Jordan Crandall on 17 Mar 2001 00:45:33 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Armor, Amour |
Ted: Of course I know the idea of a missile shield is decades old. I think the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield version is something different. To think it's the same thing is like speaking of armor as if it were the same kind of shielding that exists through the years unchanged. It's an effect, a product of many things. We constitute our dangers differently than in Cold War years, we have new vulnerabilities opened, we have this antiseptic goal of risk-free victory, we are making new tradeoffs between protection, mobility, and firepower in the battles for the reshaping of the military, we have new visual conventions and senses of place, we are beholden to new sets of economic interests, we have volatile climate of protectionist sentiment and all kinds of separatist movements, nationalistic or otherwise, along with new identity-formations in globalized world. There is also the fact that we are not talking about a giant dome over the US but a network of missiles. Where are they to be placed, how are they to be controlled, which allies do they protect? Who is inside or outside the 'bubble' and how will that decision be used as a political tool? The missile shield is actually less a shield and more a weapon. There is also the thinking of what exactly is the 'territory' that the missile shield rises up to protect. It's not just land. There is territorial contestation, backed by kinds of invasive/protective machinery, determined by the technological capacities of a time. I'm skimming through all of this now but there is a lot of work to be done in thinking what factors interlock to give rise to the shield-effect as a contouring force. You can say a lot about a culture by how it constitutes its shields. My concern is what the current version of the defense shield is saying about the US. It marks a place of war, a war-site in the process of being shaped, and a boundary-making process, a proto-materialization. A defense shield will materialize an "us." I'm not going for an analysis, but trying to tap into an imaginary, playfully and irresponsibly. It's in that spirit that I thought of my airline companion gleefully riding a bomb a la Dr Strangelove. I didn't intend to reference anything about that film, because you are right, what it says is just obsolete. I just want to follow that woman right now, looking for clues in the ways she stages her wars. Jordan _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold