Biopolitical Screens by Väliaho Pasi

Author:Väliaho, Pasi [Väliaho, Pasi ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: social science, media studies
ISBN: 9780262027472
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

A whole network of psychobiological rationalities, traumatic bodies and minds, military training and rehabilitation strategies, screen technologies, and actual “overseas contingency operations” surrounds the images produced on the Virtual Iraq platform we started this chapter with. Alongside discourses, institutions, scientific statements, and technological materialities, simple computer-generated animations, like the one of driving a Humvee on a desolate road in the desert under the evening sky (see figure 3.2), function as important operational tools with which bodies and persons are captured in ever-expanding and self-perpetuating wars. The virtual reality and video game images used in training, therapy, and entertainment serve to produce agency that is prepared for the exigencies of hostile combat environments specifically and for the neoliberal reality of competition, risk, and danger more generally.

That agency is at once distributed, affective, and plastic. First, the mental and bodily dispositions of the biopolitical subject, considered as a member of the human species rather than as a psychological individual, are distributed across the evolutionary folds of the brains of the entire species. Second, this subject is fundamentally an affective being whose motivations boil down to a few “basic emotions” crucial to the survival of the organism. Third, and most important, the brain of the biopolitical subject is plastic and amenable to modulation by media technologies. Virtual reality video game images, by erasing distinctions between themselves and the body-brains of their observers, predispose those observers to the ready modification of their cerebral circuits, especially in the name of self-preservation and immunity.

However, the visual economy we encounter on Virtual Iraq produces subjects immune not only to their outside but also to themselves, subjects that experience the past as an alien force operating from within them. And this conflation of life with death, emergence with destruction may well be symptomatic of the more general autoimmunitary crisis that characterizes the thanatographic images we consume on our game consoles and computer screens. The power of these violent images lies not so much in what they show as in how they animate the reptilian cinema of basic affectivity that runs deep in the ancestral folds of our brains, and that makes us want to violently defend ourselves against any threat—even when we are the threat.

The opening of Farocki’s Immersion points to at least one significant way we can counter the destructive power invested in these images. As the black left screen reflects back on its observer, the video installation asks us to ask ourselves: What exactly are the images we are about to see? What are the forces that bind them together and in binding them shape how we think and act? The images themselves become objects of questioning and evaluation. This kind of “double exposure” generates a “cut” into the prevailing models of sensation and perception, giving rise to another level of (re)cognition, one that can critically reflect on the production of our perceptions and mappings of the world. Such cuts and double exposures will be the focus of chapter 4.

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