[-empyre-] 'bare life' in Technopanic (forwarded from Horit)

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>, "horit herman peled" <horithp@gmail.com>]

On the threshold of Western cultural and economic affluence, dwell 
human beings excluded from its promise. The landscape of the 
Palestinian West Bank is dotted with dozens of temporary and 
permanent checkpoints, chaotic, cumulative piles of concrete, a 
surface of ruins. Their intervention in the Palestinians' lives is 
all-pervasive, designed to harass and humiliate them in order to make 
them relent on their struggle against the occupation. The  banality 
of evil is all-inclusive, encompassing the ontology of existence 
under occupation. Movement within the West Bank is subject to 
constant interruption, stalled and displaced by the web of 
checkpoints. State-of-the-art hi-tech gear, weaponry, wireless 
devices, computers and military uniforms, weave the control system. 
Each soldier is a communicative intersection in the wireless net. An 
important item in his or her dress inventory is the bulletproof vest, 
a shield over the chest signifying a state of active combat, soon to 
be a wearable wireless intersection site. Telescopic lenses mounted 
on M-16 rifles are at the soldier's disposal at all times, pointing 
at those who are at the checkpoints and those who approach the 
vicinity. Ephemeral bodies move within the checkpoints as if in slow 
motion, from frame to frame, performing a dance to the tune of the 
jailer, constantly suspected as either bodily bombs or smugglers of 
destructive weaponry. Rather than fighting terror, however, this 
network of checkpoints actually practices it, in that it turns human 
beings into helpless objects of oppression, stripped of subjectivity, 
driven to the point of total despair, to bare life existence.



While the digital screen is conventionally thought of as an 
intersection in the flow of social, cultural and economic 
transactions, the same screen, interfaced with military technology, 
metamorphoses into a weapon. A perfect hybridity exists between the 
body of a soldier stationed at a checkpoint in the West Bank or in 
Iraq or in Afghanistan, wrapped in fifteen kilos of state-of-the-art 
defensive and offensive instruments, and interactive digital screens 
streaming with rich multimedia data marking the bare life existence 
of every member of the occupied people, from birth to death. In this 
way the desert of bare life is surveilled by technopanic.  It is 
there where the illusion of security is being weaved. Technopanic is 
embedded in bare life existence.

Horit
>


--