----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------the discussion wants to open its eyes and ears to the truth of terror and violence and insists or in some cases concedes - in very general terms, forgive me - that the vicious circle of perpetration-victimisation-witnessing expresses or even communicates politics, as if it were the mere technics of politics, the support for the image, but has not acknowledged - I will be wrong and embarrassed to be so as soon as I say - that it /is/ politics, not by convention, not by association, representation or performance, except that perpetrator-victim-witness enact politics: there is a political act in progress in violence and terror as these are engaged here and now. As violence and terror are engaged (in) as spectacle, they are here now; and as they are sometimes elsewhere - although always the threat this will suddenly alter, as with the precautions taken in anti-terrorist measures, or given voice to at the G20 - they are here too in our immediate milieux of communication, information: what collapses distance is not the horror but that the horror has a political function. Neoliberal reforms in education equally eliminate critique to a purpose. If the distance is historic, the proximity is in direct proportion to the political charge, even residue and fall-out, or ramifications of a past politics to us, in us, today. We feel still the fall of the empires of the 19th century even as so many 'senseless' wars have been fought in the name of empire; the senselessness of violence is not an index to its not making political sense. It made and makes sense for the US to have and to continue to support divisive and even Jihadist factions and factionalisation - everywhere in general. Fear is not the secret power invoked to paralyse populations, rather the forceful determination of and on a political agenda is the open secret of power. Fear is the projection. Fear is the knowledge that every individual will prove the rule by exception should he or she, you or I, criticise the Global War On Terror - and so become the enemy, terrorist, stuck in a cycle, where now the neoliberal democratic state is the perpetrator, the public is constructed as witness and this week's next top victim is... ...Is it possible to talk about a political intention in accelerating violent imagery, collapsing historical precedence, dividing societies by reversing meanings, that debt will be credit, that risk and danger will be security, that wars are humanitarian, that is eradicating rights because they threaten democracy, privatising and marketising weapons manufacture, including nuclear arms, while directing their deployment in a controlled market of the senseless consumption of living flesh, enslaving governments to corporations, while violently overthrowing states who fail to surrender sovereignty or economic self-determination? Is there a bigger horror being prepared just around the corner? - a naive question, I know.
Thank you, Simon
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