Blasting war. (Report and Essay).

Mohsen Mahkmalbaf, one of the important lyrical film directors of the Iranian New Wave, published a powerful essay in Monthly Review in 2001 called "Limbs of No Body." He described the destruction of Afghanistan over the last 20 years. The body of the world amputated Afghanistan. (1) In this time of digital terror, various email snooping and commercial digital data mining technologies have been justified and mobilized by the USA Patriot Act. The digital, in this paranoid, authoritarian era, is being used to disembody and to disempower.

We need to reembody and reempower our politics, our analysis, our digitality, our critical art. Therefore, we must resist any and all architectures of disembodiment which remove labor from manufacturing in the global economy, war from geography, privacy from security, gender from race and dissent from justice. These ideas, and all of us, are limbs of one body-the phrase over the portal to the United Nations.

Our point of reference in this chaotic, endlessly morphing swirl of phantasmatic nationalist discourse is quite simple: we are dead, or we are alive. We must issue a call to humanity, not as some universalized abstraction, but as a specific dialogic action across and with difference. We must look to our humanity in and with others across the globe, and find them human. And we must look to the dead, everywhere-not just here in the United States-and forge connection. The people who die from AIDS in SubSaharan Africa each day equal the dead of two September 11ths. We need to see, to really see, and then to see more, through a digital viewing of all of the complicated, messy, invisible politics that evade us. We can choose: we are limbs of no body, or we are limbs of one body.

This essay is about blasting war. Blasting enfolds within and around itself many meanings from many different historical epochs that traverse many different disciplines-war, weather, infectious disease, biology, environment, slang, aggressive language, critical analysis. Digital terror requires historiography: a structure that can identify changes without a reductionist causality, that can connect the limbs to the body. "Blasto," in biology, means embryonic cell formation.

To blast is to open up, to make, to form. To blast is to proclaim. To blast is to criticize vigorously.

It is a word that both describes and sounds a process rather than a statement or a thing. Politically significant in this time of terror, this Digital Terror gathering at Cornell University identifies itself as a workshop-a place to work together. In this spirit of collective work and effort, this essay connects five, conceptualizations our convener, Timothy Murray, professor of' English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, advanced in his symposium announcement: machineries depleted and abused by politicians, human rights, terror/war, ethnic anxieties and artistic responses.

This essay is structured as a homage to Mahkmalbaf's timely film Kandahar (2001), a film that blasts our imaginary projections of Afghanistan as a place of rubble, death, drugs, amputation, murder and bombed buildings (a place of absence) with an expansive, controlled compositional strategy of rich color, line, form (a place of presence). Kandahar insists on mapping visuality when our new world bans images. It is a cinema of many landscapes where the real and the imaginary twist together: sand, burqas, poverty, madrassas, people trying to live. Prosthetic legs cascade from the sky.

In Kandahar, a Canadian/Afghani woman journalist journeys into Afghanistan to search for her sister. The film moves from outside to inside but is always public. Subjectivity is figured as always larger than the self; it is self and others, in movement. The film genders the nation of the Mujahadeen and the Taliban through the vision of a diasporic woman. It is not a narrative. It does not have digital special effects. It is not an explanation. It is many stories folded into one. In the final shot, the woman journalist looks through the screen of her burqa at a distant city: we are inside Afghanistan, we are inside the burqa, we are not reaching our destination or concluding the narrative. We are looking out through a screen. We are looking beyond ourselves.

Machineries depleted and abused by politicians

Both popular culture like USA Today and CNN as well as President George Bush's speeches declare the tragedies of September 11th as a seismic historical shift, where nothing is the same after and what came before is blasted away like rock in a mountain needing removal for a new tunnel. Books on Islam proliferate but Islam is seen as separate from the "West," whatever that is in our post-cold war world. Books on 9/11 crowd bookstores but history is reduced to therapeutic repetitions. These testimonies are then separated from other traumas and suffering across the globe.

To blast is an expression of reprobation.

History begins, in this view, with the horrific assault on the U.S. And it begins in the U.S. But as Robert Fisk has pointed out "if you talk to a Palestinian in Lebanon about the September massacre, he will assume you are referring to the slaughter, at the hands of Israel's militia allies, of 1700 Palestinians in Beirut in September of 1982." (2) Many voices from around the globe, like Ariel Dorfman, Zillah Eisenstein, Eduardo Galleano, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said, have reminded us over the last year that September 11th is also the anniversary of the Chilean Coup, where 10,000 died, and other anniversaries of horrific and wrongful deaths and genocide, each different, each requiring our mourning. Around the world, there are many September 11ths, not only one: Iranians killed by Irqis; Guatemalans killed by their government; Rwandans, Yugoslavians, Cambodians, East Timorese and African Americans murdered across many Septembers. These deaths surround Americans with a virtual archive which is not spoken, whic h is not imaged, which is not connected.

These dead are the limbs of one body. When Bush proclaimed you are either with us or you are with the terrorists, he blasted away history with his binaries that, in and of themselves, are inoperative in a globalized, flexible, borderless economy, in asymmetrical warfare without nation states and with invisible enemies who blend in as suburbanites and family men. As film scholar Philip Rosen has argued, a radical historiography must replace the pursuit of authentic, immobilized pastness and disavowal with a dynamic sense of multiple temporalities. (3) These multiple temporalities must collide and produce frisson if we are to see anything at all.

The mediated immobilized pastness of mourning 9/11 throws out an anchor to our floating, gyrating anxieties. But on 9/12 Bush replaces Osama with Saddam, Afghanistan with Iraq, a plummeting economy and corporate criminals with war, and coalitions with global domination. It is a psychic replacement of memorializing with militarization, as though delete, copy, insert graphic were public policy rather than digital interfaces. Yet more than a decade ago, in the era just after the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz outlined exactly the same plan in their Defense Planning Guidance Report. They directed the military to retool for cyber, laser and electronic warfare capabilities to dominate outer space, inner space, digital space, private space, domestic space, entertainment space, international space and national space. (4) War policy is a repetition fetish recycling post-cold war, globalized capitalism as U.S. domination insured through preemptive strikes.

War machinery is no longer debated as public policy. It has been shorn from death. It is branded, streamlined and invisible. Adam Card, a White House Advisor, declares that the war plans against Iraq were delayed until September because you don't want to introduce a new product in August. Yet, since August 6, 1990-the same date as the bombing of Hiroshima-the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Iraq. Over one million Iraqis have died, half of whom were children.

Iraq raises a question for our politics and for our digital practices: what is history? In 2002 alone, the U.S. military has executed 30 bombing missions into Iraq. Will we declare war on Iraq when the image marketeers identify a good launch date or is the language of Bush a different temporality than the narrative on record? Or has the war been going on for over a decade anyway? Are Bush's speeches performance art used to camouflage the intensification of transnational capital?

By 1992, capital spending on information systems exceeded capital spending on industrial age items, such as mining, construction and manufacturing equipment. The Department of Defense (DOD) then shifted to an explicit policy of strategic information warfare because of the threat of open networks, no borders and easily available software. Instead of fighting Saddam, the DOD rerouted to protect capital's digital infrastructures from us, while it bombed Iraq. (5)

Human Rights

To blast is to blow air through the mouth to clear it from particles.

Slavoj Zizek asks what are we to make of the greatest power in the world bombarding one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan, as retaliation? (6) He observes that Kabul already looked like downtown Manhattan after September 11th, lulling us into the false security that nothing has changed. The most high-tech country in' the world has bombed a nation with barely any electricity and no paved roads. The DOD briefings explained that Afghanistan was not "target rich." The geography of war has been reorganized: within minutes of the first bombing of Afghanistan, the U.S. repositioned 40 communications satellites over the country and bought all satellite time to prevent independent imaging from outer space. (7)

Yet, as U.S. ground forces and CIA agents penetrated, they captured not only what they thought were Taliban operatives, but hard drives from almost any computer they could find. The Taliban banned every form of entertainment: movies, television, videos, music, dancing, photographs and paintings. As Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid points out, entertainment was always in short supply anyway in such an impoverished country. (8) U.S. popular culture imaged the end of the Taliban as a visual couplet between Afghanl women (not all, maybe a few) disposing of their burqas and the importation of Indian musicals on video and satellite dishes hammered from soup cans.

A recent issue of Variety, the entertainment industry trade paper, has a headline "Post Taliban Production Rebounds." It explains that the West--whatever that is now--is no longer limited to Mahkmalbaf's Kandahar for a point of reference. The Locarno Film Festival hosted an Afghan Film Day this year. But the Taliban destroyed 2700 films in the Afghan film archives, a history of analog images incinerated. (9)

Afghanistan's history is one of dismemberment before the U.S. bombings. Over the last 20 years, 2.5 million Afghans. died from war, militarization, famine and lack of medicine. Ten percent of the population perished. Another 30% migrated to other countries in search of food and water. More than six million Afghanis are refugees--three times the number of ex-Yugoslav refugees. (10)

But Afghanistan is not the only history to be rendered Invisible. It is as though Harry Potter's invisibility cloak has covered the globe like a digital rendering effect in a Disney film. Angola is an oil rich country recently visited by Colin Powell. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), after 27 years of war, 30% of the Angolan people are malnourished from famine, with mortality and malnutrition rates five to 10 times emergency threshold levels for international relief agencies."

We must articulate these histories with the recent actions of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. He responded to the terrorist attacks by arresting 6000 people in two months with little or no evidence of wrongdoing. But let us not amputate Ashcroft's actions from U.S. history: the Palmer Raids against Eastern European immigrants and communists in 1917 and 1918, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Red Scare evidence that Rosen's notion of multiple temporalities is not simply a theory but a necessity to blast away this aura of uniqueness that immobilizes political action and accountability. The USA Patriot Act, "rammed through Congress," as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes It, with very little debate, expands government power to Invade privacy, imprison people and punish dissent. Under the Terrorism, Information and Prevention System (TIPS), the government militarizes citizens and service workers to spy on people in their homes. Law enforcement agents now hav e a sneak and peek provision to enter a house or office with a search warrant when the occupants are away, photograph whatever they deem necessary to fight the war on terror and confiscate any communications equipment. (12)

Terror/War

To blast is to bomb, explode.

Susan Sontag, in a Op Ed piece in the New York Times, wrote that the war on terror is a vague, ill-defined misnomer designed to keep us engaged in endless war. She says "this is a phantom war and therefore in need of an anniversary." She says we are fighting Al Qaeda, not terror. (13) Perhaps war is simply a vacuous invocation and cover for the complete reorganization, realignment and mobilization of the state, the military, information infrastructures and transnational capital. Tom Ridge, head of Homeland Security, asked for not only exemptions from congressional oversight, but also demanded that corporate records and infrastructures be exempted from the Freedom of Information Act. Perhaps an authoritarian coup has occurred within our own borders. Perhaps Bush himself is virtual.

This endless phantom war which is really not war is also a war without images and without news: an invisible war. The DOD, according to the Columbia journalism Review, has created the strictest press protocols in U.S. history. (14) Reporters have no access to military personnel anywhere independently. They are covering the story from destroyers 2500 miles away in the Indian Ocean. All images must be approved, or are supplied by the DOD. The new terrain is a geography of non-appearance, no independent information and virtuality. Three dimensional imaging replaces news.

We must rewire for cyberwar. Bush's new war, and the wars that will follow, will no longer be total wars like World War II or Vietnam or the Gulf. They are, and will be, nodal wars, practiced and perfected in the war on drugs in the U.S. and Latin America, or the war on immigrants or the civil wars against the cultures of difference and public arts practices. Nodal wars are no longer wars of images and propaganda, but are instead about the simultaneous policing and circulation of images. They are asymmetrical warfare.

Since 1989, at the end of the cold war, the military has converted to something called Revolution in Military Affairs. As the twentieth century moved to put wars more and more in the air and off the ground, wars in the twenty-first century (which began not on 9/11 but in the revolutions and corporate mergers of 1989) etherize war itself by digitizing it. The 1999 bombings of Serbia signaled a decisive shift in the military from weaponry to cyber-infrastructure, the logical culmination of a transformation initiated in the 1950s during the height of the Cold War. (15) Now, with the largest military contract in U.S. history--$200 billion--awarded to Lockheed Martin, an aircraft manufacturer, there is virtually no difference between planes, weapons and computers. The CIA, for example, has targeted financial networks and organizations that might have harbored Al Qaeda money, by employing the hackers they once pursued for copyright piracy. The Predator, an unmanned spy plane, can also do reconnaissance. Commando So lo, a special operations communications plane, drops anti-Osama reward leaflets and blasts world beat hip-hop music over Afghanistan like a mobile rave machine.

In World War II, the Hollywood film industry collaborated with the military to produce propaganda films to uplift the troops and produce commercial narratives to keep the home fires burning. Film was used for reconnaissance, for surveillance, for news and for fantasy. The military provided plots and tactics, Hollywood supplied the images. Now, 50 years later, the military and Hollywood have a similar, but different, relationship based on digital interfaces. In August of 1999, just after the NATO bombings in Serbia, the U.S. Army announced a gift of $45 million to the University of Southern California over five years to create a research center to "develop advanced military simulations." The research center hoped to attract film studios and video game designers who would bring the psychoanalytical advances of video games and game park rides to war. (16)

This conversion of cold war digitalization strategies to Hollywood entertainment signified the increasing importance and power of the information/entertainment sectors in the U.S. economy, especially in terms of export, where copyrighted products are now our largest export. Firms that depended on military financing from the DOD moved into special effects, computer design and interactive entertainment, three areas then recycled and recombined back into military simulation technologies.

These digital conversions and convergences do not so simply mark a technological shift, but a political economy shift from a military industrial complex to the military information media entertainment complex. Last fall, Variety announced that the military had convened a group of screenwriters of action and cult films like Die Hard, Fight Club and Being John Malkovich to brainstorm terrorist scenarios. Jonathon Dolgen of Viacom, Sherri Lansing of Paramount and Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America met with Karl Rove, Senior White House advisor, to discuss Hollywood studio contributions to the war effort. (17)

Yet computer games outsell Hollywood films. But even more significantly, Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, was installed as head of the Federal Communication Corporation. In less than a year, he has peeled back rulings on media concentration and endangered the diversity of voices and opinions on broadband Internet, which the ACLU and many U.S. and Canadian media rights organizations have dubbed the "free speech issue of the twenty-first century."

In Variety, the network news executives bemoaned how to cover a war with no clear enemy, no single location, no beginning, middle or end, no images, no news bureaus in Central Asia, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, after the downsizing of public affairs departments across all media in the 19905, and no advertisers. As one executive put it, "we're not entirely sure where 'there' is now." (18)

Ethnic Anxieties

To blast is to infect injuriously.

Ethnic anxieties have escalated: Muslim, South Asian and Arab men were "tracked, interrogated and rounded up on 200 college campuses," according to an ACLU report. (19) Passengers from Middle Eastern countries were removed from flights because passengers said they were "uncomfortable." A Muslim woman was subjected to a humiliating body search at O'Hare Airport in Chicago when she refused to remove her scarf. Suspicions against immigrants have mounted precipitously: visitors from specific countries will be fingerprinted, non-citizens cannot be airline screeners and we can spy on our neighbors through the TIPS program. (20)

The Department of Homeland Security institutionalizes ethnic anxieties. It will, in the near future, have more armed federal agents than any other agency. It limits openness and accountability, threatens the Freedom of Information Act and advances racial profiling. It has the potential to turn whistle-blowers into enemies of the state. The budget allocations for Homeland Security show that raclalization of anxiety can be translated into dollars: the largest budget area, more than 50 times that allocated for twenty-first century technology, is designated for "SECURING AMERICA'S BORDERS." (21)

On the Internet, anti-Osama and anti-Arab gaming sights have multiplied Into the hundreds. The image of Bin Laden is the most circulated digital skin on the Internet for gainers, with Bush second. These games express that which George Bush, with his endless claims that we have no quarrel with the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, represses: they are the phantasmatic projection of power over the unknowable, the invisible and the unfindable. They are called Bye Bye Bin Laden, Bin Laden's Liquor Store, The Kill Osama Game, Bend Over Bin Laden, Box Bin Laden, Where's Osama, Slap Osama, Capture Bin Laden, Where's Osama Bin Hiding?, Bin Laden Bowling and Special Ops. These games function as displacements of the Revolution in Military Affairs. They elaborate the digitalization of warfare with the psychic manifestation of hatred. They repair the invisibility of this war with the vectors of flash animation that mark a sexualized, racialized, tactile killing of that which cannot be found.

Power, rage and revenge fantasies are projected into gaming interfaces--the psychotic underside of the national phantasma that pledges restraint and precision bombing. In these on-line games, the user's mouse and keyboard are weaponized into machinery that activates killing, exploding and deleting Arab men. Narrative is reduced to the movement of the mouse and the cyber-killings of Bin Laden, a pathological compulsion.

These interfaces racialize us and our computer keyboards as white, American, male killers for whom linear narrative supplies the erotics of death. As we select our weapons from the gaming interfaces--missiles, advanced weaponry, hi-tech gear, fists--we exceed psychoanalytic suture: we are weapons. We enter the messy underbelly of the machineries of war. As all the games are designed with a first person point of view shot, we insert ourselves into the screen, 'selecting our weapons, hard-booting critical analysis and debate, and kill. The reality of our now racialized white touch merges with the fantasy of the screen which is Arab, which is male and which is silent. Our speakers surround us with the blasts of explosions. We virally circulate these games as jokes, as relief from progressive email forwards from The Nation magazine, as pop culture, as blood lust, as continual reenactments of death to others.

Artistic Necessities

To blast Is to produce a shockwave, a thunderbolt It Is to blast hot air on steel in order to smelt something new.

In the end, I am not sure what shapes our politics and critical art will assume in this slippery, chaotic, authoritarian world. I only know we need both. Perhaps, through digital art as a prosthesis of hope and shockwave of peace, we can relearn that if we are alive--and not dead--we are all, indeed, limbs of one body. (22)

NOTES

(1.) Mohsen Mahkmalbar, "Limbs of No Body" in Monthly Review, Vol. 56, no. 6 (November 2001).

(2.) Robert Fisk "One Year Later: A View from the Middle East" In The Independent (September 11, 2002).

(3.) Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 77.

(4.) David Armstrong, "Dick Cheney's song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance" in Harper's Magazine (October 2002), pp. 76-83.

(5.) For a massively documented description of how the military has shifted to protection of digital capitalism, see Gregory J. Rattray, Strategic Warfare In Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

(6.) Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York Verso, 2002), p. 35.

(7.) David Corn, "Their Spy In the Sky" in The Nation (November 26, 2001).

(8.) Ahmed Rashid, Taliban (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p.115.

(9.) Melanle Goodfellow, "Post-Taliban Production Rebounds" in Variety (September 16-22, 2002), p. 20.

(10.) Mahkmalbaf, Ibid.

(11.) See Medecins Sans Frontieres information sheet on Angola, www.msf.org.

(12.) American Civil Liberties Association, "Civil Liberties after 9/11: A Historical Perspective on Protecting Liberty in Times of Crisis," published on-line at www.aclu.org, pp. 7-12.

(13.) Susan Sontag, "War" in the New York Times, September 12, 2002), p.21.

(14.) Neil Hickey, "Access Denied: The Pentagon's War Reporting Rules the Toughest Ever" In Columbia Journalism Review (January/February 2002).

(15.) Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 4-35, 91-112.

(16.) Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Matrixes of War" in Afterimage 28, no. 4, pp. 18-23.

(17.) Peter Bart, "Mixing the real and the surreal" in Variety (October 25-21, 2001), p. 6; Pamela McClintock, "Can MTV Help win Arab hearts over?" in Variety (November 19-25, 2001), p. 18; Pamela McClintock and Paula Bernstein, "Newsies walk propaganda tightrope" in Variety (November 19-25, 2001), p. 42.

(18.) Paula Bernstein, "Newsles Weigh High Costs of War" In Variety (September 24-30, 2001), p. 17.

(19.) ACLU, "Civil Liberties After 9/11," p. 6.

(20.) Ibid., p. 16.

(21.) Statement of David M: Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, "Homeland Security: Responsibility and Accountability for Achieving National Goals," Testimony Before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate, April 11, 2002 (United States General Accounting Office, 2002).

(22.) This article was originally presented as a lecture at Digital Terror: An International Workshop of Artists and Scholars, Sponsored by Ctheory Multimedia and the Rose Goldsen Lecture Series, at Cornell University on September 21, 2002.

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000).