(DOWNLOAD) "In the Name of Freedom Comes a Totalizing War-Machine (Commentaries: The World at Large: War, Terror, Freedom)" by Arena Journal # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: In the Name of Freedom Comes a Totalizing War-Machine (Commentaries: The World at Large: War, Terror, Freedom)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2002
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 205 KB
Description
Photographs of dead children regularly appear in the world press. The killing of Anas bin Nazir, shot in the back by the Indonesian military as he ran through a rice paddy in Aceh, is a recent example (23 May 2003). However, there is a one syndicated photograph that I cannot get out of my mind. Taken in 2001 after an exchange of gunfire at a checkpoint near Jerusalem, the photo stands out as carrying something beyond the usual image of simple tragic death. It is poised at a moment of contradictory truth. It depicts a Palestinian youth lying prone and half-naked in the middle of a dusty street. A dog-sized robot--camera-eyed and remote-controlled--checks to see whether or not the boy terrorist is dead or still dangerous. To one side of the photograph a woman carrying a shopping bag begins to cross the street. The human moment is frozen at the point of a technical question. The woman, and the body politic of an imposed nation, waits as the necroscopic machine checks on a technicality: 'Is the potential risk neutralized, or does it still present a threat?' Certainly this act of technological mediation ameliorates risk for the unseen soldiers. However, at the same time it also dehumanizes the threat and safely objectifies the 'enemy'. No one mourns the dead person--not even the bystander. There is no rite of passage to mark the passing of life from his body. The emotional power of the photograph works off that very contradictory abstraction, contrasting the post-human intervention with the banal humanity of an old woman engaged in one of the necessary transactions of everyday life. It just so happens that she wants to cross a street where someone has been killed. The photograph thus subjectively counterposes instrumental mediation, human mortality and quotidian necessity, even as it carries this condensed moment of tragedy to us, the newspaper readers thousands of kilometres away--mediated tragedy, breakfast toast and momentary effect. To the extent that the photograph still works emotionally, we do not live in a post-human world. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the lines between the human and the means of technical mediation are being blurred. Every time that instruments of the abstract war-machine are used--even if ostensibly to protect us--or every time we glance at yet another image of violence and the emotional effect is diminished by even a shade, we are allowing our world to be overlaid by a strengthening level of the post-human.