“In the new context
of struggle to the death, there is no place for spurious solutions, no place for
the pursuit of an equilibrium between oligarchic and popular forces through
tacit non-aggression pacts. Oligarchical dictatorships pose the alternative of
beginning to destroy them en- bloc or of accepting them en- bloc: there is no
middle way.”
These are the words
of Regis Debray, the French
radical theoretician who systematized the military and
political doctrine developed and attempted to implement by the romantic
revolutionary hero Ernesto Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's legendary
lieutenant.
His book “Revolution in the Revolution?” has become a primer for guerrilla insurrection.
“Revolution in the Revolution?” focused
its main attack on military line against Mao Tsetung‟s conception of people’s
war, particularly Mao’s stress on mobilizing the peasantry and building up base
areas from which to wage the war. Of course, there is a more fundamental
difference concerning the role of the masses in revolutionary war altogether.
In early 1966 Castro
and Guevara brought the French Professor to Cuba for discussions on guerrilla
war. They asked him to prepare a polemic which would synthesize the experiences
of the Cuban Revolution into a military doctrine and political line suited to
Latin American conditions. The end product was –Revolution in the
Revolution?
He fought in
Bolivia, had been
captured with the guerrilla band led by Che Guevara, and was sentenced by a
Bolivian military tribunal to 30 years in jail. Due to the intervention from persons such as
President Charles de Gaulle, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, he was
released after three Years. He spent five years in the early '80s as a special
advisor on Latin American relations to French President François Mitterrand.
Today,
his obsession shifted from ‘Ideology’ to a new discipline called ‘Mediology’.
Through this he is trying to investigate how
certain abstract ideas, signs and images transferred through intermediaries and
converted to actions. For example, the parables of Jesus of Nazareth has been
reworked and by St. Paul into a body of beliefs known
as Christianity or the writings of Karl Marx were reworked and
transformed into a political program by Lenin. He considered the ideas as part
and parcel of its delivery system. The technologies
of print, the networks of distribution, and libraries worked together to create
a fertile milieu - what is called a "mediosphere" - for its
operation.
This
mediosphere is divided in to three historical ages of transmission technologies:
Logosphere; the age of writing, theology, the
kingdom, and faith
Graphosphere: the age of print, political
ideologies, nations, and laws
Videosphere: audio/video broadcasting,
models, individuals, and opinions
These apparently different historical stages are more like
successive geological strata than quantum shifts from one medium to the next.
To summarize the principle thesis;
The influence of an ideology cannot be
analyzed in ideological terms. The hidden dynamics of these ideas in the
history is reflected in their material forms and sequence of transmission. The
transport of information in time is to be distinguished from the transport of
information in space. The nonbiological, artificial transmission of
acquired features is another name for human culture. The animal communicates
but they do not transmit.
The
aim of this discipline is to destroy the wall that separates technology from
culture, technology experienced as anti-culture and culture experienced as
anti-technology.
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