Masters of the Screen: On Media, Optics, and Photography as Fatal Strategy

Abstract

Departing from Bernard Harcourt’s The Counterrevolution, this paper considers how American counterinsurgency theory-based government and paramilitarizated optics together created Baudrillard’s “irruption of the obscene”—where Rapid Dominance strategy bleeds across the delineation between military and civilian realms, where mass media becomes the site of warfare—and re-examines Rapid Dominance along these new terms: when loss of illusion unfolds alongside declarations of “transparency” and “truth,” when everything becomes optics as mediated by a screen—the limits of which we can no longer detect—there can be no visual comprehension of our environment. Here, the strategy continues to issue a condemnation-to-paralysis, a being-ensnared in the cyclical effects of vertigo and fascination within the trance of spectatorship, but who is the new adversary? How is the field of vision renegotiated and what is camouflage? Disrupting our visual hypnosis, this paper uses Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies alongside Virilio’s Vision Machine to argue that resistance is still possible—the faculties of battlefield-perception can be wrenched back— presenting visual communication as weapon against the omnipotence of Rapid Dominance: a new photographic language through technological manipulation that breaks the flow of information, refracts shock and awe and puts on display our full monstrosity as the pharmakon of perception.

Contributors

Rebecca Lee Sanchez

Conference

Publication date: June 2019

Publication date (Print): June 2019

Pages: 83-89

Affiliations

European Graduate School

Seewjinenstrasse 6, CH-3930 Visp

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM19.13

Copyright statement: © Sanchez. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of POM Beirut 2019

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019

Conference acronym: POM2019

Conference number: 2

Conference location: Beirut, Lebanon

Conference date: 11-14 June 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Politics of the Machine

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM19.13

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing