Geographies of Violence by Doel Marcus A;

Author:Doel, Marcus A;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2017-05-09T13:40:10.349957+00:00

9 Atmospheric Terrorism Exterminatory Air Conditioning

Here, even the sky is dead.

William Sharpe, quoted in Goldsmith, 2015: 845

The weaponization of gas and air since the 1790s, exemplified by the advent of military ballooning, the rise of gas warfare, and the construction of death factories fitted out with gas chambers and crematoria, is part of a wider ensemble that Peter Sloterdijk (2009) calls ‘atmospheric terrorism’ and ‘black meteorology’ – the application of weaponized science and military technology to the explication (unfolding) of lethal environments. Sloterdijk only traces this explication of ‘environmental terrorism’ back to the entrenched battlefields of the First World War, and specifically to 22 April 1915, when the newly formed German gas regiment released chlorine gas on the Franco–Canadian infantry positions near Ypres, and in so doing transformed the atmosphere itself from a life-support system into a killing apparatus. One can immediately see the appeal of this killing operation in the context of trenches, tunnels, and bunkers, all of which render bullets and shells less and less effective. When chemical weapons penetrate these enclosed environments, however, they render them unliveable, necessitating the introduction of defensive measures to prevent the internal atmosphere from becoming lethal. For Sloterdijk, then, the key killing innovation of the twentieth century was the tendency to target not the body of the enemy directly, but his or her environment. This, he says, is the critical insight of terrorism, which is at root a kind of ‘atmospheric terrorism’ or ‘atmos-terrorism’ – the exploration of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility, the precursors of which we have mentioned in preceding chapters, such as poisoning watercourses and smoking-out besieged structures. The fallout from the worldwide advent of ‘atmospheric terrorism’ is particularly apparent in the transformation of the landscape through bunker architecture – those ‘cathedrals of artillery’, as Friedrich Tamms referred to them – during the Second World War and the Cold War, from the modesty of pillboxes to the majesty of the Atlantic Wall, and its quotidian expression in the concrete Brutalism that cemented cities and fortified life in the shadow of nuclear war.

Consider how far air power has been explicated (unfolded) by science and technology since the small steps taken in 1806, by Francis Beaufort, a ship’s commander in Britain’s Royal Navy, who solved the seemingly intractable problem of creating an exact wind-scale for sea-going vessels by adapting a technique that had been developed for the sails of windmills. The force of the wind could be inferred from the physical state of the sail: from the zero-degree of complete calm to the limit of what a sail could withstand in a storm. In so doing, the sails of a fully rigged frigate became a precise instrument for recording wind intensity. The use of the eponymous ‘Beaufort scale’ became mandatory for every vessel in the Royal Navy in 1838. By replacing the vagaries of inexact descriptive terminology with precise measurements that allowed little if any interpretative discretion, thousands of logbooks from across the world were suddenly rendered commensurable,

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