Interfacing Knowledge: New Paradigms for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
March 8-10 2002, University of California Santa Barbara
Perfect Transmissions: Evil Bert Laden
Mark Poster
Film Studies and History, UC/Irvine
(all
rights reserved)
In the globally networked world, strange, unexpected
and sometimes amusing events occur. I shall analyze one such happening with the
purpose of understanding how the global communication system affects national
cultures. It is my hypothesis that the current state of globalization, of which
the Internet is a major component, imposes a new and heightened level of
interaction between cultures. This interactivity changes each culture in many
ways, one of which I highlight: the degree of autonomy of each culture is
significantly reduced as a consequence of the global information network. On
the one hand, all attempts to sustain such autonomy tend to become retrograde
and dangerous. Local beliefs, values,
and practices can no longer be held as absolute or as exclusive, at the expense
of others. On the other hand, a new opportunity arises for a practical
definition and articulation of global, human or better posthuman culture. In
short, henceforth, the local is relative and the global may become universal. This
universal, unlike earlier attempts to define it or impose it, will be
differential, will consist of a heterogeneity of glocal fragments.
Although there are significant
economic and demographic components of the new level of global interactivity, I
address the issue of the flow of cultural objects within cyberspace. New media
contribute greatly to the quantity and quality of the planetary transmission of
cultural objects. Cultural objects – texts, sounds and images – posted to the
Internet exist in a digital domain that is everywhere at once. These objects
are disembedded from their point of origin or production, entering immediately
into a space that has no particular territorial inscription. As a result, the
Internet constitutes distributed culture, a heteroglossia that is commensurate
with the earth. Cultural objects in new media are thus disjunct from their
society. They are intelligible only through the medium in which they subsist.
Cultural objects in cyberspace elicit a new hermeneutic, one that underscores
the agency of the media, rendering defunct figures of the subject from all
societies in which it persists and persisted in a position separate from
objects.
For the Internet enables planetary transmissions of
cultural objects (text, images and sound) to cross cultural boundaries with
little “noise.” Communications now transpire with digital accuracy. The dream
of the communications engineer is realized as information flows without
interference from any point on the earth to any other point or points.
Cybernetic theory is fulfilled: both machines and the human body act on the
environment through “the accurate reproduction” of information or signals, in
an endless feedback loop that adjusts for changes and unexpected events. (Wiener) And yet, as Derrida argues in Postcard things are not so simple. (Derrida) All the bits and bytes are there alright but the
message does not always come across or get decoded. Misunderstandings abound in
our new global culture, sometimes in quite pointed ways. This article is about
one such miscommunication. It concerns a perfect transmission of an image half
way around the globe that somehow went awry. Indeed one may argue that the
global network, with its instantaneous, exact communications, produces
systematically the effect of misrecognition as information objects are
transported across cultural boundaries. Global communications, one might say,
signifies transcultural confusion. At the same, the network creates conditions
of intercultural exchange that render politically noxious any culture which
cannot decode the messages of others, which insists that only its transmissions
have meaning or are significant. As never before, we must begin to interpret
culture as a multiple cacophonies of inscribed meanings as each cultural object
moves between cultural differences. Let us look at one instance of the issue
that I have in mind.
The second week of October 2001 was
eventful with the onset of U.S. and British bombing in Afghanistan. Like many
Americans I listened intently to reports of the war and to analyses by informed
commentators and academics. On Friday of that week, a few days after the start
of the bombing, I heard, on a National Public Radio broadcast, one expert on
Middle Eastern cultures explain to the interviewer and audience that among the
many aspects of American society that antagonize Islamic fundamentalists the
worst is American popular culture. Even more than American support for Israel
or the American led embargo of Iraq, the enemy, in the eyes of these Muslims,
is, of all things, American popular culture. With some surprise, I filed this
bit of knowledge somewhere in my brain’s database and continued my ride home.
Much could be said about American popular culture in the
age of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “the Empire.” (Hardt and Negri) Here I need only note that a
peculiarity of many Americans is the emotional fixation they often develop for
figures in popular culture, not simply for acknowledged celebrities but for all
manner of objects: clothing, food, animated figures, music, television shows,
and so forth. Americans obsess about selected aspects of popular culture. One
such American is Dino Ignacio who had an extraordinary dislike for Bert, a
muppet on public television’s longstanding children’s show, Sesame Street. For Mr. Ignacio, Bert was
evil. To satisfy his obsession, Ignacio created a Web page entitled “Bert is
Evil.” Here with the aid of a Web browser one finds Ignacio’s “evidence” of the
muppet’s alleged misdeeds. Among this evidence is a series of images that
Ignacio thinks prove the point: Bert is pictured with Hitler, with the KKK,
with Osama bin Laden, [see Figure 1] and with a long list of other evil-doers.
.
Figure 1: Bert
& Osama from Evil Bert Web Page
Bert’s
crimes are thus detailed with fastidious and unrelenting hostile energy.[1]
Perhaps Ignacio has too much time on his hands but in any case his Web design
is characteristic of the commitment of many Americans to their peculiar,
fetishistic attachments to popular culture figures. An understanding of this
aspect of popular culture in the United States is essential to appreciate what
follows.
On
Sunday, October 14th, a friend emailed me with an urgent message to
look at the New York Times for an
incredible story about a protest in Bangladesh on October 8th
against American bombing in Afghanistan. The story he referred to by Amy
Harmon, one of my favorite journalists writing on new media, included a picture
of the protestors in Bangladesh carrying a poster of bin Laden that was an
attractive collage composed of several images of him along with a tiny picture
of Bert the Sesame Street muppet
sitting on his left shoulder and staring smugly. [Figure 2] 
Figure 2:
Image from NY Times Article
Another photograph that I found on
the Web indicates more clearly the face of
evil Bert. [see Figure 3]
Figure 3: Bert is Highlighted
Bert is in the highlighted circle, grimacing
at the viewer more fiercely than Osama. How was it possible for Bert to get
into the scene in Bangladesh? Amy Harmon could not explain the inclusion of Bert
in the poster but there he was for all the world, and especially protesting
Islamic militants, to see. Perhaps he truly was evil, living up to Ignacio’s
image of him, siding with the Al Qaeda terrorists.
I was fascinated by Harmon’s story
and the accompanying photograph. Out of curiosity I searched the Web for more
information about Bert’s remarkable presence in Bangladesh. A simple image
search for “evil Bert” in Google yielded the following photographs [see Figures
4-7] that confirm the one reproduced in the New
York Times’ article. They are also significant to understand more of the
story.
Figure 4: Photo from Protest in Bangladesh
Figure 5: Another Photograph
Figure 6: A Longer Shot Showing English Banner
Figure 7: Poster Indicates Evil Bert Image in Collage
This
last photograph [see Figure 7] yields the best information about how evil Bert
managed to appear in the poster. It shows that the image of Bert in the poster
is taken from Ignacio’s web page. The image on the Evil Bert page has simply
been set into a collage of images of Bin Laden. There are eight images of Bin
Laden in the poster, including one from the Evil Bert page. In fact the image
of Bin Laden that Ignacio combined with one of Bert is the same one that is
positioned centrally in the poster.
When I began to relate the story of
Bert’s appearance in a pro-Taliban demonstration to colleagues and students at
UCI, I encountered another strange twist: about half the people to whom I
showed the New York Times story and
photo concluded that it indicated a sophisticated knowledge of American pop
culture by the Bangladesh militants. They appropriated, as cultural studies
scholars would say, the nasty image of Bert and shoved it into the face of
Westerners as if to say, if you think Osama is evil, we’ll take evil Bert on
our side and use him against you. Another 25% of my respondents simply did not
believe the photo at all. In the age of digital images, they surmised the photo
was doctored: someone in the West had added the figure of Bert to the photo
that appeared in the New York Times.
Evil Bert, they concluded, never appeared in the protest in Bangladesh. The
rest of my respondents accepted the image at face value and were utterly at sea
to explain it.
I next went online again to pursue
the discussion. I found a flurry of comments about the photo. Some Scandinavian
newspapers were convinced it was a hoax.[2]
Others assumed the protesters in Bangladesh, unlike their Taliban compatriots,
watched American television and were avid Sesame
Street fans. The photo produced a variety of misunderstandings by
Westerners of Bangladesh culture. The Babel-like confusion of cultural tongues
only heightened with the transmission of more and more information from across
the globe.
Meanwhile Mr. Ignacio must not be
left out of the picture, so to speak. For he also became a victim of
information overload. His reaction to the New
York Times story was guilt. He very quickly took down the Evil Bert Web
page and posted in its place an apology. He concluded that somehow his Web page
abetted terrorism. On his “apology” Web site he stated his remorse, admitting
that “reality” had intruded into his fantasy. In his words, “…this has gotten
too close to reality…” (Ignacio) Suddenly his obsession with Bert decathected and left
him, shorn of his libidinal outlets, staring fixedly at his own super-ego
induced guilt. With a global audience presumably shocked and angered at his Web
design, Ignacio now suffered from the burst bubble of his fetish.
But that was not the end of his
woes. The Internet does not forget so easily the “crimes” of its producers.
What Ignacio wanted to hide would not disappear. For other Web authors,
admiring his work, created mirror sites. Indeed at least nine of them were up
and running at one point shortly after October 14th, all displaying
boldly the full variety of Evil Bert’s deeds and photographic evidence for
them, including the controversial image of Bert with Osama bin Laden. The
emergence of the mirror sites complicates the cultural confusion, subverting
the power of authors to control their work in yet another manner. Not only did
the anti-American militants of Bangladesh unknowingly and without authorization
appropriate Evil Bert, but other Americans, admiring the handicraft of Ignacio,
perpetuated his work for their own ends.
For their part, the producers of Sesame Street were also not amused by
the perfect transmission of the image of Bert. They are quoted in a CNN report
with the following response to the event: “Sesame
Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding. We’re
outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful
manner. This is not humorous.”(CNN)
How did the image get on that poster
in Bangladesh? The answer is simpler in one sense and more complex in another
than the views and imaginings of my respondents, as I reported above. A
journalist discovered finally who made the poster, telephoned the company, and
unraveled at least part of the mystery. A local graphics company in Bangladesh
was hired by the militants to produce a poster for the demonstration. It had to
be done quickly because the protest was planned for the day after the bombing
commenced in Afghanistan. In these
circumstances, the company did what anyone today would do. They went on the
Web, did an image search for Osama bin Laden, and presto, downloaded a number
of them, including, we must note, the image from the Evil Bert Web page. They
also put out a request to friends who emailed images to them as attachments.
The representative of the graphics company admitted outright that the employees
did not notice Bert when they put together several images of bin Laden for the
poster. Here, incredible as it might seem to some, is the report on the Urban
Legends Web page: “Mostafa Kamal, the production manager of Azad Products, the
Dhaka shop that made the posters, told the AP he had gotten the images off the
Internet. `We did not give the pictures a second look or realize what they
signified until you pointed it out to us,’ he said.”(Mikkelson and Mikkelson) It was as simple as that: the transmission of Bert’s
image went completely unnoticed in the culture of Bangladesh. Invisibly to the
militants of Bangladesh, Bert snuck into the poster where he was indeed noticed
by Western journalists covering the story of the protest.
It could be that the poster company
representative lied to the Western journalist, perhaps not wanting to take
responsibility for the inclusion of Bert in the poster. Perhaps the company
representative did not have accurate information about the image of Bert.
Perhaps the company intentionally put Bert in the poster as a joke or as an
ironic comment either to the West or to the protesters. Even if any of these possibilities were
true, the fact remains that the protestors themselves appear not to have
noticed the image of Bert and are certainly not likely to recognize his image
from the Sesame Street program. The
photos of the demonstration indeed show some banners in English. Even the
notorious photo in the New York Times
has a caption with bin Laden’s name in Roman alphabet. At least some of the
demonstrators were aware of Western media coverage of the event and were
interested in getting a message to the West about who they supported and what
they wanted to happen.[3]
Nonetheless the circuit of
transmission was closed. We may conclude that in all likelihood the protestors
in Bangladesh did not see the image of Bert. From Ignacio’s anti-cult Web site
to the anti-American pop culture protest half way around the world, and back
again to the West in the medium of print journalism, evil Bert’s digital bytes
circumnavigated the globe in a series of misrecognitions, perfect
transmissions, confusions, blends of politics and culture that surely speaks
much of our current global culture.
The conditions of global cultural
transmissions in the case of Bert Laden initiate many changes in communications
practices in all societies. The Internet imposes everywhere new challenges and
offers new opportunities. The political consequences of the response to the
Internet are serious indeed. Just as the mixing of peoples within a nation
renders especially noxious parochial ethnic and racial attitudes, so the mixing
of cultural objects in the Internet compels each culture to acknowledge the
validity, if not the moral value, of such objects that may be alien and other.
With Bert Laden, the stakes are especially high in the context of the war
between Al Qaeda and the American led coalition.
Mass communications scholars tell us that the failure
of recognition of Bert by the Bangladesh protesters is a case of “aberrant
decoding.” (Fiske and Hartley, p. 81) They failed to interpret correctly the image of Bert
and Osama. This omission was however highly motivated. The protesters cherished
a pre-existing hostility toward American popular culture, even though they
inadvertently displayed one of its minor icons in their demonstration. Their
hostility to U.S. popular culture, like that of other fundamentalist Islamic
groups, derives from a wish to maintain the autochthony of their own beliefs
and values. They wish to insulate themselves against American popular culture,
viewing it as a potent threat to their own way of life perhaps in part because
of its popularity with other Muslims or Middle Easterners. Yet exactly this
effort at insulation proved impossible in the instance at hand.
In another example of parochial attitudes, a highly
respected Middle Eastern journalist, Ali Asadullah, reported in an Islamic
online newspaper about the problem with American and in this case Western
culture. In an article entitled “Spice Girls: Exactly the Reason Why Bin Laden
Hates the West,”(Asadullah) Asadullah reported that a former Spice Girl, Geri
Haliwell, on October 6th, one day before the bombing began in
Afghanistan, entertained British Troops in Oman. For this respected Muslim
journalist, that was all the proof needed to explain, and indeed to justify,
disdain by some of Islamic faith for U.S. and British society. “…the core
causes for terrorist rage and aggression against the United States,” he wrote,
was “the Spice Girls,” not “hatred of freedom, liberty and democracy…” Muslims,
he continued, “want their cultures, traditions and religious and societal
standards to be respected.”
I argue this is exactly the logic that no longer
works. With globally networked digital communications, one must be especially
careful in taking as an offence the legitimate cultural practices of another
even if they are on one’s soil. I will not make any invidious comparisons of
the practices of the Taliban with regard to women to those of the British, but
you can imagine easily where my sentiments lie given my cultural context. Because
cultural objects circulate everywhere, there is no longer any local soil on the earth. Moral outrage
directed at the cultural practices of others, especially toward those that do
no physical harm, today becomes particularly obnoxious. Journalists and intellectuals
such as Asadullah, with his smug air of moral repugnance at Western popular
culture, do much harm in justifying the sentiments from which arose the hideous
murders of September 11th.
What is more, the luxury of such a moral claim,
inspired in this and many other cases not by any means limited to the world of
Islam, is often grounded in versions of monotheism. It may be that in the
present context the collective human intelligence embodied in the Internet is
set in a deep cultural opposition to parochialism in general and to versions of
monotheism in particular that refuse the condition of cultural pluralism. The
one and only God will have to make way for many one and only Gods. If that is
the case, then the Bert Laden incident is more than an amusing series of
cross-cultural confusions but an allegory of changes in contemporary culture,
conditions rife with profound political implications.
The main interest of my intervention is not, however,
to renew a theological critique. Rather my purpose is to raise the questions of
the general role of media in culture and the particular role of new media.
Transmission may now, in the digital domain, be both noiseless and incoherent. Interpretive practices
must accordingly recalibrate themselves to the conditions of planetary culture.
Research about any cultural object in cyberspace entails an infinite series of
interpretive acts. Translation is now a central dimension of any cultural
study. Texts, images, and sounds now travel at the speed of electrons and may
be altered at any point along their course. They are as fluid as water and
simultaneously present everywhere. They mock the presuppositions of all
previous hermeneutics and the subject positions associated with them. They
require a discipline of study unlike any that has subsisted in academic
institutions. From this vantage point, Evil Burt, the emblem I have selected to
designate cyber-culture, is indeed a trouble-maker.
References:
Asadullah, Ali. Spice Girls: Exactly the Reason Why Bin Laden Hates
the West. October 9, 2001 2001. Available: http://www.islamonline.net/English/ArtCulture/2001/10/article4.shtml.
December 10 2001.
CNN. 'Muppet' Producers Miffed over
Bert-Bin Laden Image. October 11, 2001 2001. Available: http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/11/muppets.bindladen/.
December 10 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card : From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Fiske, John, and John Hartley. Reading
Television. London: Methuen, 1978.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Ignacio, Dino. Good Bye Bert. 2001.
Available: http://www.fractalcow.com/bert/bert.htm.
December 10 2001.
Mikkelson, Barbara, and David Mikkelson. Bert
Is Evil! October 12, 2001 2001. Urban Legends Reference Pages. Available: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.htm.
December 10 2001.
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human
Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Doubleday, 1950.