BY JORDAN CRANDALL
During Gulf War II, around 600 journalists were assigned positions alongside combat and support troops — intended to give us all front row seats to the war. Previously trained by the Pentagon in week-long media boot camps, these embedded journalists were not allowed to carry guns but they were allowed to carry cameras. If the first Gulf War (where the reporters were confined to hotels) was something like a war game, this war would seem to be something more like reality television.
Buoyed by its collaborations with Hollywood -- which is riding high on an unprecedented wave of revenue from reality TV programming that now constitutes over half of the top 10 shows in the US -- and increasingly information-savvy, the Pentagon now knows that stage-managed real life is where the action is at. It will no longer be accused, it thinks, of withholding or controlling information. It will give us real life on the front lines, truth behind the facades, Ted Koppel in a tank. However, like the overproduced reality television show that ends up squeezing out any sense of spontaneity, these images turned out to be as misleading as those of the first Gulf War. There were rules of engagement that all embedded journalists had sworn to abide by. The details of military actions could only be described in general terms and journalists were prohibited from writing about possible future missions, classified weapons, or sensitive information. There was a social code of conduct among personnel as to what can be said. The commander of an embedded journalists unit could block any reporter from filing stories via satellite connection at any time. Much of what appeared to be live was actually recorded hours earlier. And the whole thing got fed into the graphics-heavy, soundbyte-oriented news machine anyway, itself a primary interface to a media-driven market of investors who play the war and who trade based on news. Embedded reporting was itself embedded within a host of now-familiar conventions, accompanied by scrolling updates, computer-generated flyovers over Baghdad, animated EarthViewer satellite imagery, drum rolls, and links to websites that allowed us to fondle 3D animations of munitions. The war didnt end up looking like reality television so much as a carnivalesque media Olympics.
Haunting images
Standing out prominently alongside these embedded images were the familiar echoes of the first Gulf War: those haunting images from camera-mounted bombs (or rather, bomb-mounted cameras) that explode upon impact and mask any repercussion at groundlevel. Those flying points of view to which we have only virtual access… One wonders, as always, what the real artillery is in this war -- images or bullets. Perhaps the soldiers should be allowed to carry cameras, or the camera and gun should simply collapse into one another. For the military, the distance between has been narrowing for quite some time anyway. It has been narrowing in terms of what has been called the military-entertainment complex. It has been narrowing in terms of the windows between detection and engagement, sensor and shooter, intelligence-gathering and deployment -- which in many ways drives military development and especially its aerial imaging. There are two modes to this collapse. We might call them the manned and the unmanned. A channel of re-embodiment opens up via reality media and its focus on unfiltered immediacy. At the same time, a channel of disembodiment opens up via automated vision and the unmanned. Think of two modes. One is the handheld camera, live and on the scene. We watch seemingly immediate, raw footage through it. The other is the disembodied gaze. We don’t watch through it. It is the gaze that belongs to everyone and no one. The camera-riding bomb is only one example. There are many other examples that we can’t see. In many senses, this gaze has moved into the status of a condition. That is, it has moved from something that we can represent to something that helps to structure representation itself, as if lurking behind the visual field.
The Predator
So which is it? If we think of perception as being relocated -- and in many ways warfare is about such relocation -- can we say that it is becoming re-physicalized, or not? I want to consider both of these modes. In so doing, I want to also introduce another element -- in a sense, outfitting these concepts with armaments. I want to suggest that the condition of this relocation of perception is its subsequent arming -- its subsequent backing by an apparatus of conquest and defense. Can we think of perception as becoming armed in this way? How could such an increasingly ephemeral and distributed capacity be simultaneously fortified, couched within an apparatus of warfare – dematerialized - yet weighted?
The current star of the unmanned vehicles is the Predator, which had its major debut in 1995 in Bosnia. The Predator is a toy-like and windowless vehicle, originally built for reconnaissance missions, that is flown by both the military and the C.I.A. There is no pilot in its cockpit -- there is an operator who sits hundreds or thousands of miles away at a console (most recently, in Nevada). The Predator was never conceived to be able to fire upon targets. It has on many occasions captured potential targets on video but was unable to do anything about it. In other words, it had got them in its sights but was unable to fully capture -- i.e., shoot -- as if it were impotent. For example, a Predator drone once captured a tall turban-wearing man on video in Afghanistan that many officials believe was bin Laden. But there was nothing to be done except to relay the information back to command posts, who may then channel it to other vehicles equipped for interception. There was no chance to eliminate that which appeared in the image, an act which seems to negate the very purpose of photography. Meanwhile, the target slipped from view. The impotence of the image led to the re-forging of the vehicle. In the new regimes of the image, there can be no possibility of escape. Vision must be outfitted, the body retooled, the apparatus armed.
Institutional effect: The military has always sought to reduce the time from sensor to shooter to almost zero - to more closely integrate the apparatuses of detection and engagement. The growing urgency reached its culmination after September 11. Now Predators were being hastily equipped with Hellfire missiles and laser-targeting systems which can work in tandem. Missile and video camera sit side-by-side, pointed toward the ground, aimed to capture, mounted on the belly of a windowless airplane.
Photography was once an accurate replica of the world, driven by the need to remove the human from direct physical contact with the site of experience. The human is placed on the other side of representation as a kind of shield from reality, physically protected but allowing a form of disembodied presence. The image and its technical support act as protector, as life-giver, yet they are bound up in a technical development that threatens the human with obsolescence. They provide a means for its extension, yet a means for its removal. Warfare: protection through the aid of the image, countered with the annihilation that the image also facilitates.
Sedimentation in real-time
We have the narrowing of divisions between the technologies of detection and engagement, as well the blurring of the roles of intelligence-gathering and deployment. Think of the blurring of the roles and limits to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the creation of the new intelligence unit within the Department of Homeland Security. From this consolidation erupts the technology itself. Or is it the other way round? Then there is the image, and the role of seeing. The image both tracks and aims, traces and targets, its framings operating as a new development of perspective. If we think of perspective as a way of locating relationships between objects in space and their representations, what is it, then, if we seek to collapse that space? Is this a perspective aimed at obliteration? A precise freezing in time and space, a precise sedimentation of image, referent, and projectile in real-time, in order to guide and mark an annihilation? [ed.] Crandall details four instances of such use of the Predator drones in Afghanisaton, Yemen and Iraq between February 2002 and June 2003. In each of these cases, in each of these strikes, I remember trying to picture the scene. One man -- standing alone or in a group, or travelling by car -- is suddenly fired at from the sky, as if zapped by a lightning bolt. He is singled out for destruction among the others standing nearby, as if by an act of God. To what remote hidden bunker was this image sent, whose hidden hand released its payload? In the New York Times, Walter Kirn wrote that, from the perspective of his sofa, this latest incident had the quality of an immaculate destruction. It may well have been Thor doing the shooting, he wrote. Or me. He said that with no individual human being to take credit for the hit -- no swaggering flying ace, no deadeye tail gunner and no squinting rifleman -- it felt like a pure projection of my will or continuing anger about terrorism.
Fictions of instant command
One can immediately picture a peculiar kind of armed couch potato, caught somewhere between a videogame and the news. We hold our own remote devices that give us the fictions of instant command, and sitting in front of our television sets or computer screens, we are oddly enough about as close to the action as the actual pilots get -- as well as those secret teams who have their fingers on the triggers. Part of a distributed mass with no fixed contours, with no one person to locate at the helm, the unmanned system is no ONE yet everyone. Its projectile: the extension of some inner combative state? A distributed, armed intent? One can think of the action of slamming the phone down as somehow getting back at the person on the other line, or of blasting the horn at a stupid driver who nearly caused an accident. We transfer anger through our devices. Through remotes of all kinds, we can picture the very common gesture of the point and shoot. None of these actions are anywhere near that of launching an actual missile, of course. But we can identify with the gesture, the response mechanism, the conditioning process, the interceptive goal. We can speak of mechanisms behind the decision to engage. One can speak metaphorically of pushing ones buttons, which means that someone is deliberately exploiting ones soft spots, inciting anger in a knee-jerk reaction. The device marks a loop between perception, technology, and the pacings of the body. Eye, viewfinder, and trigger. A structure for orienting attention and facilitating differentiation or division. Subject/object, me/you, friend/enemy. We choose this over that. We locate ourselves to this side of image, to the safe side, against the enemy it protects us from. We draw lines in the sand; we say ‘I stand here against you, defining ourselves by that which we oppose’. How far are we willing to go to defend it? What kind of technology backs us?
The surprise attack on the Iraqi command bunker that launched Gulf War II was supposed to be the mother of all smart strikes. Think of all of the computational power and intelligence that went into the determination of that one precise moment. It was supposed to be the apex of the entire operation, the magnum opus, the punctum, the crowning glory of the American military machine. Imagine: to obliterate Saddam Hussein himself in one enormous zap, one precise blast from the sky, as if God himself had struck the man down. The blast over Baghdad that morning shook the city and the entire world.
It has been said that there is so much reporting today, it often gets ahead of the news. Think of the swarms of reporters in Washington DC during the sniper attacks confronting the police force as if they were swat teams. In a cutthroat commercial news media world, timely information is artillery, and journalists are fighters. Virilio once said that it is now reality that has to keep up with media, rather than the other way round. It is easy to see how embedded journalism would arise in a culture of behind the scenes entertainment, immediacy, and rapid media technological advance, and impatient with the kind of secrecy such as the Pentagon has shown in the past. Truth is the best defense said Col. Jay DeFrank, the Pentagons director of press operations, as legions of Americans grabbed their popcorn.
Camera and weapon, in the trenches together on the battlefield. Trigger click, camera click. With the Predator, the distance between was narrowed in the drive for capture in its most violent sense. That is, there could be no escape for the represented. It fuses with its image as it is obliterated. An image and a life are both taken as eye and projectile join. The distance for human error shrinks since it is a machine that coordinates. Here at ground-level, however, camera and weapon co-habit a space through the agency of a fallible human. The camera shakes. Its bearer’s life is on the line. In the field between seeing and shooting a human is not removed but reintroduced. In a sense, it is the human that is deployed to serve a need within the workings of the apparatus.
What is that need?
It is well known that, within the scrims of hyper-reality, a mode of witnessing has been lost. An indexical bond has been severed. Through a verite of the everyday, real life media arises to fill the gap. It purports to put us on the front lines. Media moves into the space of the audience by allowing its authentic participation. A sense of being un-scripted counters the polished quality of the media mise-en-scene and opens up an entry point. The deceptive character of the media is suspended for a moment, and one can project oneself inside. I do not abandon myself to the image, or live in the world of images. Rather, this realness allows a seamless interface between. A port of synchronization is opened up that allows a shuttling back and forth. Real feelings and real people are what code authenticity. We identify with the people on screen because they are somehow more like us, in situations and under conditions that are more like life. The distance that voyeurism relies on for its source of pleasure migrates into other geometries. These real-time image streams, life-like settings, real actors, and seemingly live actions and effects however could only have opened up a site of identification for a populace that had already been conditioned to see itself through media self-reflection. This could not have taken hold unless the media mise-en-scene had already arisen, as it has, to form the sole authenticating construct of our time -- the cultural background for awareness, identity, and representation, the background against which subjectivity and social relations are formed.
Through embeddedness, I am put back in the place that photography had once purported to remove me, in order to protect me. I am (seemingly) reintroduced at the other side of the shield, dropped onto the battlefield of the Real and (seemingly) subject to all of its dangers. Embeddedness constitutes a language that signifies the real -- a real that has been under siege in more ways than one -- by helping to develop new coherencies and cohabitations against a violent other. It offers a form of indexical compensation. The seemingly spontaneous, handheld, grainy video mode has come to signify a mode of real presence -- and here the staggered motion and artifacting brought about by limited transmission capacity serves as a kind of transmission verite. The real equals credibility via its sense of unfiltered immediacy. The reality of representation is substituted for the representation of reality. That is, authenticity arises less from the authenticity of reality per se than the authenticity of the means by which reality is portrayed.
The compensation works linguistically as well… Margaret Morse has pointed out that through such mechanisms, which include stacks of hierarchically-arranged worlds, sartorial and acting codes, graphics, and other carefully ordered conventions, a cohesive world is constructed that contains its viewer in a comforting here-and-now. We see in such news constructs a public being taught its place according to the conventions of power and position in discourse. Through carefully arranged divides within the news, where, for example, newscasters can address the viewer directly but the represented public cannot, positions are reinforced, battle-lines are drawn and power is maintained. If we see a process of differentiation actively at work, we can regard this as part of a machine of subjectivity. An arsenal, in effect, of producing an interior/exterior divide.
Such mechanisms do not only represent the war. They are the war. In the heat of battle, one does not think too much. One acts. Especially in a crisis state (increasingly the norm), the military machine does my thinking for me. In civilian terms: The construct is couched within what Elaine Scarry would call a mimesis of deliberation -- a simulation of deliberation that replaces ones own thinking. The media construct is such that it does its own thinking through mirroring ones own thought processes, seducing one into a direct interface, a mind-meld. Automated deliberation, seamlessly achieved. I am there on the front lines and I virtually witness what is shown on the screen, it is real. This occurs within a news construct that virtually does my thinking for me. The image that I see -- the smart image of high technology weaponry or the smart image of the multi-format newscast with its text crawls and weblinks -- is the image that thinks for itself, harboring cognition within its own confines. In some cases, as when image and ammunition coincide, it even destroys itself.
The sightless gaze of the unmanned system tends to acquire exceptional power since its bearer cannot be pinned down. The reinforced gaze of the embedded eye acquires its power precisely because it can. Perhaps both that turn out to be equally unmanned -- the latter being more insidious because it traffics in the guise of its opposite.
Critic? Seducer? Victim?
