by looking at the »war room«. For, although the prototypical power centre is fundamentally secret and inaccessible, there is an extensive repertoire of concepts about it that has a way of creating an impact: anything that withdraws from the world and remains in concealment feeds the collective imagination in a particularly effective manner, and can exercise power by means of omission.

Anyone who looks at all imaginable representations of the »war room« - official and unofficial, documentary and fictive images – will notice its Janus-faced character. The »war room« stands first of all for an insight into the structure of power and thus not least for a promised solution to numerous puzzles: how are strategic decisions made? How is control exercised?
At the same time, it stands for a type of power operating in a way that is closed to the public and hermetically isolated. It is seldom that its incubative, mysterious, laboratory character is not stressed: here, power is focused, intensified, canalized and discharged; here, the outside world is meticulously recorded, analyzed and controlled. These are two sides of a coin that is obviously also traded as a currency unit in pop culture.

A panoptical look at cinema over the past fifty years, especially spy- and political thrillers, war films and science fiction, also shows two canonic war-room patterns there that have a complementary relationship to one another. Here, the »war room« is, above all, a space that eludes the gaze: only mediatized body parts of the rulers penetrate to the outside, a paradigm that is made still more extreme in »Mullholland Drive« (2001), for example. »The conspiracy of power in the dream factory«4 is here reduced to an isolated room, whose sole furnishing consists of black wall curtains and whose sole piece of equipment is a microphone – set up at an absurdly great distance to a wirepuller whose small stature can be read as encapsulating the model of the dematerialization of power. In contrast to this is the paradigm of the »war room« as a pulsating nerve centre, flooded with light. Here, the world has fallen into measurable elements and is represented numerically, statistically and graphically. “Behind Enemy Lines« (2001) epitomizes this model. Here, during a war situation, soldiers operate in a war room that is immersed in blue light, while the displays and control panels around them glow with a yellowy red light. This layer of colour, which encodes the »war room« as a production studio for TV, video or music, gives an insight into the connections between the arms industry and the entertainment industry, and thus the decentralized nature of contemporary power as cited in the “delocalized” concept of power.5

Absent and placeless

There are very many war-room images current in pop culture. They take literally this »delocalized« concept of power of »negative imperialism« – most clearly, they depart from notions of a classical centre of power intended for official, self-promoting functions. In Japanese manga, for instance, the »war room« is often removed from the surface of the image and hidden under the earth.6 In other narrative, fictive contexts it is located far outside the city in uninhabited areas or in severed-off vehicles, as in »The Man with the Golden Gun« (1974), for example, where the control centre of the British Secret Service is situated in a shipwreck in Hong Kong Harbour, a grey zone outside territorial jurisdiction. The notion of the »war room« as a mobile control centre is also equally widespread: spaceships, decoupled railway carriages, limousines, planes, vans and submarines – political adviser Oscar Valparaiso7 and financier Eric Packer8 are the most recent role models of a protagonist that cultivates a nomadic lifestyle of power in potent vehicles.

As far the imagification of the »delocalized« concept of power is concerned, the »war room« is primarily of interest because of its furnishings. »Swarms of flat displays«9, which, in Valparaiso’s domestic »war room«, play back information from all over the world, create an »immersive« environment that, through its concentration, robs the data of their assignable sources: that is, of their locatability. Thus, in the »war room«, a non-location is simulated: the manipulating subject has the feeling of being in control but, at the same time - as if it itself were to feel the essence of power - the feeling of losing control. Eric Packer, for instance, continually experiences discrepancies between the images of reality delivered by his monitors (fed with data from security, finance and news networks), the images of reality that he perceives through the windscreen of his luxury car, and the images that descend upon him when he goes out onto the unsheltered street.

The loss of control that Packer undergoes as a result of this experience of reality is diametrically opposed to the fantasies of omnipotence catalyzed by the »war room«. This loss of control also contradicts the idea that is probably best expressed in the slogan of those military advisers and PR consultants who would like to see strategic superiority understood in terms of superiority of information: »information is power«. In contrast with official representations of the »war room«, the desire to assign power a location – the spectrum ranges, incidentally, from »garden«11 to »engine room«12 – has, in the pop-cultural war-room image, found a field for projections that expresses the paradoxes inherent in the »delocalized« concept of power in »negative imperialism«: in the negation of its nature as a control room, the »war room« illustrates the dominant form of power today, not least by raising the question of whether the latter is still a controllable – and thus also legitimate – instrument.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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