Volatizing the Other

Consider modern weaponry, such  objects as the intelligent drone or the artificially intelligent psyops expert.  These weapons emerge with increasing importance to the status of current world conflict.  They are weapons of intelligence and counterintelligence.  They can pacify the enemy or destroy the enemy—but this may amount to the same thing.  They define a structural relationship between the agency that deploys the weapon and the target of the weapon.  Oftentimes, but not alawys, this mirrors the structural relationship between the so-called first world and the so-called third world, the mass market global monad and indigenous local resistance.  From the perspective of the monad this relationship is called shock and awe, an asymmetric form imposed by the monad in the hope of volatizing the indigenous other. The metaphor here derives from nostalgia for the early days of atomic weaponry in which, as at Hiroshima, the figure of the other is irradiated into a poignant trace or instant memorial, such as a shadow on a wall. The global monad seeks the same result, accomplished metaphorically, or politically, with minimal violence, or no violence whatsoever. It is a question of convincing the Other, of persuading him to or selling him on that fatal post-consumerist wish, that becoming an irradiated shadow on the last standing wall was what he always wanted. Or at least, what he will end up becoming anyway.

The development of these weapons in the past quarter-century illustrates the degree to which the battlefield has become a laboratory for the study of weapon-target interaction, a normalized site of research that continues in perpetuity, just like those so-called laboratories for better living  first made famous in 1950s consumer ads. The medium of war becomes the message of the global monad. The metaphor of war becomes normalized and domesticated: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on so-called illegal immigrants.  Each of these marks a condition that relate less to the classical notion of war and its implication of utter victory and\or utter defeat, and more to the hyper–real condition of ambivalence.  Victory is replaced by perpetuation. Indeed those quaintly old-fashioned holidays such as Victory in Europe Day or Victory over Japan Day may soon be replaced by the new holiday of Perpetuation Days.  Afghanistan Perpetuation Day or Cocaine Perpetuation Day offer a vaguely medieval sense consistent with those holidays marking the precession of a retrograde world.  We promote drugs and wage war on drugs at the same time. We create conditions favorable to cancer and wage war on cancer at the same time. These hyperreal wars mark projects in which no end is foreseen, or wanted. They prophesize instead a permanent structure of ambivalence superimposed upon binary oppositions based on false values—a structure of unconsciousness, amnesia, sterility, and violence.