Afterimage call for papers/contributions: Alternative technologies
01/11/2001
"'Dialectic' is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of
conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton and åsemiology is a way of
avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm
Platonic form of language and dialogue."
Michel Foucault, from Power/Knowledge
Introductory overview
It is common practice that sailors and soldiers launching bombs and missiles in Afghanistan these days decorate them with a written message for their recipient. Usually underwritten by phobic statements from the American vocabulary, these deliberately offensive exclamations obviously reiterate some close affinities between warfare and discourse. However, while insulting words are often delivered for a destructive effect, they are rarely backed by such explosive power: with every message dispatched in Afghanistan any notion of impact acquires an added meaning. The sight of language dispersed along with shrapnel has caused many cultural critics and artists to lament the lack of power and potency in the relations of meaning they have carefully crafted. But to actually mourn such a loss must come with a recognition that any dialectic always aspires to a combative model. If words have supposedly lost their impact, to recall the blast of a previous sentence, it is only because they were, from the outset, launched from a linguistic command that calculated their syntactical path and semantic trajectory with purposeful precision. Discourse, in other words, is always caught up in the power relations made explicit by warfare. The point is made even more poignant by the Anthrax-laced letters arriving at various U.S. institutions. Handwritten manifestos have forwarded a lethal concoction that is both a subject of the text and a definitive enclosure. These words are, as with the correspondence taking place in Afghanistan, dispatched and backed by a substance that brings them into effect. The question is: are we, as critics, writers and artists, really "jealous" of bombs or toxic agents to the extent that we, in understandable despair, surrender words to the role of a futile supplement, even when words remain such a compelling addendum for warlords and terrorists alike? At the moment, the American bombs, combining insults and munitions, along with the anonymous letters, blending threats and poisons, are horrible compromises on communication. Let us instead address the struggles, strategies and tactics of present discourse/warfare with a sharpened pencil.
Call for papers/contributions
Let me offer some incomplete and inadequate fragments to elaborate on this call for papers and contributions in the context of recent events. It becomes more apparent with every GPS-piloted missile and ground operation guided by night-vision equipment that this "war on terrorism" is fought both with and over certain technologies. In the "wrong" hands, technology has a destructive potential, as witnessed on a macro level by the September 11 hijackings, renewed concern over the nuclear capability of Pakistan and the capacity to produce Anthrax spores with a levitating density. In the "right" hands, technology exudes a redeeming promise of global justice (administered the American way), economic affluence and ideological supremacy. But the battle of and over technology, interpreted here in the widest sense, may of course also extend to the removal of new Osama bin Laden footage from network television over fears that he could send some secret signalãa destructive code made possible by his mere presenceãto accomplices around the world. American media outlets have accompanied this move toward a dated caricature of the enemy with segments on the "lies" spread by headlines in the Pakistani press (reporting on Taliban news conferences) and "misleading" information distributed by broadcasting networks in Arab nations. It may furthermore include the capture of this very email message by the joint project Echelon that monitors communication channels and intercepts those parcels containing key words from a filtering list (I have no doubt made this shortlist). This latter point was further exacerbated by the recent U.S. anti-terrorism bill, passed on October 26, which makes invasion of privacy, through searches, and the constant surveillance of phone and email communications, what is commonly referred to as a gathering of "intelligence," a largely uncontested right of certain government agencies. The technologies now pronouncing war are, without doubt, the same technologies that we are actually fighting over, and the unbalanced contrast between the current adversaries could not be stronger: on one side, a global power, and on the other, a devastated place derogatively referred to as a remnant of the Stone Age. Technological progress, or prowess, is quite horrifically celebrated through this questionable display of military might, but it is also seen, usually in the foreboding CNN suspense that accompanies a dark night made visible in the moments before explosive impact, as a regulating and disciplining apparatus extending from certain conjunctions of power and knowledge to cover everything from your own home to the entire globe.
In a broad call for papers and contributions, Afterimage, the journal of media arts and cultural criticism, seeks work that wishes to profoundly engage and challenge the use and distribution of technology with alternative visions and functions.
Please forward your requests for further information or proposals to the editor, Are Flagan.
