<underfire> on disappearance

Sat Nov 18 18:46:12 EST 2006

Allan, Steve, and all,

  if i'm not wrong, there is a 1992 Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance - the kind of "enforced disappearance" that Allan has spoken about: but no, that's not the kind of disappearance that i'm concerned with, neither with the State's making-disappear of such information.

  the point on U2 crashes, getting lost - same phenomena with UAS, all subject to accidents precisely! and hence my suggestion in the post to perhaps create those accidents, so as to interrupt militarized democracies' order of disappearance/ stealth mode. 

  and Steve, the suggestion that it seems "easier to disappear into the mass of useless surveillance" is fascinating. i'll be very interested to hear more how that can be worked out.

  best regards,
  irving

"sdv at krokodile.co.uk" <sdv at krokodile.co.uk> wrote:
  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.

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