Media of Death, Death of the Media I. When the dead and the living still used to treat each other on equal terms, every person was a medium and the media fell outside of the event horizon. Contact with ancestors and future generations was established collectively. The tribe was complete; there was no need for telecommunication with absentees. It is only after the dead depart that there first appears a need for media to keep the lines to the disappeared open: without direct contact with its origins, humanity loses its vital powers. Ritual is a medium, a synthetic channel which allows the living to die in order to regain their lives from the deceased who no longer need theirs. Without such a connection, the dead take revenge by sending uncontrollable cacodemons who can no longer be ritually exorcised. These are not the messengers of dreams but of traumas. By turning the dead into ancestors through careful ceremonies, future unpleasant surprises could be avoided. Rituals were great wild parties in which contact with the past was made in the meantime. The long bacchanal of the deathwatch gave people little time to produce much-needed surplus values, but at least it helped them to overcome their grief within a week or so. When the deceased spirit could no longer be directly connected to, attention shifted to the dead body. After Christianization, the deceased becomes an individual corpse, whose image lingers on for a while in memories or in the little oval above the sideboard. The body has become an image, and promptly appears in the dark as a haunted spirit or phantom. The Christian deceased is a loner who is awarded the inner cinema of next of kin as a dwelling. The connection with origins has been disrupted. In the mass media, the dead even lose this final abode. Nowhere do there occur more deaths than on the personal screen. But the displayed corpses always remain anonymous: they are merely the dead of humankind. This universal community cannot live without them. Without images of death, people forget that they are survivors. If this awareness decreases, then the live report's magic power may well be lost forever. II. The Gulf War distinguished itself from its Vietnam predecessor through the absence of images. The military deprived the media of their dead. Instead, the upset viewers had to derive their drama from the exciting question, "Is this a video game or a real bombing?" When the Iraqi soldiers finally appeared on screen, they turned out to be poor dupes who hailed general Schwarzkopf. The urgent demand for the image of death remained unfulfilled. Even the dying birds along oil-infested beaches turned out to be just file footage. All that remained were a few authentic arms industry ads - and commercials do not usually feature dead bodies. The war was less against Iraq or Saddam Hussein than it was a positive gesture towards the New World Order, in which there are only fellow players in the game of supply and demand, not enemies. The topical media took terrible revenge on the military, as the Kurds in their mountain camps were soon to find out. While the international relief troops were nowhere to be seen yet, the media were already making up for their acute death shortages and instantly transmitting the distressful images worldwide. In order to present the item of genocide so as to reinforce humanity's awareness of being survivors, a few explosives were set off within the collective unconscious. The shocking images of dead babies and dying old ladies represented the destruction of the old cycle from ancestors to posterity. After the dead had not been allowed to appear during the war, they returned elsewhere as uncontrollable disrupters of the New Order. In war, death had found a meaningful context in the media, but Desert Storm's hundred thousand had remained invisible. Now, they reappeared elsewhere and were dying in numbers in a nameless and meaningless catastrophe. The live effect's power derives not from its immediacy, but from its fatal consequences. III. The structure of topicality is that of medieval death; the time of the item, that of the hourglass. Its suspense lies in the fact that its finiteness is predetermined. Every item has its own decisive moment. The announcement, "Charles Jacobs live in Riad" is the final drop, after which the sandglass can be turned around again for the next report. The cut is the scythe in the directors' hands, causing a sudden break in what might otherwise have been an endless data flow. It cuts fractions from reality and presents them as reality itself. In the autumn of the media, the dance of death is performed when the spectacle reaches its macabre stage and raises tension to the edge of exhaustion in an orgy of catastrophic moments. How and when we do not know yet, but we can be certain that the image will be extinguised for good after the twilight of the media. Perhaps the media will burn on for years after, as the warriors move on from one station to another. The global data network will disintegrate and the tribes will recover their own time, gathered around the campfires where ancestors, future generations and the living meet again in bewilderment. But the dying age of the media has only just begun. As long as they have deaths to portray, they themselves live on, while not to portray them causes their catastrophic return elsewhere. The new technologies inevitably steer towards the physical experience of the other's death. First expressions of this are reality-TV shows about hospitals and police stations and speed sports like base jumping, sky surfing and heliskiing. But the closer the media bring us to death, the closer we are to the death of the media. It will not be a patricide or suicidal performance, but a catastrophe the media themselves will never report. Now we are rehearsing the rituals to ensure that the media do not only die, but will become our ancestors as well. Only thus can we prevent the media from returning as cacodemons one day. ??