Proteus

Perpetual war is all but intolerable, except within in a video game, and so perhaps at the limits of tolerance we have entered a dormancy phase in which the wars continue at a lower intensity, as if we sleepwalk through them.  The unreality of these event favors their constant recession from consciousness where they sleep with the other corpses of our forgotten history, to be re-animated as circumstances demand.

There are always other sources of terror available to us.  It may be that it is not so much war that is perpetual as it is terror.  The condition in which there is no longer any ideological ground from which to criticize capital coincides with the emergence of a fundamentally protean form of terror.  

Terror cannot serve as a basis to critique capital.  It is too immediate, too fluid, too easily named and unnamed, and too easily seized upon by the hegemonic power as a justification.  Hegemony and terror are equally protean, equally without justification, except in their entanglement with each other.

As hegemony proceeds toward increasing invisibility, we witness the elimination or disappearance under unsatisfactory circumstances, of many of the iconic figures of terror.  The hanging of Saddam, captured on low resolution video, looked nothing at all like justice, and lacked the untainted symbolism of the toppling of his statue.  Nor did the impromptu video of Qaddafi’s street torture and execution, match the lofty ideals of the hegemonic West.  Bin Laden was removed as if by the wave of a magic hand.  No images were released, except for an animated schematic of the official version of the shooting, as if it had not happened in reality, but only in some virtual space where justice and history are digitized.  Mubarak attends trial in his deathbed.  There is not the sense of fundamental change in any of this.  There is rather the sense of a generational interlude, while the West finds its new form of terror in the specter of economic collapse.