[Nettime-bold] Call for...

[Are Flagan <areflagan@mac.com>]

Afterimage call for papers/contributions: Alternative technologies

"'Dialectic' is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of
conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton and Œsemiology¹ 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

Contents:
Introductory overview
Call for papers/contributions

+ + + 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 ³jealous² 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 signal‹a
destructive code made possible by his mere presence‹to 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 ³misleading²
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
³intelligence,² 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 (http://www.vsw.org/afterimage), 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, areflagan@mac.com.

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold