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Retort, "Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11"
May 18, 2004 - 7:36pm -- nolympics
"Afflicted Powers:
The State, the Spectacle and September 11"
Retort
He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971.
We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. [1] The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly. But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?
Read the rest at
"Afflicted Powers:
The State, the Spectacle and September 11"
Retort
He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971.
We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. [1] The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly. But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?
Read the rest at