<underfire> on disappearance

[sdv at krokodile.co.uk]

allan/all

A couple of things concern me about your response to Irving's 
interesting post, which at least raises the possibility of  what  
politics might be in the process of becoming. Rather than the absurd 
return of the transcendent, the imposition of false universals and the 
unacknowledged borrowing from Levinas. However to the point then:

The central problem with your representation is that acts of state 
terror are never invisible. Indeed I'm tempted to ask  'how can one 
imagine that any of the named acts of state terror were ever invisible 
?'  (One might argue that the genocidal acts of British colonialism in 
India in the late 19th C were not recognized as Genocide at the time, 
however that millions of people died was known at the time.)  The point 
is that acts of state terror have never have been invisible, indeed the 
opposite is true because the acts are paraded in front of the world as 
'worthy acts'.  Acts of state terror are precisely and perhaps always 
have been in the public realm. There is an implication in your last 
comment which suggests that public knowledge of the actions being 
carried in their name might increase the resistance to the events, not 
so - a safer presumption would be that the public referred to merely 
desires the acts of genocide, the torture,  after all a 'voting 
majority' of the german public desired the repression that the fascists 
offered, the majority of the Israeli public desires the urbicide...

The differend between us is best summarized in our understanding of the 
value of the discussion of disappearence, which is interesting precisely 
because it is an attempt to discuss the actual machinary of the 
postmodern state. The relations being drawn out between the 
technologies/technocracy and the functioning state apparatus are 
important precisely because they are a different view of the inevitable 
consequences of the state as an imperial machine. It is not enough to 
know of the acts of  states (not a state) even if they and you believe 
that they attempting to make consequences invisible,  which you'll 
unsurprised to hear I doubt. We have to understand the machinary itself.

Where Irving discusses UAS as an element of machinary, let me add 
another; those tedious american anti-philosophers who produced 
justifications for legitimate-state-torture... one day we'll be coming 
for them and believe me that it won't be with compassion...

Finally then (and I've worked to keep this brief)  there is an 
implication in Irving's note that the concept of disappearence is an 
aspect of the 'resistance' that both of you mention. Which is to say the 
new choice of visibility or invisibility for those who resist. Bizarrely 
in this society when sense cannot easily be differentiated from nonsense 
it looks like it is becoming easier to dissapear into the mass of  
useless surveillance....

best wishes
steve
Allan Siegel wrote:

> I find this piece by Irving Goh (16 Nov.) baffling and obtuse. As it 
> is employed here, the term democracy is so facile anyone from Putin to 
> Bush to Nazarbayev could use it with equal dexterity. But really, is 
> this about the disappearance of people, machines or the state? Seems 
> to be mainly about the disappearances of machines and/or the state. 
> U2’s have been known to disappear, crash or even be shot down – so 
> much for invisibility. But, I am more interested in acts of a state 
> that render the ramifications of its policies invisible:  that cause 
> people to disappear. For example, in El Salvador or Argentina where it 
> was a whole ‘class’ of people who were made to disappear. Alongside 
> these acts of ‘disappearance’ was an apparatus of disinformation, 
> censorship and murder designed to negate or obliterate these actions 
> of disappearing. Is this what Irving means by, “it is as if the State 
> has put into effect a counter-disappearance to counter critical 
> disappearance”?
>
> It is axiomatic that alongside state acts of terrorism there exists an 
> apparatus (operating with varying degrees of success) whose purpose is 
> to render the objects of state terrorism invisible. Whether its the 
> Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis, the Armenian genocide , 
> Srebrenica, Rwanda, Guantanamo or actions in the West Bank the 
> organizers of state terrorist campaigns seek to cover their tracks and 
> render the victims invisible. Notably, some of the acts have been 
> revealed (unfortunately and mostly after the fact) before the traces 
> could be completed eradicated. Yet, under the cover of ‘democracy’ 
> numerous acts of disappearance meld into a web-like apparatus of 
> acceptable deniability - Disneyland gulags with starbucks at the 
> entrance. What forms of resistance, compassion, discourse can be 
> activated, energized, articulated to counteract (negate?) state 
> terrorist repertoires as they expands their reach, methodology and 
> objectives?
>
> A.S.
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://underfire.eyebeam.org/pipermail/underfire/attachments/20061118/3fb89f66/attachment.html