April 26, 2005
the haunting spectre of machine metaphysics
The Australian media has been full of war talk these last few days.
It's mostly been about celebrating heroes, sacrifice and the blood spilled by the slaughter of young men by the military machine in 1915. This rhetoric is disturbing, as it sits oddly with a liberal political culture. What is equally disturbing is that few question the will-to-power metaphysics involved in this machine technology, which associated with militarism and a nationalism acting as a substitute for religion.
When I listen to, and read, this rhetoric about 'losing the war to win the nation' I'm haunted by images such as these:
W.B. Wollen, Fleurbaix, Christmas 1916,(1919).
It's a WWI image of western Europe. I recall that at Gallipoli so many young lives were wasted for a campaign that was of little military consequence. It should be treated as one of the great military disasters of all time.
I look at images of the effects of the war machine and I can understand Heidegger's argument that we are engaged in the transformation of the entire world, ourselves included, into "standing reserves," raw materials mobilized in technical processes. In the process we have become little more than objects of technique, incorporated into the very mechanism we have created.
War discloses the way that technology constitutes a new type of cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control. This system is characterized by an expansive dynamic which invades every pre-technological enclave and shapes the whole of social life.
I'm haunted by the spectre evoked by this kind of image:
Does not the presence of the haunting image dislocate us from ourselves and prevents us from taking up a position as subjects over against an objective field?
The sacrifice of war is what is required, say the new conservatives, to found and unify the nation. Out of catastrophe our nation emerges with a new sense of destiny. At the shrines of Remembrance we--that is, us as citizens---are told to close our eyes and imagine that we are in a boat heading for the Gallipoli shore, walking side by side with friends into inevitable tragedy---to our death.
Stop. Put the emergency brakes on quick. It's a nightmare narrative about inevitable tragedy enlargening and strengthening the soul. Why do we celebrate this? What is going on with the glorification of our death by the apologists for the warmachine? What kind of ethics are the conservatives proposing with their talk of tragedy, death and sacrifice?
I hear echoes of Ernest Junger in all of this. Did he not say that Germany's suffering in WW I was a prelude to a greater victory and a rebirth for the nation? War has a profound significance and the sacrifice of millions has a meaning that is primarily felt. What is being echoed is the vieww that nationalism is a part of the struggle against liberalism and lefties who see Gallipoli as nothing but futility and madness.
Is not this spirit being invoked in Australia today by the One Nation Conservatives. I cannot help but feel that the time is out of joint. Should we not think the ghost of Gallipoli when we hear the Anzac tradition invoked by the Right?
Does not Derrida's category of specter represent a certain undecidability between the living and the dead, the present and the absent, and the imagined and the actual? I think of the dead men coming back and the ghost (the Anzac Spirit) whose expected return repeats itself again and again. The specter of Anzac is the promise of its own future return that reveals to us the out-of-jointness of the times.
The spectre of Anzac haunts the present historical moment and the politics that it forebodes is the promise of law and violence. We should listen to the spectre that surrounds and inhabits us.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 26, 2005 03:46 PM | TrackBack