24/7, 16.8: is 24 a political show?

Another trait is the issue of the body as an informatic database. Perhaps the single most emblematic scenario in 24, the one motif that returns with most regularity and that sums up the entire signature of the show in a single gesture, is the interrogation scene. It is Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib writ large in the cultural unconscious. But in 24, interrogation and torture are never questions of punishment, or of sadistic mutilation; the goal in these scenes is to extract informatic data from organic bodies. Interrogation is merely the technique for information retrieval; the body is a database, torture a query algorithm. If Jack is impassioned during an interrogation, it is always strictly his own PSYOPS tactic. There is never pleasure-seeking in his sadism. It is torture as zen. (1)

Information retrieval is always paramount in the 24 interrogation scene: the location of a bomb, or the answer to a clue, and the question is more about information flows. Answers are needed back at headquarters, answers that will allow the machines to hone in on the next piece of the puzzle. Bodies inevitably block those flows, contravening a more perfect efficiency of informatic flux. The body in interrogation is never mere flesh but is an informatic space that must be hacked according to its own proclivities, its own psychological or physiological profile. "Everyone has a breaking point," the viewer is reminded. It is merely a question of hacking the particular individual in question given the precise exploits known to be effective against him and only him. If the body happens to be damaged, it must be healed just to the point where the corpus is legible again (to proffer a password, to testify) before the body is discarded as no longer informatically viable. Or if a body no longer has any useful information it is summarily executed, as Nina is by Jack in season three. Data equals life; informatic viability trumps all other considerations (due process, mercy, human rights). In many ways it marks a return to the medieval inquisition model of torture. Both exclusively value immaterial rewards, except today it is informatic not spiritual.

Another important formal detail in the context of informatics as style is the waning of montage in the moving image. It is hard to understate the importance of montage as a twentieth-century cinematic technique. It extends from Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov to the very center of the classic Hollywood continuity method.

However, with new media of the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a waning in the importance and use of montage as a technique. Lev Manovich has pointed out how the general aesthetic approach that he simply calls "morphing," a technique facilitated by the computer, is one for which montage is no longer central or even necessary, as one image grows and warps into another without a cut or even a dissolve in the cinematic sense. (2) The notion of morphing is crucial, as is the logic of "windowing" whereby more than one image appears framed within the entire screen. (3) This is one of the great aesthetic leaps of the graphical user interface beyond the example set by the cinema: no longer will the viewer experience montage via cuts over time, proceeding from shot to shot; one must now "cut" within any given frame, holding two or more source images side by side, which themselves will persist montage-less over much longer "takes" than their cinematic predecessors. Fusing cuts within the frame replaces fusing cuts in time.

But "beyond" cinema may also indicate a prefiguration of cinema, an undoing of its demands. In 24 the techniques of visual simultaneity follow the historical example of the visual arts, in particular certain genres of painting, illustration, and graphic design, whereby multiple panels appear together within a single overall frame, as in a triptych painting, ecclesiastical stained glass, or comic book. This side-by-side technique is used at the climax of each episode, as well as going in and out of each commercial break, and additionally throughout the show for special scenarios such as telephone dialogue.

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One can quibble over why this might be the case. To formulate a coherent explanation, return to the question posed at the outset: is this show political? Note that the question is not: does the show have a political message? That question is exceedingly more difficult to answer, and is frankly much less interesting. The issue at hand is, rather, the expressive relationship between any given cultural artifact and the larger geopolitical context in which it exists. The question is: is the show, in itself, political--not, is it a courier for this or that political ideology. Thus, if the viewer can determine the material reality of the current geopolitical context and interpolate from it a model of semantic expression, as flawed or symptomatic the model might necessarily be, he or she will arrive at a coherent "way of viewing." And this "way" will be political, simply by virtue of it being true. So the question remains, what are the material conditions of contemporary life? Luckily this is not a difficult question to answer, even if the answer is time-consuming in its telling. Gilles Deleuze referred to this as the "control society": millennial flows of bodies and commodities, the transnationals, flexible accumulation, universal informatic protocols, rhizomatic networks, biomedia, global empire, and so on. (4) More complicated is the model of semantic expression, which could be labeled "flawed or symptomatic." I must thus show my true colors and side, somewhat axiomatically, with the Marxian and psychoanalytical notions of semiotic economies. This is a perspective that explains meaning-making and expression through the notion of what Fredric Jameson calls a "political unconscious" wherein cultural production is not simply the act of making a work of art and disseminating it, but instead is understood through complex flows of sublimation, transfer of affect, repression, subject formation, neurosis, and all the other aspects of desiring production. This is indebted to a tradition of critical materialism starting with Marx and proceeding through a number of figures, including Jacques Lacan and Jameson. The claim that the model is "flawed or symptomatic" is not to discredit its predictive utility but to acknowledge the critical gap that must necessarily exist in any theory of mediation. If we are lucky, the act of interpretation itself will realize and confess to the gap, shunning the folly of trying to cleanse the aesthetic by annihilating it in either the utopia of union or the dystopia of exclusion.

To see this at work in 24 it is helpful to return to the discussion of visual simultaneity and the waning of montage. Visual simultaneity is indicative of how informatic economies reappear in the show as "style." In other words, what is evident in this show is the distributed network as an aesthetic construction, both at the level of narrative and formal design. Since it represents difference through time, traditional montage is less effective at displaying networked relationality. The notion of difference in space is better suited to a single plane, which is then bisected one or more times. Hence, the polyptych supercedes montage because it is a better representation of informatic networks, perceived as they are surfaced, flat, horizontal, topological, and synchronic. The "poly-ptych" is, to stress an etymology that Deleuze would have liked, a "multi-fold." It is a single plane that, through its own internal folding, allows multiple significant subsystems to express themselves simultaneously. In short, the polyptych is a network.

But visual simultaneity is also paired with a specific form of narrative construction that privileges the complex synchrony of an ongoing swarm of characters in a web of interaction. This is the visual and narratological equivalent of graph theory and social network theory. Filmmaker Robert Altman is the primary auteur for this technique, aesthetically repurposing in his style the growing importance of interpersonal, "grassroots" networks in the new social movements of the 1970s. Thus, the ambient interconnectedness of story and character in Nashville (1975) or later in Short Cuts (1993) exists as a sublimation of the growing globalism in which "we're all connected" even if we don't entirely realize how, why, or what for. Short Cuts is, in this sense, a friends-of-friends network in which characters are nodes and their various actions and interplays constitute propagating links and gateways to other nodes. Altman gives some context, then, to the growing emphasis today on serendipity and concurrency in narrative media: two things happening in the same time or place, which may or may not overlap or "link." Today the Altman touch has gone mainstream, essentially becoming a new dominant, as seen in films like Magnolia (1999) by Paul Thomas Anderson, Traffic (2000) by Steven Soderbergh, Crash (2004) by Paul Haggis, Syriana (2005) by Stephen Gaghan, or Babel (2006) by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, all of which devolve into a narrative construction of pure rhizomatic imbrication. In these films, a number of relatively autonomous, yet ultimately interconnected, subnarratives proceed in parallel, often interconnecting for logical reasons or for reasons of happenstance. The thick latticework of relationships is not without precedent. 24's iteration owes as much to the soap opera as it does to Altman or Anderson. Regardless, this unique brand of narrative and visual simultaneity is one of the newly identifiable formal techniques in the control society.