Washington in October 2002, when 25o,ooo people surrounded the White House. Nonetheless, myriad progressive, alternative, and critical left news outlets supplied frequent and reliable information about the action on the ground. All in all, a strong antiwar message was out there.
But the message was not received. It circulated, reduced to the medium. Bush acknowledged the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 15, 2003. He even reiterated the fact that a message was out there: the protestors had the right to express their opinions. He didn't actually respond to their message, however. He didn't treat the words and actions of the protestors as sending a message to him that he was in some sense obliged to answer. Rather, he acknowledged the existence of views different from his own. There were his views and there were other views. Al had the right to exist, to be expressed. But that in no way meant, or so Bush made it seem, that these views were involved with each other, that they inhabited a common space, that they were elements to be considered and integrated in the course of reaching a consensus on American foreign policy.
The terabytes of commentary and information, then, did not indicate a debate over the war. On the contrary, in the days and weeks prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the antiwar messages mo'.i-phed into so much circulating content, just like all the other cultural efluvia flowing through communicative capitalism's disintegrated spectacles.
We might express this disconnect between engaged criticism and national strategy as the diference between the circulation of content and oficial policy. Both are politics, just politics of diferent sorts, at diferent levels. Terms like democracy, it would follow, confuse matters by blurring these levels. So on the one hand, we have media chatter-from television talking heads, radio shock jocks, and the gamut of print media to websites with RSS (�eal Simple Syndication) feeds, blogs, podcasts, email lists, and the proliferating versions of instant text messaging. In this mediated di� mension, politicians, governments, and activists struggle for visibilityj currency, and, in the now quaint term from the dot-com years, mindshare. On the other hand are institutional politics, the day-to-day activities of bureaucracies, lawmakers, judges, and the apparatuses of the police and national security state. These institutional or state components of the system seem to run independently of the politics that circulates as content. They go about their work, the business of politics, and the other level reports on it, talks about it, treats it as content about which it opines.
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