Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution by Benjamin H. Bratton

Author:Benjamin H. Bratton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

We Are the Troops

The doubled but certainly not interchangeable atrocities of beheading videos and the Abu Ghraib torture games .jpgs turn degraded, profaned, dehumanized bodies into sacrificial symbols, and for this they are proximate shuttles for the suicide bomber’s transformation of his or her own person into a preemptive instrument of spatial warfare. The weaponized civilian body here inserts itself into soft targets and toward a grotesquely ultimate “deterritorialization,” reversing its solidarity with the mass medium of the biological crowd. The suicide bomber scrambles contracts and mutilates programs premised on duration and daily continuance, if not actually permanence. The act, however deranged, however devoted or faithless it may be, demonstrates (to itself and to us) a refusal to “go on” as a particular character cast by an enemy program of habitation (national, religious, linguistic, “ethnic”) manifested under the cover of anonymity. He walks onto “a bus,” into “a café,” into “a crowd.” Not every bus, café, or crowd—but at least one. That given site (designed and designated, composed and constituted) elaborates a specific formal incorporation and will do for now. It is, as one place among other places, a component in a larger contest of geographies, and the pedestrian’s performance of this repetition wears into that place and reshapes it accordingly—place becomes habitat for predator and prey. To re-perform, consciously or unconsciously, a role demanded by any place’s script is to accept a requisite inscription as the legitimate position for one’s own person. With or without a bomb strapped to it, the meandering body is the transport of an ongoing architectonic conflict that is fundamental to political participation. As first-person munition, the suicide bomber refuses that casting, and in lieu of the necessary political technologies with which to counter-inscribe a site, he or she attacks the same medium through which the offending geography works: bodily habitation itself.

In the midst of the act of suicide his body triggers a self-extinguishing and then self-amplifying feedback loop—refusing, reflecting, and returning the ordained identification of location, wiping it of programmability, and possibly also claiming it thereby for another nation and narration in a place now cleared of the offending plots. Another less-direct violence of the suicide bomber is the suspension of the premise of habitation per se, its patterned repetition toward collective formal location. The immediate anatomical violence at the site of the explosion also instills fear in those who would otherwise blithely occupy those same places in full confidence of their everyday roles. The fabric blanketing habit, habitat, and habitation is torn. Facing the new everyday program of the randomly exploding pedestrian, the city struggles to maintain the illusion of normalcy. The battle is surely over real space, but also over the perception of space. This part of the war is phenomenological, as victims of suicide attack are those who have lost the lottery of thereness. One group struggles to focus their benign existential illusion, drowning out the din, and the other to blast that inertness to bits, each a soldier-civilian in the other’s plot.

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