"Blasting War" essay excerpts

[pynchonoid]

Having created and edited a magazine called Blaster
back in the mid-90s, the title of this essay intrigued
me.  I think many of you will also see how it relates
to Pynchon -- the War that never ends, binaries,
multiple temporalities, mediated experience, etc. 
Your mileage may vary, of course, so press DELETE now
if you don't want to read what follows.  


http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1022-08.htm

"[...] In response to the war resolution vote in
Congress yesterday, my talk today is about blasting
war. Blasting enfolds within and around itself many
meanings from many different historical epochs and
disciplines. We need to connect the limbs to the body.
Blasto, in biology, means embryonic cell formation. 

To blast is to open up, to make, to form. To blast is
to proclaim. To blast is to criticize vigorously. It
describes and sounds a process rather than a statement
or a thing. [...]

History begins, in this view, with the horrific
assault on the U.S. But as Robert Fisk has pointed out
“ if you talk to a Palestinian in Lebanon about the
September massacre, he will assume you are referring
to the slaughter, at the hands of Israel's militia
allies, of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in September
of 1982". Arundhati Roy, Ariel Dorfman, and Zillah
Eisenstein, have reminded us that September 11 is also
the anniversary of the Chilean coup, where 10,000
died, and other anniversaries of horrific and wrongful
death and genocide, each different, each requiring our
mourning. Around the world, there are many September
11ths, not only one. Iranians killed by Iraqis.
Guatemalans killed by their government. Rwandans,
Yugoslavians, Cambodians, East Timorese, African
Americans murdered across many Septembers. These
deaths surround us with a virtual archive which is not
spoken, which is invisible, which is not connected. 

These dead are the limbs of one body: When President
Bush proclaimed you are either with us or you are with
the terrorists, he blasted away history. His binaries
are inoperative in a globalized, flexible, borderless
economy, in assymetrical warfare without nation
states, and invisible terrorists who blend in as
suburbanites and “family” men. As Philip Rosen has
argued, a radical historiography must replace the
pursuit of authentic, immobilized pastness with a
dynamic sense of multiple temporalities. These
multiple temporalities must collide and produce
frisson if we are to see anything at all. [...]

War is no longer debated. It has been shorn from
death. It is branded. Bush advisor Adam Card declares
that the war plans against Iraq were delayed until
September because you don’t want to introduce a new
product in August. Yet, since August 6, 1990–the same
date as the bombing of Hiroshima-the US imposed
sanctions on Iraq. Over 1 million Iraqis have died,
half of whom are children. Iraq poses a question for
our politics: what is history? In 2002 alone, the US
military has executed 30 bombing missions into Iraq.
Will we declare war on Iraq when the image marketeers
identify a good launch date? Or has the war been going
on for over a decade anyway and all of Bush’s speeches
performance art to camouflage the realignment of the
US military with transnational capital? By 1992,
capital spending on information systems exceeded
capital spending on industrial age items, such as
mining, construction and manufacturing equipment. The
Department of Defense then shifted to an explicit
policy of strategic information warfare because of the
threat of open networks, no borders, and easily
available software. 

To blast is to blow air through the mouth to clear
from particles. 

Slavoj Zizek asks what are we to make of the greatest
power in the world bombarding one of the poorest
countries in the world, Afghanistan, as retaliation?
He observes that Kabul all ready looked like downtown
Manhattan after September 11. The most high tech
country in the world has bombed a nation with barely
any electricity and no paved roads. The Department of
Defense briefings explained Afghanistan was not
“target rich.” The geography of war has been
reorganized: within minutes of the first bombing of
Afghanistan, the US repositioned 40 communications
satellites over the country and bought all satellite
time to prevent independent imaging from outer space. 

Yet, as US ground forces and CIA agents penetrated,
they captured not only what they thought were Taliban
operatives, but hard drives from almost any computer
they could find. Yet as Pakistani investigative Ahmed
Rashid points out US military and oil companies have
been involved in Afghanistan for twenty years. US
popular culture imaged the end of the Taliban as a
visual couplet between urban Afghani women (not all,
maybe a few) disposing of their burqas and the
importation of Indian musicals on video and satellite
dishes hammered from soup cans. 

Several weeks ago, Variety boasted a headline “Post
Taliban production rebounds.” The article explains
that the west–whatever that is now-- is no longer
limited to Mahkmalbaf’s Kandahar for a point of
reference. The Locarno Film Festival hosted a Afghan
Film Day this year. But the Taliban destroyed 2,700
films in the Afghan film archives, a history of analog
images incinerated. And just last week, the US
Consulate denied Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian film
director, a visa to attend the New York Film Festival.
[...]

To blast is to bomb, explode. 

Susan Sontag, in a OP ED in the New York Times, wrote
that the war on terror is a vague, ill-defined
misnomer designed to keep us engaged in endless war.
She says “this is a phantom war and therefore in need
of an anniversary.” She says we are fighting Al Qaeda,
not terror. Perhaps war is simply a vacuous invocation
and cover for the complete reorganization, realignment
and mobilization of the state, the military,
information infrastructures, and transnational
capital. Several weeks ago, Tom Ridge, head of
Homeland Security, not only requested exemptions from
congressional oversight, but also demanded that
corporate records and infrastructures be exempted from
the Freedom of Information Act. Perhaps an
authoritarian coup d’etat has occurred within our own
borders. Perhaps Bush himself is virtual. 

This endless phantom war which is really not war lacks
images and news: an invisible war. The Department of
Defense has initiated the strictest press protocols in
US history. Reporters have no access to military
personnel anywhere independently. They are covering
the story from destroyers 2,500 miles away in the
Indian Ocean. All images must be approved, or are
supplied by the DOD. 3D virtuality replaces
muckraking. CNN is now our collective burqa. 

We must rewire for cyberwar. Bush’s new war, and the
wars that will follow, will no longer be total wars
like World War II, Vietnam or the Gulf. They are, and
will be, nodal wars, practiced and perfected in the
war on drugs in the US and Latin America and the civil
wars against the cultures of difference and public
arts practices. Nodal wars are no longer wars of
images and propaganda, but are instead about the
policing and circulation of virtuality in assymetrical
warfare.  

Since 1989 at the end of the cold war, the military
has converted to something called Revolution in
Military Affairs (RMA). The 20th century moved wars
into the air and off the ground. In the 21 st century,
war is etherized by digitizing it. The 1999 bombings
of Serbia signaled a decisive shift in the military
from weaponry to cyber- infrastructure. 1500 bombing
sorties required 30,000 computer technicians,
engineers and analysts. Now, with the largest military
contract in US history–$200 billion -- awarded to
Lockheed Martin, an aircraft manufacturer, there is
virtually no difference between planes, weapons and
computers. The CIA, for example, has targeted
financial networks and organizations that might have
harbored Al Qaeda money, employing the hackers they
once pursued for copyright piracy. The Predator, an
unmanned spy plane, can also do reconnaissance.
Commando Solo, a special operations communications
plane, drops anti-Osama reward leaflets and blasts
world beat hip hop music over Afghanistan like a
mobile rave machine. 

Digital technologies developed for the Cold War have
now migrated into and merged with the entertainment
industry. The information sector represents 15% of the
US economy. Copyright products– film, video, games,
software-- are now the largest U.S. export. Firms that
depended on military financing from the Department of
Defense moved into special effects, computer design
and interactive entertainment. 

These digital conversions do not so simply mark a
technological shift. They signal a political economy
reorganization from a military industrial complex to
the military information media entertainment complex.
Last fall, Variety announced that the military had
convened a group of screenwriters of action and cult
films like Die Hard, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich
to brainstorm terrorist scenarios. Yet computer games
currently outsell Hollywood films. But even more
significantly, Michael Powell, son of Colin, was
installed as head of the FCC. In the last year, he has
peeled back rulings on media concentration. He has
endangered the diversity of voices and opinions on
broadband internet, which the ACLU and many US and
Canadian media rights organizations have dubbed the
“free speech issue of the 21st century.”
Soo-to-be-unregulated media transnationals may control
all portals and filter content. 

In Variety, the network news executives bemoaned how
to cover a war with no clear enemy, no single
location, no beginning, middle or end, no images, no
news bureaus in Central Asia, and no advertisers. As
one executive put it, “we’re not entirely sure where
“there” is now.” [...]

On the internet, anti-Osama, anti-Arab gaming sights
have multiplied into the hundreds. The image of Osama
Bin Laden is the most circulated digital skin on the
internet for gamers, with George Bush second. These
games express that which George Bush, whose endless
claims that we have no quarrel with the peoples
Afghanistan and Iraq, repress: they are the
fanstasmatic projection of power over the unknowable,
the invisible and the unfindable. They are called Bye
Bye Bin Laden, The Kill Osama Game, Bend Over Bin
Laden, Slap Osama, Capture Bin Laden,Where’s Osama Bin
Hiding? Special Ops. These games displace the
Revolution in Military Affairs. They elaborate the
digitalization of warfare with the psychic
manifestation of racialized, gendered and sexualized
hatred. 

These revenge fantasies are the psychotic underside of
the national phantasmatic that pledges restraint and
precision bombing. The user’s mouse and keyboard kill,
explode and delete Arab men–a pathological, racist
compulsion. 

These interfaces racialize our computer keyboards as
white, American, male killers for whom linear
narrative eroticizes death. We are the machineries of
war. Touch merges with the fantasy of the screen which
is Arab, which is male, which is silent. Our audio
speakers engulf us with the blasts of explosions. 

To blast is to produce a shockwave. To blast is hot
air on steel to smelt something new. In the end, I am
not sure what shapes our politics and critical art
will assume in this slippery, chaotic, authoritarian
world. I only know we need both. Echoing the narrative
of Kandahar, indymedia journalists Jeremy Scahill and
Jacquie Soohen are now in Baghdad, reporting the
invisible story of Iraq through daily webcasts on
iraqjournal.org. We need their reports and their
dissent. Perhaps, through digital art as a prosthesis
of hope and shockwave of peace, we can relearn that if
we are alive --and not dead - -we are all, indeed,
limbs of one body. 

Blasting War was presented at the Race in Digital
Space Symposium sponsored by University of Southern
California, Annenberg School, and MIT Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles, California on October
11, 2002

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of cinema and
photography at Ithaca College in Ithaca New York. She
is the author, most recently, of Reel Families: A
Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana 1995) and
States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies
(Minnesota, 2000) 





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