Keith Sanborn on Sun, 20 Aug 2006 16:54:25 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> IDF reading Deleuze and Guattari (and Debord) |
A short response: 1. It's interesting the military is finding its inspiration in ubanist theory which dates from the 1950s in the case of Debord and the Situationists. In the case of Deleuze and Guattari, the work dates from the 1960s and 70s. Not exactly today's cultural avant-garde, even if an inspiration for it. 2. While the refusal of conventional architectural space--door, windows, passages, stairways--in favor of unexpected penetrations of walls, does have a terrorizing effect which can not doubt procure psychological advantages for those carrying it out, it represents an elaborate admission-couched in theory which is at a minimum decades old-that the war effort being carried out by the Israeli military is a massive attempt to level a culture, so that not one stone shall be left on top of another. A time honored tactic in the local Hittite tradition, rather than the more distant French one. 3. It's not about surprising and intimidating the "bad guys" in their hiding places, it's about carrying forward a war of extermination: the Israeli military's goal was essentially to destroy infrastructure in their recent campaign; the inhabitants of the territory who died, were of less importance to them. They are attempting to make the space of the Palestinians, and those who sympathize with them in the immediate vicinity uninhabitable. In this they achieved notable "success." It is a "cautionary" narrative: pour encourager les autres. 4. The UN Troops were not "in the wrong place and the wrong time" because the goal was to destroy the place, hence the direct hits on UN Troops, in spite of repeated advisings of their positions to the Israeli Military. The information was not ignored, it was irrelevant to the Israeli mission. 5. Random media reports from the field carried nothing of a sense of an Israeli soldier, reinvigorated by radical theory. The ones I heard carried the profound sense of disorientation typical of the conventional soldier used in urban terrain. The disorientation effect may have backfired. 6. Hezbollah is no longer conceived of either in Israel or Lebanon as a "terrorist organization" in the old sense but a space which resists Israeli penetration. The two Israel soldiers, whose capture were used to justify the Israeli attack, were captured by Hezbollah-not kidnapped-inside Lebanon, or shall we say inside Hezbollah space. The use of this as a justification for the brutalization of the Lebanese victims by the Israeli military is part and parcel of their repeated violations of Lebanese air space: we can come and go as we please, penetrate your most private space, terrorize you. It is a pattern more nearly based on the tactics of gangsterism, or domestic violence than on radical French theory, whatever its intellectual veneer. In the "he started it" scenario, it is at best a grotesquely amplified mirroring back of the rockets which occasionally but symbolically send Israeli settlers scurrying to their bomb shelters. But instead of sending people underground, it brings their houses down. 7. Interestingly, Hezbollah, who clearly understood that the Iraeli attacks on Lebanon were primarily directed against infrastructure as an act of extermination, has moved quickly, according to us media reports, NPR for example, to offer architectural and engineering help as well as financial support for those affected by the Israeli attacks. Labelling Hezbollah a "terrorist" organization is certainly either a deliberate misrepresentation of its activities or a feeble misunderstanding of them. 8. The Israeli version of "swarming" has less to do with "tactical media" than the 1968 strategy suggested by US General Westmoreland: bombing Vietnam "back to the stone age." This is the same one applied in Iraq by the US. Architecture comes in the back door in Iraq in cynical corporate form: boondoggle, no-bid contracts, which, according to the US Government's own recent reports, are failing because of grotesque mismanagement as well as "security issues." 9. Even if IDF tactics are not credible as a recuperation of decades-old French theory, we should remember the old Situationist dictum: those who make revolution half-way, are only digging their own graves. Keith Sanborn # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net