Issue 3 - Screening War

Fall 2014 | www.diffractions.net

EDITORIAL

Images at War

In times of war, I can see the images that I just saw again
on the same channel, or on a different one.
Harun Farocki

More than playing a pivotal role in the political and military events of our history,
images have always exercised a constituent function in warfare. In the course of the
twentieth century, this function became ever more apparent, compelling, puzzling
and contradictory. The violent turn of the century, inaugurated by the new war on
terror, definitely rendered it more complex and, one could say, frightening. George
Roeder aptly defined war as a way of seeing (Roeder, 2006), not only because the
visual framing of war, as Judith Butler termed it (Butler, 2009), has implications for
how we perceive, understand, remember and deal with military events and the
people, societies and nations participating in them; but also due to the fact that
warfare itself relies on representational strategies and visual technologies to be
envisioned and conducted.
Indeed, modern war has always been a product of both material and imaginary
forces. Defining linkages have existed since the late nineteenth century between the
development of military skills and the evolution of representational technologies. In
fact, the history of warfare mirrors a progressive turn towards mediation and
representation. As Virilio has put it, the evolution of warfare is primarily the history

of radically changing fields of perception (Virilio, 1989: 7). In his understanding,

war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories
as in appropriating the immateriality of perceptual fields, what he calls the
perceptual logistics of war (ibid). The First World War in particular, according to
Virilio, would be the first mediatized conflict in history, for the hand-to-hand combat
was abandoned and substituted by the long-range massacre, in which the enemy,
hiding out in the trenches, becomes almost invisible, perceptible only through the
flash and glow of his own gun. This change in the perceptual logistics of war
explains the growing necessity for ever more accurate sighting, greater magnification,
for filming the war and photographically reconstructing the battlefield. From the
commanding heights of the earliest fortifications to the architectonic innovation of
the watch-tower, the development of anchored observation balloons, or the aerial
reconnaissance of its photographic reconstruction of the battleground, there has been
no end to the enlargement of the military field of perception. In short, the evolution
of warfare and the advancements in visual and filmic technologies have always fed
into each other.
German filmmaker and media theorist Harun Farocki, who sadly left us this year,
never ceased to chart this mutual contamination throughout his works. Already in
Before your Eyes Vietnam (1981), his second full-length feature film, Farocki
probed the difficulty to distinguish the conduct of war from its representations. In
one of the main scenes, the protagonists, a couple of political activists in Berlins antiVietnam movement, stand before war photographs of the conflict, shocked not only
by the violence of the events depicted, but also by the distancing effect of those
images:
A picture of us among the pictures of Vietnam it looks obscene, because we are
unharmed. The victims in the photos are covered in blood, their assassins remain
unharmed Its like a war film.

In this scene, the impact of those Vietnam images comes fully to the fore, not only as
a frame of war that builds on other representations of war (such as war films) to
organize ones perception of the conflict, but also and foremost as a battlefield, an
imaginary front where war is disputed both during and after the actual conflict. But
this scene also reflects upon the screening effect of war images, the way they bring
war closer but also render it more distant for those who fight it and for those without
direct access to the war experience. In a later film, War at a Distance (2003),
departing from the Gulf War, Farocki examines the exacerbation of this effect in

more recent and technologically sophisticated images from the air images from the
projectiles head, from the cameras that throw themselves into their targets. These
images no longer just represent the war for those who cannot directly experience it;
cameras have become actual weapons, and thus images actually wage war. More than
frames of war that organize our perception of wars in the actual world, shaping
hearts and minds, representations also contribute to the militarization of
thinking, to use Samuel Webers expression (Weber, 2009), and visual images, to be
more specific, have become the dominant warfighting model in the twenty-first
century. Hence Virilios assertive claim that there is no war without representation
(Virilio, 1989: 6).
Like Virilio, Farockis movies have also demonstrated that there is a quest for a
general system of visibility that will allow everything to be seen and known, at every
moment and in any place. There is, however, a paradoxical development in this
quest: while the recent visual history of war seems to mirror a growing demand for
visibility, it also displays an increasing scepticism towards the visual rendition of war.
Take Baudrillards famous claim that the Gulf War did not take place (Baudrillard,
1995). The first Gulf War pointedly showed that visibility and invisibility evolved
together throughout the history of modern warfare technology, with invisible
weapons making things visible and visual technologies rendering events invisible.
Baudrillard is often deemed to have claimed that the Gulf War was no more than a
hoax, a conflict that took place on screen and not in the actual world. At issue in his
analysis is not whether military attacks physically took place or material damage was
done by the United States in the Gulf, but what comprehension of these events can
exist outside the mediated experience of television coverage. What Baudrillards
assumption points out is that television coverage of the Gulf War was made to seem
surgical and that the emphasis on crafting the right image of the war heightened the
sense that it was somehow unreal, that it was just a spectacle. Yet, as Guy Debord
affirmed in his Society of the Spectacle, the drive towards spectacularisation is not a
mere dematerializing process that turns everything into images, but a mechanism for
unification. The spectacle of precision enacted by television during the Gulf War was
thus a strategy of invisibilisation, a mechanism to render the violence of war invisible
and to cast it as a minimalist and clean intervention through a unified image. One
could argue that the Gulf War was indeed screened in the sense that it was shielded
and contained by the television screens.

This spectacle of strategically contained visibility, this unified regime of vision, could
hardly be achieved in todays digital mediascape (Appadurai, 1990), as the Abu
Ghraib episode might attest. The leakage of pictures taken by American soldiers with
their digital cameras, which soon gained visibility throughout the entire media
landscape, proved that the Iraq war was being conducted within a new visibility
paradigm. As Nicholas Mirzoeff points out, the Iraq war was imagined as a
Hollywood film, with a necessarily dramatic and heroic ending, with George W. Bush
announcing his Mission accomplished (Mirzoeff, 2011: 288). However, in spite of
this hollywoodian vision, the war was already taking place in a post-cinematic era, in
a convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006) that diffuses and splinters any attempt at a
unified image of war. Indeed, as W. J. T. Mitchell has observed, in a formulation that
will be recurring throughout this issue, there is something new in war imagery ever
since 9/11, which he sees as a matter of both quality and quantity:
The development of new media, especially the combination of digital imaging and the
spread of the Internet has meant that the number of images has increased
exponentially along with the speed of their circulation. But it is also a matter of quality.
Images always possessed a certain infectious, viral character, a vitality that makes them
difficult to contain or quarantine. If images are like viruses or bacteria, this period has
been a period of breakout, a global plague of images. And like any infectious disease, it
has bred a host of anti-bodies in the form of counterimages. Our time has witnessed,
not simply more images, but a war of images (Mitchell, 2011: 2).

It should be noted, however, that this exponential increase in the number of pictures
circulating in the visual sphere does not amount to a higher diversity of images. As
Andrew Hoskins claims in the interview published in this issue, the idea of the
diversification of images circulating in both old media and new digital chains is often
overdone, given that practices of connectivity, convergence and remediation lead to a
repetition and homogeneity of visual contents. In Andrew Hoskins words, we are not
so much confronted by a new abundance of images as by the knowledge of the
abundance and the nature of images out there. Consequently, rather than the
traditional means of production and transmission of visual images being threatened
by the abundance of new images circulating in new channels, mainstream media have
become more conscious of their role as powerful modulators of terror, aggregating
and redirecting audiences towards the content of other media under their own
framing practices.
This also means that the growing demand for visibility and diversification is often
hampered by dynamics of opacity that regulate and obstruct the visualization of war

in spite of the pluralisation of imaging techniques. More than censoring practices, at

stake in this dynamics is a search for familiar procedures and templates of war
visualization in order to deal with the disarray of new types of images. Despite the
new logics of creation, consumption and reproduction of images at play in our media
ecology, the conditions of seeing and showing war are nevertheless haunted by past
wars and visual reconceptualisations of them, in a search for legibility, continuity and
familiarity.
Coming back to Mitchell, if [o]ur time has witnessed, not simply more images, but a
war of images (Mitchell, 2011: 2), this certainly means, not only that images have
become warfighting weapons, but also that given the pluralisation of new types of
images and the different media strategies that try to regulate them, images are at war
with each other, competing for visibility and fighting towards each others erasure.
Bearing these complex dynamics in mind, between the illusion of abundance, the
reutilization of old patterns and the unexpected new usages of visual imagery, this
issue aims at reflecting upon the variety of war images that have been brought to the
screen in various genres and at different historical moments, and at assessing present
conditions of seeing, showing, remembering and contesting war.
In the first article of this issue, Arresting Images: Inhabiting the Nazi
Archive in Yael Hersonkis A Film Unfinished, Daniela Agostinho addresses
the current archival economy of memory and the resource to archival imagery in
contemporary films dealing with traumatic pasts. Taking the case of A Film
Unfinished (2010), a documentary that appropriates Nazi propaganda imagery of the
Warsaw ghetto, the author interrogates the turn to wartime footage from the past as a
renewed crisis of representation that results from the disappearance of first hand
victims. Drawing on Derridas seminal Archive Fever, Agostinho discusses the
arresting quality of archival images of Nazi violence and the implications of
appropriating past imagery for the future of Holocaust witnessing. In questioning the
legacy of wartime footage, the article sheds light on the present usages of past images
and on the effects those past images keep bearing upon the present.
The legacy of past images is also at the forefront of Solveig Gades article,
Revisiting

and

Renegotiating

Wars:

The

Potential

of

Political

Subjectivization in Anri Salas Film 1395 Days Without Red, in which the
author examines Anri Salas film as an example of the trend in contemporary art
towards critically rethinking visual documents of recent wars. As a re-enactment of

widely circulated images of the siege of Sarajevo, Salas film questions the ruling
epistemological frameworks and the distribution of the sensible that determine
what can be seen and on which terms in times of war. Through a sophisticated
discussion that draws on affect theory and theories on political subjectivization,
Gades article explores the production of subjectivity and the potential to resist
dominant interpretative frames of war through what she terms war-critical art.
Within the broader context of the late modern war paradigm, in which war has
become the normative logics of social organization, contemporary artistic practices,
Gade argues, have the potential to create counterimages and thus shift, even if
temporarily, the warring distribution of the sensible.
The visuality of the late modern war paradigm is also the backdrop of Lorenzo
Donghis article, Replacing Bodies with Pictures: Al-Qaedas Visual
Strategies of Self-Configuration, which investigates the role images have
played ever since the proclaiming of War on Terror. Claiming that the Baudrillardian
conception of image as simulacrum is no longer able to tackle the war imagination
shaped in the first decade of the new millennium, Donghi argues for an approach that
takes the operative reality of images, instead of their ontological unreality, into
account. Focussing on strategies of self-representation in wartime, the article
examines bin Laden's self-iconography, composed by a large number of videomessages performed by the Saudi sheik from 2001 to his death, and the videotestaments of suicide-bombers that precede their death. As war weapons used by
terrorist organizations, often reproduced by the current media system to negotiate
the visibility of contemporary conflicts, these strategies of self-configuration
contribute to the dematerialization and endless replication of the terrorists body,
which is substituted by its own image, not as a simulacrum, but as an operative
presence.
The manifold dimensions of the relation between warfare and the connective turn
are discussed in an interview with Andrew Hoskins, professor at the University of
Glasgow, who questions the dynamics of old and new media, arguing that it is more
of the old that seems to be winning out. Finally, and coming back to Sarajevo,
Diffractions interviews Bosnian director Aida Begi, who recently directed one of the
segments of the collective film Bridges of Sarajevo (2014). Discussing the memory of
Bosnian war in her award-winning films, Begi suggests that the war keeps bearing
profound but often subtle effects on Bosnian society, which she tries to capture in her
carefully crafted works.

The centenary of the First World War commemorated this year has brought to the
fore how our notion of war has changed tremendously over the last century. As recent
scholarship emphasizes, war has ceased to be a state of exception or transition and
turned into a permanent and global condition, a logics of social organization that
drives relations on a planetary scale. Because the new global wars no longer have any
kind of spatial delimitation, the role of images has grown more problematic, caught
in a violent dynamics of multiplication and redundancy. By subtracting some of the
most compelling images from their frantic daily stream, the different contributions to
this issue offer a diverse and exciting reflection on the work of images in
contemporary warfare and war imagination.

Works cited
Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Baudrillard J (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translation by Paul Patton.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Butler J (2009) Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Jenkins H (2006) Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New
York and London: New York University Press.
Mirzoeff N (2011) The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Mitchell W J T (2011) Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the Pressent.
Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.
Roeder G (2006) Ways of Seeing. In: J. David Slocum (ed) Hollywood and War. The
Film Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 69-80.
Virilio P (1989) War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick
Camiller. London: Verso.