My goal for this post is to lay out some thinking I’ve been doing lately about US evangelical Christians and their perceptions of the Middle East, which is the topic of my current research. In the book I’m working on, I argue that many observers, including most people on the left, have misunderstood the nature of American evangelical politics, in part because they misconstrue the nature and direction of evangelicals’ interest in global issues, starting with Iraq and the Mid East, but also in Africa and elsewhere. The picture is far more complicated than is often acknowledged by those who see all evangelicals as trying to bring about Armageddon.

Yesterday, the _Washington Post_ reported on the narrowing of the “God gap” between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, arguing that the Democrat wins last Tuesday could be traced, in part, to shifts among white evangelical Protestants: in this election, compared to the House races in 2004, the Democrats got 28% of the white evangelical vote. It wasn’t a tremendous increase from 2 years ago, but it was something. And it does leave us with the reality that almost 30% of white American evangelicals voted Democratic. African American evangelical numbers were undoubtedly much, much higher. I'm not one to see voting for the Democratic party as the sign of great liberalism, much less liberation, and it certainly was not either for many who cast their ballots. But for those of us opposed to the Iraq war and the “war on terror,” there are some genuinely positive changes going on among American evangelicals, including not only some changes in voting patterns, but also a d read more

I am encouraged by Ananya's intervention to end the week's posts by reflecting on some contemporary feminist debates in Iran; debates around the question of representation in cinema. Listening to these debates, I am, in particular struck by the persistent evocation of the notion of realism and, in thinking self-reflexively, by the global demand for realism in representation. A recent Sunday Times Magazine article on the election of the Iranian President Ahamadinejad focuses on his "image maker" whose film about the modest then-mayor portrays a simple man who eschews the luxuries of his predecessors. "Asked if he thinks this was authentic," Javad Shamghadri, the president's visual arts adviser replies, "People can tell he is genuine. That's why they voted for him. The image corresponds to his true self." The image corresponds to his true self. ...Shamghadri's film about the mayor attracts the voting masses because of its realism, its realistic portrayal of a man who despite his humility is today the Iranian "President of the Apocalypse".

In watching the success of Iranian post-Revolution films in film festivals around the globe, critics repeatedly argue that the films depict unrealistic representations of Iran and its "way of life." Central to these critiques is the industry's problematic representation of women. In the Iranian context and increasingly in the West, a particular mode of critique introduced by Iranian feminists, articulates the shift from pre-Revolutionary cinematic depictions of women as "unchaste dolls" to the "chaste dolls" of the post-Revolutionary period. Shahla Lahiji's work on the representation of women in Iranian films is at the forefront of these critiques, suggesting that "the unchaste dolls" of the pre-Revolutionary cinema were banished from the cabaret stage and are now chastened and confined within the interior walls of the kitchen and engaged in domestic chores. It seems to me that while these critiques of stereotypical representations may be seen as progressive in the context of a national industry that is charged by its government to propagate proper standards for Islamic life through film, they become quite problematical as they make the rounds of international film festivals. What is key in this context is the critical appeal to realism once again. read more

It's interesting, from the perspective of someone who is neither American nor Muslim (nor even Christian or Jewish for that matter), to see how the war in Iraq is viewed from American and Muslim points of view. I observe the same tensions in the underfire discussions, as I see played out in Columbia University, where I am teaching this year. I hear many of the same anxieties voiced online as I do on campus: about secularism and faith, about veiling and surveillance, about torture and human rights, about terror and compassion, about religion and globalization, and so on.

The two voices I have heard of late that seem to me to introduce genuinely new vantage points and allow our conversations to grow in unexpected ways, are, on underfire, Negar Mottahedeh's posts, taking us into the heart of Iran and the Iranian cultural world in the West, and, at Columbia, Ohran Pamuk's recent talks, lectures, classes and public appearances in his capacity as this year's Nobel Laureate for Literature who is also a faculty member here at the university. If Negar forces us to engage Iran on its own terms, Pamuk's interventions foreground the specific dilemmas of a secular but Muslim-majority country like Turkey (which also has the peculiar position of lying somewhere between Asia and Europe). In a seminar this evening (Nov 10, 2006), Pamuk in fact quoted Khomeini via Hamid Dabashi, and described how Khomeini's pronouncements about the role of Islam in the consciousness of the believer had troubled him (Pamuk) enough to lead him to think through the problems of political Islam and Islamic politics in his latest novel, "Snow". read more

Total war, much as described through Negar’s quotations of a former US marine, entails a targeting of citizens. The rationale, as we all know, runs along the lines of the following: if every segment of a given society is mobilized in a war effort, as was the case during WWII and the Cold War, then any aspect of that society is a legitimate target for attack. During the British air raids on Germany, the strategy was called “dehousing the work force,” a nice euphemism for civilian targeting. The role of targets in urbanization and militarization, which cannot be separated from the movement of neoliberal markets and the deployment of information tele-technologies, is something that I have spent a good bit of time working on with my colleagues and friends Greg Clancey and John Phillips (as Under Fire 2 exhibited through Jordan’s kind auspices).

Negar’s evocation of images of the veils in relation to Reading Lolita in Tehran foregrounds the veil’s manifest polyvalence, or perhaps just good old fashioned double bind (as in, either veiled or unveiled, the women in countries that don veils somehow embody the stakes of long standing struggles regardless of their own desires). Within a specific representative regime, the veil is the target. I am reminded of the long reach of this targeting, a parabolic arc that takes us back to Homer’s Iliad. The word for veil and battlement in the ancient Greek are the same, so when Andromache stands on the city’s walls to see her husband’s body defiled in death being dragged through the dirt beyond the city gates, she removes her veil, letting it fall from her head and body, signifying the fall of the city walls as well. Both she and the city are undone. In a moment of terrible beauty, Homer brings the veil and battlement together, both as target. Both reveal the profound paradox of security. Only that which is valuable is protected, and that very protection draws attention – it attracts through the act of providing security. The defense itself is a lure. Defense and security undo themselves through their very enacting.

The veil has long become a target. Perhaps now, in an age of network-base warfare and total global surveillance, the screen functions rather a lot like a veil: a target of total war by total images.

The veil. The screen. The image. The target. Veils, screens, images, targets.

Nestled between prefix and suffix, the word veil resides in the very heart of the word surveillance. Though the etymologies of the terms come to English in largely unrelated ways, the role of covering and uncovering in surveillance is key to its operation, as well as to its self-defeating deployment. But perhaps more to the point, with the veil, we return to the question of epistemology and violence, for the veil and unveiling relate to truth as aeltheia, or truth as ongoing unconcealment. In the veil, as in the screen and the image, we find the material and immaterial means of thinking through the epistemology of violence. But I do not think we will find the means for engaging critically with epistemological parameters in them, nor am I convinced they exist in experimental art, though I wish they did. However, the latency mentioned by Wolfgang does adhere with a delay or lag that is found in the effects of the most powerful avant-garde art work of the early 20th century, much of which we find manifesting itself in contemporary military technology. One could not have predicted these effects at the time. We had to wait for the century to unfold, to reveal itself. So perhaps Wolfgang is looking in the right place. However, if there is a power in latency, in delay, in lag, in effect, then we will not and cannot foresee what the outcomes will be. If we can see that which will become the originary event of peace now, then that will not be the event later. It will have been veiled from the outset; we will have been blinded to it. read more

Scenario

You are on vacation. As any good tourist you have your camcorder and are filming everything in sight.

-cut-
You dump your video to your computer after arriving to your hotel. While watching the footage you notice that you accidentally left the camera running. It captured your shadow traversing the sidewalk and intersection as you crossed the street. You laugh at yourself, close your computer for the night to get ready for the long plane ride home tomorrow.

-cut-
At the airport you check your bags and prepare to go through inspection. You've worn slip-ons. Keys and change are stashed in your bag. You’ve already pulled your laptop out, and are ready to pass quickly through security. As you meet the first in a series of security guards your ID and boarding pass is held upright and ready. You smile innocently, if not somewhat guiltily waiting to be passed to the next step. The security guard tells you to go stand to the side and wait. Your boarding pass has been marked and you must go through further inspection. You are taken to a small cubicle and asked a series of questions. You explain that there must be some mistake, you were just on vacation and returning home. The officer ignores your claim and decides that he needs to look through your bag and your computer. He boots up your computer, and notices a movie file on your desktop titled "site-seeing.mov." He opens the file and begins to watch. read more

I wonder too about the question Radhika raises on constructing a response that expresses outrage. A response that does not at the same time parttake of zones of fear and terror, but also of zones of visual pleasure and fetishism I would add. How do we in the heart of the empire construct a response at all? I wonder at this as my US colleagues who work on Iranian Cultural and Literary Studies attempt to respond to the bravado surrounding Azar Nafisi's fictional memoir READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN -- a gesture that engrains the story of Iranian women in the call for total war.

In READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN the author of the fictional memoir, Azar Nafisi, reflects on her return to Iran after years of studying abroad. Her story is set during the course of the revolution and the first years of the Islamic Republic. Here Nafisi reflects on her work as a University professor in English literature in Tehran and on the ways in which the female body plays a pivotal and assertive role in the formation of the new Republic. Describing a city battered by war, she writes about the students who attended her classes during the 1980s and early 1990s to read "the great books" of the Western canon, including novels by Jane Austen, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. Her goal of describing how her female students, sitting in the private study circle that she founded in 1995, identify their own plight with the plights of Lolita and Elizabeth Bennet is enough to capture one's interest. The writing, too, is gripping. Each of Nafisi's characters "glows on the page," one reviewer writes, "illuminated by Nafisi's affection." Most reviews of the book in the US press are comparably fervent and enthusiastic. "Reading Lolita in Tehran had a most unusual effect on me," writes another reviewer. "I didn't want to be interrupted, so I canceled a dental appointment and a business lunch and missed a deadline. I read and read and ignored the world. This is what brilliant books will do; they seize you until the story is over." read more

The paintings -- some of them based on photographs -- along the Sadr Freeway in Tehran, are, taken together, an act of witnessing as well as an exhortation to fight the good fight. Here is the fact of injustice, they seem to say; here is the recent history of American aggression against the Muslim world: Yesterday Palestine, Today Iraq, and as Negar and her respondents all suggest, Tomorrow Iran.

But Iran's future, as prophesied in two of the frames, need not be one of abjection -- it need not resemble the tortured bodies of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib, nor the dead or grieving bodies of the citizens of Palestine. It need not even resemble the soldiers at war in the final frame, perhaps reminiscent of the Iran-Iraq conflict which devastated both countries in the 80s.

For Iran's future, if it were to draw on the resources of Shia history, could recall and recreate the just war of Imam Ali, the noble martyrdom of Imam Hussayn, the battlefield of Karbala where what unfolded was internal to Islam and ultimately cleansed and ennobled all Muslims equally. Iran could be the enemy of American tyranny, and support the victims -- Iraqis, Palestinians, perhaps also the unrepresented Afghans -- of American injustice, rather than becoming victimized in its turn.

The frames, taken together, challenge the inevitability of Muslim defeat at the hands of American imperialism. At the centre of the sequence is a depiction of Mecca and a quotation attributed to Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed: the holiness of both, the site and the personage, acts as a bulwark against what everyone fears is the impending occupation of Iran. read more

Yesterday Palestine. Today Iraq. I, like Susan Charlton, can’t help but read it as saying: Tomorrow, it will be us. And what does that warning (hope to) achieve? To follow on Negar's closing comment, what is Tehran’s pre-occupation?

What I can see a glimmer of here is what strikes me continually in my New York world and that is the wagging finger that governs our daily life now. That warns and threatens and keeps us confused, suspicious, careful and obedient. Surveillance, ID cards, fingerprinting, toothpaste gels – yes, from the video camera in a bank to what I use on my teeth – are all part of this fantastical construction of fear and control. I have learnt to press my index finger hard at the airport counter knowing my prints never show up at the first try. I no longer rail against building regulations that ask Carlos to greet me by name while refusing me entry to my office because I can’t find my ID in my bag. For so many living in the U.S. there is just the enormous, dare I say, silly, web of poking and prodding that transform the everyday – and it seems that it is really for this, after all, that havoc is being wreaked half way across the world. For this “security” which now serves as a substitute for peace. Can anyone really speak of “peace” anymore – the sort of peace whose originary affect is compassion, as Bracha Ettinger suggests? The sort of peace based on reciprocal knowledge, even a churlish tolerance. Of course, there are more violent systems of policing – the detentions, renditions, surveillance – that are but a step away. I have often wondered how one sort of terror and violence (arbitrary searches) comes to substitute for another sort of terror (al-Qaeda) while making invisible the experience of that substitution. Why aren’t we horrified? Why aren’t we terrified? And I can’t help but feel that a component of it lies in these asinine daily rituals which confirm our participation in the broad network of policing – as the policed – which then allows a certain smugness to paper over what could have been that horror of what is taking place. read more

"The threat of Terrorism just does not have the magnitude of effect on the imagination that the Cold War did, particularly as there was no evidence of either wmd or collusion with Al queda. The mask was tron from the Official Story earlier than it was with Vietnam." from Linda Robertson is a bit off the mark. The 'threat of terrorism' not only has an 'effect on the imagination' but a very real impact on day-to-day realities. The use of a 'terrorist threat' strikes a very visceral chord in most people (in many parts of the world) especially when increased surveillance, body searches, and many other form of abrasive intrusions occur to disrupt ordinary daily routines. The re-invoking, re-modeling of 'the terrorist threat' is very much attached to (as we all know) a political agenda - previously we had the Saddam is Hitler construct. Remember that Reagan said the Sandinistas were going to invade Texas - an earlier version of the 'terrorist threat.'

The 'threats' grounded in the Cold War imaginary evolved over a period of time whereas the present-day 'terrorist threat' is a mantra that has been chanted most strongly by heads of state in Washington and Israel. This has the effect of neutralizing (and obfuscating) the imagery as well as masking the harsh political objectives associated with the Iraq War/s, the Lebanon incursion and the occupation of the West Bank. read more

I would like to begin my presentation this week where Melani McAlister left off: on the spectacle of Abu Ghraib. Here, with a series of images that I captured with my camera as we were driving along the Sadr freeway in Tehran two summers ago. The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote on the presence and role of the photographs from Abu Ghraib in Tehran : -------------

Air-conditioned transportation in Tehran is notoriously difficult to find. For pampered visitors such as the cultural anthropologists and documentary filmmakers from New York and Los Angeles who seem to converge on the Iranian capital every summer, a cool taxi ride to the northern parts of town recalls something of the charmed life they left behind in the United States, a life some refer to offhandedly as "the grid."

Being on the grid, it seems, is something akin to having a non-Iranian passport or a green card, multiple credit cards loaded with debt, a laptop with a 24-hour DSL connection, satellite television in an air-filtered apartment, impeccably pedicured feet in open-toe sandals, a single Gauloise cigarette ashing in a saucer next to that daily injection of coffee and money earned from a steady job. This is not to say that some of these components of the grid are not available in Tehran. They are. Apartment complexes in the northern parts of town, like Shahrak-e Qarb, also provide residents with hilly, green outdoor spaces where a woman can walk her dog without the government-prescribed full body covering and headscarf. Such private complexes come with in-house supermarkets, boxed meals delivered to your door and a doorman who will call a taxi and announce visitors just as he might at a one-bedroom pad in New York. In Tehran, all this comes to about $500 a month. read more

Like some others, I've had a hard time figuring out exactly where to jump into this rich discussion. But two posts recently caught my attention, both of which asked us to think in very nuanced ways about the contradictions of the media and the current war (and thanks to both for the images):

James Der Derian: Getting up close to the war machine has its dangers (I’ve seen many an embed go native), but it also has its virtues (hearing a two-star general tell you where he’d like to stick all the neocons). And you do get a more variegated view of war, certainly more than the NYTimes, but also more than I’ve recently been scanning in these online exchanges.

Ananya Vajpeyi I suppose one of the threads of our discussion here on underfire is proceeding as an attempt to flesh out exactly what this "somehow" gestures towards -- in other words, we are trying to figure out exactly how "the coverage of the war and the course of the war" are indeed "intertwined".

It seems to me that there are two levels of analysis here, which I'll describe as focused differently on "long dure'e" and "immediate contradictions."

The long dure'e analysis looks, among other things, at the function of spectacle, information saturation, and the meeting of "ideological" and "state" mechanisms. For this mode, which is crucial to looking at the structuring structures of our current moment, I'd notheless suggest we not forget that many of these issues did not start or stop with Vietnam. They arose, for example, and perhaps even -more- intently, in the 1990-91 Gulf war, when spectacle described pretty much everything people in the West were able to see on TV. In those moments, with the Cold War just ended, it looked like the New World Order (GHW Bush's term) would be nothing so much as image-as-event. Of course, the movement had begun long before, and in fact, one could argue that Foucault's work is about defining the much earlier demise of spectacle (punishment for display) toward a rationalized discipline/surveillance that disguised and internalized the operations of power. In ways that are truly hard to u nravel, but vital too understand, the rationalization and hidden-ness of surveillance in the modern era has worked in tension and tandem with the emergence of other kinds of spectacle in the form of media. read more

What would be an originary event of peace?

Wolfgang provocatively asks this question after reminding us that violence is an event and peace is a state, the former more visible, tangible, material and evident than the latter. Can a state become an event, or is this merely the impossibility of trying to find what is perhaps impossible to find? James der Derian usefully tells us that the majority of the “volunteer army” (a misnomer if ever a nome missed) did not simply sign on for financial and educational opportunities not offered to them through any other venue in US society – that, they also were looking for meanings, solutions, direction, purpose in a world and place bereft of it. When the trajectories of western history repeat an oscillation between the “two violent conceptions of history” reconciled under the silence wrought by the unassailable thought of “security,” as Wolfgang, argues, to where can the youth of a nation turn for meaning? The centrality of the violence, and the institutions that seek to contain it and turn it to their ends as well as those organizations and individuals that seek to undo it, results largely from the inescapable situation that the problem of violence is inextricably intertwined with the problem of knowledge itself.

The issue, then, becomes one of epistemology and violence, as well as epistemological violence – all of which seems deeply counterintuitive to us, children of the Enlightenment that we are. But it is more evident in the current moment than perhaps at any other point in time that the part that knowledge plays in creating meaning in the world is bound by and made possible through force: the force of an argument, the subjugation of counter positions, the dismissal or erasure of traditions, the mobilization of wealth and material to legitimize and circulate knowledge in a form, medium or institution (including our beloved internet). Military technology (including our beloved internet) is the most obvious manifestation of epistemological power as it materializes specific technicities that pertain to centuries of scientific, rational and instrumental thought. Our current model for the global university is the research and development institution that emerged under the guidance of coordinated government, corporate and military demands in the US immediately following WWII when the country decided not to demobilize for peace time, as after the first World War, but to step exponentially those processes and knowledges perceived as making a decisive difference in the outcome of the just ended conflict. Such would make us secure, we believed and were told to believe, and security became common knowledge. With these steps, we find ourselves caught in a simulation of security and even a simulation of war (pace Baudrillard) without either being a state or an event.

What would be an originary event of peace? Perhaps a thought, a thought well-considered and contemplated, but withheld. read more

> Ryan Bishop

I disagree with Michael’s other statement: “Allan speaks of theorization as if that has some great importance in lending opposition to violence. Much as I like theory, the relationship is nonsense.” Perhaps we have a different understanding of what theorization means – certainly it can be purely abstract BUT it can also apply and relate to the real world. On the most immediate, basic, spontaneous level one can intervene to prevent violence; on a larger plane theoretical assumptions can both result in violence OR prevent or diminish it. Quantum physics facilitated the construction of the atomic bomb – Hiroshima. Mass non-violent movements in various parts of the world diminished (quite likely) violence. Did the self-immolation of Buddhist monks prevent violence? Were they based on theorizations?

What is useful about the 60’s in the context of the current discussion relates to the strands of utopianism (on many levels) that motivated different spheres of political activity AND the organizational networks that arose to implement various visions of what might be socially possible. In that “strange days” 60’s surreal way there was some common thread that seemed to link the cultural revolution in China with Paris with Bolivia with anti-war protests in Washington.  The link was subliminal yet significantly driven by the potentialities of human liberation OUTSIDE of the dogma of turgid leftist parties. My interest here is not to discuss or dwell on what actually came out of all this (which was actually considerable). My emphasis is on the fact that people created structures suitable to articulating and implementing their goals. In time many of these structures became equally turgid YET without them little could have happened. And, naïve or otherwise most of these structures were built around theoretical assumptions. read more

There seems to be a streak of romantic nostalgia and longing for the Vietnam Anti-war movement.

Why can't kids today just get it together, goes the collective sigh.

It's ahistorical to compare the size of the antiwar movement in 1968-1970 with that of 2006.  You have to look at the entire buildup from 1950s on to make a parallel comparison. Alexander Cockburn points out that, as far back as 1954, Eisenhower secretly decreed that Ho Chi Minh could not be permitted to win open elections. There was no media revelation and the left took another decade to get up to speed on Vietnam. Camelot worship was so strong that even Kennedy's decision to send detachments of US troops as "advisors" to South Vietnam (setting the stage for the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem) did not inflame an antiwar movement. It took the buildup all the way to 1967/68 which led the organized left  to stage large-scale, successful antiwar rallies. All this occurred in an environment of 1968 and what felt like a worldwide anti-imperialist movement (which also created incorrect predictions, as when Tariq Ali described the massive upheavals in Pakistan as "people's power", but by 1971 the movement had been hijacked by the middle class urban elite of the Awami League who became leaders of an independent nation of Bangladesh).

The national draft was always a structural force that was the LARGEST factor in creating and sustaining a massive antiwar movement, as well as fomenting a major breakdown of military discipline and mass desertions towards the end of the war. As described in the film SIR, NO SIR, the movement spread to barracks, aircraft carriers, army stockades, navy brigs, military bases and elite military colleges like West Point.  According to the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 desertions occurred between 1966 and 1971. Over a hundred underground newspapers were published by soldiers; national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; and stockades and federal prisons filled up with soldiers jailed for their opposition. By the early 1970s, entire platoons refused to fight and "fragging" (friendly fire killing commanding officers), rampant drug use and open insubordination became the hallmark of a totally demoralized army-- many of whom came home and became robust (and invincible in the context of image politics) visual icons of the antiwar movement. Structurally today's conflict can NEVER produce that kind of movement because joining the military is now an economic option, limited to working class Black, Latino and White kids. By removing the middle class and elite from the possibility of the draft, the military has successfully defanged the key driver. In addition, we should not under-estimate the shrewdness and adaptability with which the US Army took concrete steps to professionalize the army and provide carrots to mollify dissent (today considered one of the most integrated organizations in America, providing "affirmative" opportunities particularly to minorities).

Here's an excellent anti-recruitment flash animation created by a group of young antiwar protest groups (Yes, Virginia, we contain multitudes), which combines elements of SIR, NO SIR, with today's anti-recruitment drives. read more

I was wondering where to enter, until I re-rad Michael's posting, where this caught my attention:

"Yet violence seems much more interesting to notice, watch, playact, imagine, bemoan or discuss than more peaceful topics."

I agree. But is this not because war and violence are events, whereas peace is commonly thought of as a "state", and not as something that could "occur"? And as something that does not occur, how would it enter the archives, the news, or anyone's attention? In the most common representations of western history, "peace" has the meaning of "formally concluding a conflict", as in "Peace of Westphalia", etc. Only in this form it ever appears as event. But int this form, too, its meaning remains fully dependent on the war it ends (and tends to be defined by the victors). So only when the meaning of peace is set into work by a war - only if war is that father of all things including peace -  does peace enter the official archives, or become newsworthy.

On the other hand, thinking peace as fully independent of war, as a entirely distinct reality, as peace researchers have tried to do, tends to leave us with a peace that does not happen, but merely "is".  As such, it remains a metaphysical, heavy, and a-historical concept, charged with the emptiness  and awkward solemnity of things beyond this world, and also with their violence. For this kind of peace easily can justify war, or violence in general, because the metaphysical, non-occurring peace knows no representation except the representations of unaccountable power: it is not something we can engage in, or even speak about, its language used to be the imperatives of power and is now increasingly the silent, factual mode of technology, against which, there is no political appeal. read more

I'd like to enter the fray here in response to both Loretta's and Trevor's recent posts. I have been away and am catching up = apologies in advance if I may have missed or replay some critical points that have already been raised.

It is without question that the war in Iraq continues to be shockingly costly - in every form of currency exchange with which one engages: socio-economic, political, cultural, religious, our own sense of humanity and compassion, etc. It is also without question that the collective response to this war has been shockingly displaced, disaffected and repressed in the USA. The complexity of issues forming a response as to why that is the case, has been the fodder of innumerable academic and personal discussions, blogs, posts, articles, books +++. A number of these issues have been raised in Loretta's post.

However, drawing an analogy to the war in Vietnam and the response it engendered in the sixties and seventies is simultaneously beneficial and deceptive. It strikes me that this period has set the stage for the rerun of that time ever since. That we are participating in a drawn out play of the post-sixties ( not only in fashion but in the hard-hitting political landscape - more like a 45 record having been digitized and constantly remixed into a looping extended dance track....one which has finally exhausted its audience ... no matter how many pharmaceuticals are ingested. read more

click here to see additional images uploaded by James Der Derian

Sorry about the delayed response, but I’ve found it hard, time- and head-wise, to step back into this interpretive community after spending the last week shooting the return of the 1/25th Marines (New England reservists who spent the last 7 months in one of more dangerous places on the planet, Al Anbar province), whom we’ve been filming for the last year as part of a documentary, ‘The Culture of War’ (some outtakes attached). Getting up close to the war machine has its dangers (I’ve seen many an embed go native), but it also has its virtues (hearing a two-star general tell you where he’d like to stick all the neocons). And you do get a more variegated view of war, certainly more than the NYTimes, but also more than I’ve recently been scanning in these online exchanges.

So my first intervention goes after a para that I suspect Loretta purposely (and provocatively) made ‘target-rich’:

"Young unemployed Americans, from poor and middle class areas, are joining the army because they have no other way to earn a living (see the stats from www.nationalpriorities.com). They are the soldiers who fight in Iraq. Secularization has been replaced by a rising tide of ‘cheap spirituality’ from New Age gurus to Christian fundamentalism. Islam, a solid monotheistic religion, is on the rise everywhere in the West with numbers of converts increasing in all European countries. Advance in communication and technology, in particular the internet, foster physical isolation, people do not socialized as they did before, thus the idea to gather en masse to demonstrate against the establishment is not so appealing as it was in the past. Attitude towards politics is marked by disillusion, politicians are all corrupted, opposition is lead by comedians (see Michael Moore) as if politics was a joke, people who are unable to project an alternative strategy, to put have a vision of how the future should be." read more

To answer Christina interesting posting, I believe that information and images about the reality that surrounds us are readily available. The net, for example is a great place to search for the truth (and yes at the same time is full of lies). The problem is that, we, and for we I refer to the industrialized countries, live inside a web of illusions, market illusions as well as political illusions created by politicians and post Cold War politics and broadcast by traditional and mainstream media.

Let me focus on political illusions. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent triumph of Western capitalism, symbolized by the United States, have triggered a mass euphoria and destroyed any structured political opposition. The so called ‘left’ was buried under the falling bricks of the Berlin Wall. The world we lived in ended. During the Cold War, East and West existed inside a dichotomy, it was healthy because it reminded us and them (those who lived in communist countries) that politics and economics are not exact sciences and that politicians make mistakes. Above all it made people more receptive to political change, in the West it was alternative government, in the East the end of communism. After the end of the Cold War Western politicians became infallible and opposition vanished. Tony Blair politics are even more conservative than the politics of Mrs.Thatcher, a Thatcher’s government would never have abolished the Habeas Corpus, it would have been inconceivable! But the Conservative party will not oppose someone who pursues its own politics, in fact Tony Blair sole opposition comes from its own party, from the left of the Labour party. Blair lied to the nation, yet, nobody is holding him responsible for such an act, why? Because the opposition comes from the Labour party and they will not impeach their Prime Minister. I must stress that several countries went to war in Iraq without any proof of WMD, parliaments were bypassed on the basis of ‘security’. British Parliament was told that proofs could not be showed because of security reasons, members of parliaments had to trust the Prime Minister. read more

I'm Trevor Paglen, and I've been asked to provide some of the visual interventions this week. Here's a brief introduction to my work:
For the last 5 years or so, I've been interested in the space of military secrecy from a number of angles (visual, juridical, material, etc...). I'm currently finishing up a PhD in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley about all of this. I also recently published a book (with co-author AC Thompson) about the 'extraordinary rendition' program and the CIA's network of 'black sites' around the world. I try to combine art, scholarship, and research in a fluid, seamless, way.

One of the sub-projects within this body of work is a series I've been called "Limit Telephotography" - it's a series of photographs I've been taking of "black" or unacknowledged military bases, most of which are in the southwestern United States.

I've also had the opportunity to photograph some of these CIA 'black sites' while running around the world researching the "Torture Taxi" book, but those images will become public at a show in New York opening on November 16th. read more

There is so many useful important threads to follow here and I kept wondering where to start or jump-in. So...

Michael Goldhaber has stated the following:
 
“We see and are directly affected by suffering because it is so much more central our own humanity than killing is.  Statesmen only barely are beginning to understand this. One thing the Internet has already done is enlarge this contact with “the other side.” I don’t see any easy way for this trend to stop. Nor do I believe that anywhere in the world where such images are available they will not have effect.
This new form of war is entirely opposite of that that prevailed in WWII, where entire cities were demolished to make a point. There was not good war reporting in Japan, for instance, so the allies felt justified in fire-bombing Tokyo, heavily bombing other cities, and then using A-bombs against Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, just to make a point that might affect the Japanese war cabinet. Today such destruction would be seen immediately throughout the world, and the onus of evil would fall on the bombers, at least mostly.”
 
I am not so sure that today’s new form of war is so different than the past. The technology has changed (its glamor increased?), the destructiveness more targeted or contained but, “when push comes to shove” the number of recent examples of rampant destructiveness employed simply “to make a point” are quite plentiful. read more

Rogue economics is a maze of market-orchestrated interdependencies and curious contradictions: financial aid has impoverished Africa, while high-sugar food donations have triggered epidemic diabetes in its population. Rogue economics is the uncontrollable power which is erasing centuries of social improvements: slave and child labour make Asian products competitive in the West. Rogue economics is the brutal force of unregulated markets: days before 9/11, al Qaeda’s sponsors carried out one of the biggest insider trading operations in history. Rogue economics is the bastard child of Western capitalism and the business partner of globalization’s outlaws: market totalitarianism, crime and terror, the feral economic forces unleashed by the global market.
In this book I try to expose the paradoxical economic connections created by these new market forces. The world we live in is governed by different rules than we suppose, and the global economy is becoming our worst enemy.

“Meet Mr. and Mrs. Middle America, children of the post World War II American dream. They live in the suburbs of a Midwestern town, and this is as far as the similarities with the dream go. Mr. Middle America is a construction worker who, during the recession of the 1990s, waived most benefits to keep his job in a local construction company. Mrs. Middle America is neither a Doris Day look-alike nor is she a housewife. More likely, she is overweight and overworked. Employed as a nurse at a nearby hospital, in her spare time she assists neighbours without medical insurance. The occasional tax free extra cash is crucial to make ends meet. In 2006, the couple’s household income was $46,326, $2,000 lower than in 2001, the year the last recession ended.[i]They have $3,800 in the bank, $8,000 of credit card debt[ii], no stocks or bonds and reside in a $160,000 house with $90,000 still left on the mortgage. Husband and wife shop at Wall-Mart, eat at MacDonald and regularly buy lottery tickets in the hope to win their way out of the middle class. That is Middle America’s overwhelming dream. read more

Thanks to Jordan Crandall for setting this up and inviting me. This is especially in response to the remarks of Saskia Sassen on borders, Alain Joxe on structured chaos and Paul Edwards on weak discipline:

As Immanuel Wallerstein once pointed out, old empires did not survive if they took more than forty days' travel to cross from end to end. On that basis, we now find ourselves in world of six billion people sitting on the head of a pin. Virtual travel, at least, occurs in a fraction of a second, so the possibility of an “empire” or indeed a closed state is out of the question — unless every point is the capital, and, equally, a center of resistance.

Consider that we are all almost literally on top of one another, that crowding is supposed to promote anger and violence, and that so many means for violence are now readily available. What is most striking: The actual amount of violence at any scale is tiny. It is so especially in comparison with what we can easily imagine and what has been repeatedly prognosticated. It is certainly so in comparison with the spasms of killing that dominated the first half or even the first three quarters of the last century. This is not to deny or negate the horrors and criminality of most violence still happening. Nor is it to say that worse cannot happen; it certainly might, but we should not exaggerate the likelihood either. On the whole, Homo interneticus is remarkably peaceful. read more

After reading the impressive intervention of Paul Edwards I admire the brilliance and capacity of English language to shape a poetic formulation of the fading out of centralized systems and birth of a universe built as a web of webs, since the 70' or the 9O' under ruling free transnational business factories and banks. He produces suddenly the concept of "weak discipline" as a jump in a new epistemology outmoding what he calls "70s theorists of capillary power" Foucault Giddens Bourdieu. Capillarity means 'sub-millimetric flows of power' and it is not at all the Foucault’s or Bourdieu's definition for 'basic scale of power relationship' nor Giddens definition of democracy . I think we do not need to create a disordered epistemology to the limited benefit of getting a good empirical grasp on a disordered civilization. The question is not at all psychoanalytically to "free ourselves of Ur-images of closed systems". No human system has ever been closed, even academic disciplines, except in the creeds and deeds of some groups. But all systems of oppressive power has been hierarchical till now. Historically the so called 'weak discipline' is not a new civilization or culture, but clearly —(from the point of view of a historian of low roman empire or middle ages, or baroque modernization),— it is a barbarization and/or feudalization process, called "global privatization of global precocity". Emerging new transnational dominant classes are closer to a type of violent evangelist nobility or are behaving like feudal nobility between the first and the second crusade, unifying low level chivalry and princes dukes and counts, under kings of a new type, with OPA, new type of tourneys, concentrating new type of non geographical feuds, before going to the big new colonial expedition, when, on the contrary, the Pope wanted to send the warriors quickly to mid east war and alleviate the burden of war in Christianity. History is a enormous reserve of multifaceted paradigms. Foucault or Bourdieu was clearly defining power in a new sociology of oppression, posterior to central stateness. Bentham panoptic can be global or municipal targeting. But oppression is never based on a weak discipline but on a strong vertical discipline. Sometime non state- never non violent. The study of violent ordered disorder doesn’t need a "weak discipline" pattern but a strong transdisciplinary epistemology. read more

I feel that the piece of Empire of Disorder selected as an introductory tool for this Under Fire was not totally adequate because it looks outdated, as written before the beginning of the Iraq war and the final (?) is purely rhetorical. I send to everybody this « additive conclusion » which has been written for l’Empire du Chaos ‘s Pocket Book a Spanish edition, in 2004, to deal with many questions, created in two years by the American military actions in the great Middle East, and especially in Iraq and available in 2006. The first part is in English and the second in French because time is missing for translation.

Additive conclusion to "Empire du chaos" (2004) Iraq War

I accept the idea that a set of non committments, refusals to send any help, from UNO, Germany, France, Turkey, Latin America (except Honduras), the slow committment process of Japan, the fact that Spain, Poland and others contributed only with very modest military troops, as a whole, means probably a sort of slow fading out of American power (this feeling sounds more like a European than a leftist optimism). But instead of predicting yet (like Emmanuel Todd), a « decomposition of American system », I prefer to keep as a tool a hard pessimistic diagnosis, considering the "American" Empire as a long term, extreme right ambition, altogether a coherent and fascistoïd view of the future, even, if it is absurd from the military point of view. This project is capable to cause enormous destructions and damages, before finally crumbling (like Hitler’s one or Stalin's) under the so called dominant laws of Real-ökonomie or real-strategie. Economy is always determinant in the longterm, but not quite in « short time », actions in time of war, when quick destruction, not slow production, is supposed to be the right measure of power. The question is: is it possible to avoid the third ( or fourth) world war ? Afghanistan’s War, Iraq’s War, and even Israel-Palestine War, which is an indirect US intervention and a much older one, are today, forming a new class of wars,and the US are bound to win them together simultaneaously, if they really want to be fully victorious, in the war lauched against islamist « terrorism » — an ennemy depicted as able, just like the US, to menace all the scales of power in the world. There is now three Empire’s Wars in the Middle East and the three are obviously in a dead end, within and because of a militaristic rigid doctrinary posture of war management, excluding any political version of peace. This is true for US world war and for Israel local war, urbanization process and colonial ethical purification. If the definition of this « world war » is actually romantically defined as God’s war, both by an American President by some Islamist leaderships, and by some Israeli’s religious beliefs, it is in fact to avoid any political definition of such a war and, of course, any democratic definition of peace. But democracy (in greek demo-kratia means control taking by the poeple on the economic and religious power of oligarchy). It is also a deep rooted, long term desire of global humanity, (but not necessarily in th definition which is now accepted in the US). Under this set of considerations, the professional observers of strategic problems should normally demonstrate a deep knowledge of Islam and Christian protestant or catholic, and Jewish theological debates, which is not generally the case. It introduces religious creeds in the evaluation of relations of forces, is also a corollary of a growing limitation of political and intelligence capacity, of American or Israeli soldiers, because of their status as occupation troops with no protection duties toward the civil population under their rule military colonial or occupation status is, as such, contrary to political intelligence of local situations. Every old colonial politician knows that. The danger comes when difference between the military and the political understanding of a local war management disappears. This fading out is the root of a philosophical jump into a fascist representation of violence. To make a comparison, without any God’s influence, I feel obliged to add to our middle east class of neo-imperial wars , the Colombian war and central american mexican and carribean tensions, conflicts and fights, clearly localized at the fronteer of world’s developped nucleus, and where no religious identity is at stakes. At least, these wars are totally human or inhumane. No religion war explains the fears and the fortification pattern of ennemity and exclusion. Finally, instead of deciding promptly that European Union or China could as an economical mass, be able to resist a superconsuming indebted Empire, riding a rodeo based on a Disneyland electronics domination, I prefer maintainig a high degree of doubt, mentioning that « we » non-imperial thinkers, class, poeple, nations, lays and clerks, are not yet at the level of a unified strategic and political thinking, able to control in a common debate an extreme right, imperial, American power, driving successfully the world toward new permanent social wars. The global strategic critic of the global american empire is just beginning. It won’t proceed simply with optimism good will and common sense as a californian middle class project. read more

The War on Terror is defined by a growing concern with the protection of what is described as the 'critical infrastructures' of liberal regimes. In the US, Bush has provided a series of presidential directives in response to the attacks of 9/11 for the development of a National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). The response to the directive is expressed in The National Plan for Research and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection published by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2004. In Europe, the European Union is pursuing a European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) 'to enhance European prevention, preparedness and response to terrorist attacks involving critical infrastructures'. The United Nations is seeking meanwhile to identify the critical infrastructure needs of liberal regimes globally, as well as continuing to explore ways to facilitate the dissemination of best practices with regard to critical infrastructure protection.

In the European context critical infrastructure is defined as 'those physical resources, services, and information technology facilities, networks and infrastructure assets, which, if disrupted or destroyed would have a serious impact on (the) health, safety, security, economic or social well-being'. In the United States it is defined similarly as the 'various human, cyber, and physical components that must work effectively together to sustain the reliable flow of goods, people and information vital to quality of life'. Others point also to the importance of critical infrastructure for the maintenance of the 'good governance' of societies. The defence of critical infrastructure is, therefore, not about the mundane protection of human life from the risk of violent death at the hands of terrorists, but a more profound defence of the combined physical and technological infrastructures on which global liberal regimes have come to depend for their sustenance and development in recent years. 'Quality of life' is deemed inextricably dependent in these documents on the existence of critical infrastructures. Terrorism is a threat to these regimes precisely because it targets the critical infrastructures which enable the liberality of their way of life rather than simply the human beings which inhabit them. read more

Jordan Crandall asked that I provide a few side bar comments this week from a book of mine that came out this year: Enduring Innocence: Global architecture and it Political Masquerades. The book looks at spatial products that incubate in several species of zone-outlaw enclave formations or "parks" not unlike the zones about which Alain Joxe writes. The book focuses on the instrumentality of duplicity, the preference for manipulating both state and non-state sovereignties-for alternately releasing and laundering power and identity to create the most advantageous political or economic climate. It follows transnational forces as they seek out relaxed extra-jurisdictional forces (SEZs, FTZs, EPZs etc.) while also massaging legislation in the various states they occupy (NAFTA, GATT). Various enclave forms with various legal parameters, merge and hybridize to create new legal habitats like free trade knowledge villages and special economic tourist zones. They are the aggregate unit of many new global conurbations and the mechanism for a mongrel form of exception. Many, calling themselves "cities," sport a civic enthusiasm associated with entry into the global marketplace. Others occupy a hidden lawless area offshore, operating just on the safe side of engineered criminality. Other head-quartering corporations see themselves as global leaders worthy of quasi-diplomatic immunities. In their parastate capacity they may provide the support and expertise for transportation and communication infrastructure, relationships with IMF and the World Bank, or mercenaries in a global war.

Jordan invited me to offer something from one of those stories-a story about the global demolition industry and its mergers with both global defense and entertainment industries. In the story, a company, CDI, implodes buildings. For instance, it implodes dysfunctional high-rise housing, a building type that sponsored its own demolitions in both its inception and occupation. The company is asked to create urban spectacles when imploding those Las Vegas towers that must be recast for the most ephemeral marketing wrinkle. It performs explosions and demolitions for Hollywood special effects. Since the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 implosion (by others), the company has worked for the State and Defense Department on blast-proof building, urban warfare and security. read more

Joxe's depiction of the twentieth century, of a 'free world' and a 'communist world' with 'each obeying its laws, its images, its lies and its idols, and a 'Third World' which attempted to separate itself from the two others thanks to its size and despite its weakness' seems eminently sensible - on first reading. The problems, however, at least for me, begin with the idea that 'the tripartite world of bipolar nuclear stand-off seemed to disappear with the end of the Cold War' and that it was 'it was believed that the earth would finally become peaceful, or at least conform to the order outlined in the UN charter'. I suppose I wanted to know who it was that believed the Earth would finally become peaceful. Or orderly? Moreover, since when has the UN Charter been taken seriously, even by itself? This week, for instance, sees Hungary commemorating the 50th anniversary of its 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union, which ordered tanks into Budapest to crush it. Budapest's public buildings are still pockmarked by bullet holes. Yet where was the UN Charter or the UN itself when this national trauma was unfolding, when the Hungarian revolution was being brutally put down, and when, for two dramatic weeks Hungarians tried to resist their Soviet jailers? The Hungarians failed, of course, but they failed in large part because the UN stood by as the tragedy unfolded and the radio stations, the only means of communication, were shut down, one by one, by the Soviet Union, and at the cost of over 3,000 lives in the streets of Budapest. Nor was I clear how much courage the US and its allies needed to attack a weak Iraqi dictator after his invasion of Kuwait or, more recently, in the Iraq War. As I wrote in a recent article, 'The Elite War on Utopia': read more

The end of the Cold War was also the end of grand systems theories (cybernetics, systems analysis, operations research, and their children), and the closed world discourse they inspired. In their place have arisen network discourses -- very many of them, proliferating at an astonishing rate along with their technical substrates, which include not only the Internet but corporate supply chain management, military "netwar" doctrines and tools, social software, six degrees of separation, and thousands of other formulas and formulations of the node-link architecture of the post-Cold War, post-post-modern world. This ultracomplex, infinite and indefinite architecture could be the framework of Alain Joxe's structured chaos and the enabling technology of Saskia Sassen's embedded bordering.

Network discourses move us from hierarchy to intricate mesh, from topography to topology, from closed to fractally open, from determinism to chaos and complexity, from control to monitoring and statistical analysis. Within them, traditional notions of power as domination from above become much harder to sustain. What, then, has power become in the world-network -- or much more accurately, the world as exponential internetwork, a network of networks of networks without end?

The automatic response of those who came of age in the Cold War is to see networks as systems in disguise, the creations of shadowy sovereigns -- capital, multinational corporations, the CIA, Osama bin Laden -- who work the strings from invisible positions behind the scenes. Even the most profound of the 1970s theorists of capillary power -- Foucault, Lukes, Giddens, Bourdieu -- could not free themselves from Ur-images of closed systems, of hierarchical control, of institutions as locales, where all-seeing sovereigns lay hidden, shadowed, but still ultimately governing even if indirectly through the astonishing techniques of discipline and surveillance. There is still truth in this view; networks have not, of course, replaced systems. The institutions of Foucault's carceral society - schools, clinics, hospitals, prisons, armies - remain potent and central. But sociotechnical networks increasingly penetrate, overlie, and fracture the borders of closed disciplinary institutions. Through them knowledge leaks out and with it, power. The decline of the closed disciplinary institution, and its replacement by distributed organizations, open source production, and other network forms of sociotechnical structure, reflects a modality of power I want to call weak discipline. read more

Greetings to all, I'm Brian Holmes, my simplest self-description is probably freelance writer and culture critic; I'll be posting mostly from Chicago and Paris.

I'm glad to be part of this latest forum that Jordan and his many partners have organized. As in each chance at world-wide communication and debate there is a hope to really get somewhere, not just interesting, but useful, vital for those of us participating and perhaps even for others, if we can reach insights that are enabling, that can be shared widely and that can help constitute a new common sense and a new constructive rationality, based on principles of inter-cultural respect quite different from the disastrous patterns of exploitation and conflict that now hold sway in the world.

The excerpt we've just received from Alain Joxe's book "Empire of Disorder" (2002) speaks of the "dynamic morphology" imposed on the world-system by the USA since 1989. From Joxe's perspective the world map looks like this: "an overdeveloped core, zones forming constellations of democracy or free market clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by flexible or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in crisis, zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid genocide."

From my persepctive in Chicago right now, I find it important to stress that the overdeveloped core and the free-market constellations he mentions do not necessarily equate with democracy anymore. We can see this immediately in the USA, since the Military Commissions Act has been signed into law just a few days ago, suspending both habeas corpus rights and aspects of the Geneva Convention against the use of torture for anyone arbitrarily designated by the Eecutive branch (and particularly the Department of Defense) as an "unlawful enemy combatant." What has been most worrying here is the relative lack of protest or palpable shock and concern at a development which constitutes a major step toward a new kind of fascism, what I call "liberal fascism" due both to its reliance on the rhetoric of freedom, and to the highly individualized nature of the repressive technologies whereby it claims to insure individual security. Why this lack of effective public outcry in the USA? read more

Excerpts from various notes I posted on SHOBAK during the invasion of Lebanon.

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August 11, 2006
Those Left Behind

I woke up this morning wondering what will happen next. When war ends? Peace breaks out? Or reap the whirlwind? Will it take forever to heal the anger?

Will people still wonder "Why Do They Hate Us/US?"

Fareed Zakaria will probably still be around to explain all this to us. Look for the anniversary NEWSWEEK cover story any time now.

Robert Fisk predicts: " A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11".

For some reason, a penultimate sentence from Bret Easton Ellis' wilfully meta novel LUNAR PARK (an elaborate mea culpa for AMERICAN PSYCHO) is stuck in my head:

"From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams."

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August 8, 2006
Henri Levy & Rockets

War is settling into a nice comfortable groove. A double shot of espresso please. Tired of rapidfire news updates, endless UN resolutions, US arm-twisting, vapid platitudes, impotent OIC maneuvering, street rage, intense blogs. As if anything moves the dial.

Bernard-Henri Levy loses the plot in this weekend's Sunday NYT Magazine. Forget the pain of others, Levy thinks the world is actually biased in favor of Arabs.

Here's the clincher:

"Maybe we shouldn't say "rocket" anymore. In French, at least, the word seems to belittle the thing, and implies an entire biased vision of this war. In Franglais, for example, we call a yapping dog a rocket, roquet; the word conjures a little dog whose bark is worse than his bite and who nibbles at your ankles. ... So why not say "bomb"? Or "missile"? Why not try, using the right word, to restore the barbaric, fanatical violence to this war that was desired by Hezbollah and by it alone? The politics of words. The geopolitics of metaphor. Semantics, in this region, is now more than ever a matter of morality." read more