9/13, Clear Part 1.
"We must become a bunker in the outside world because war is ever present there" - Rose and Rosie.1
It is 9-13-2001, a baby is born, he, later she, will know nothing but an era of Clear War. A war that causes the air to be so full of bullets it turns into transparent glass, death strikes from anywhere.
Towers fell, people fell. The people died, pushed into the abstract, spoken of in the same way the "masses" or "the people" are. The Towers live, they become much more than architecture, they represent the corpses better than the corpses ever could hope to. They become a symbol of this general death, a death of more than 2,000 people, death of the 90s2, the supposed death of some ill defined safety. Mushrooms bloom from the corpse of a crow on the side of a highway, death brings birth. It was the birth of Clear War, the enemy was invisible, they were located anywhere, so the frontline had to become something located anywhere too. The police became like the military, having to defend the new frontline located in every city. The new frontline gives rise to a new logic, that the enemy can be hiding as anyone, thus anyone and everyone could be the enemy, therefore everywhere must be occupied like it is the enemy's territory.
There is a paradoxical protection here, if it's the enemy's territory then who is being protected? In this way everyone outside of the privileged unit that has a semi divine right to use of force occupies two roles, the role of the innocent and the role of the degenerate Other (of course minorities are more often placed into the role of the dangerous degenerate). The beast of Gévaudan no longer prowls outside the town's walls but rather located anywhere in space and time, anyone can have a silicone chip switched to overload, the administration of a school becomes an administration where anyone can say "I Don't Like Mondays" and unleash a Columbine type event. Therefore the only solution is an increase of the screen, of the surveillance system. The Patriot Act is signed into law, an ever-widing screen of insta-action3.
This is the first aspect of Clear War, the civilian and the foreign military operator no longer have that much of a distinction, everyone is spied on because they are no longer civilians, they are rather an enemy in waiting, in the possible.
The police are dressed and armed like the military because they serve the same niche, occupation of enemy territory. War is the attempted control over the other's movement, traffic via air becomes a highly controlled type of movement, the ever deepening prying, every traveler is an enemy in the possible. The trans woman born on 9/13 is subject to this prying by the TSA, she is an alternative body, she is not the Aryan Fucker, the modern Vitruvian4 man. Clear War opens up a deeper and more socially acceptable policing of the alternative body, of course any body can be deemed alternative at any point, the Vitruvian body exists nowhere on Earth. Policing deploys this method of "peacekeeping" where anyone who disrupts smooth movement can have their humanity stripped of them and placed into an alternative body. The alternative body, a body out of synch5 is subject to corrective measures, to repair of ideology. The USSR employed a diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" to place those who broke the flow of movement into alternative bodies, to intern them, idleness is a moral madness6 due to its breakage of a smooth flow. We can see this with "Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)", a madness with the key trait of resistance to authority, a body made alternative by virtue of the resistance of movement. The mere threat one may break movement is justification of an ever deepening prying. The prying of the TSA into the body and soul of the trans woman is a humiliation, a reminder of the fact dignity can be suspended at any time.
Clear War defines the domestic population as an enemy population in waiting and therefore requires a diffusion of the delineation between the foreign and domestic surveillance architecture. There is a fear that an attack could rise from anywhere and anyone, consuming the population in a fear of attack, and more importantly that there is a thought and blind belief that all these attacks are ordered by someone.
Virilio was right in saying that it is now an era of impure war but we have also entered into something worse, the age of Clear War. War has become a method of management, there is no longer a classical front. One goes to Europe and they see the police carrying these military weapons7 patrolling these monuments, pieces of architecture becoming something that carries the soul of a population. War is said to be located somewhere else, some other place but the simple fact is that War has multiplied into A Thousand Wars8. The name "culture war" is an apt one, the war waged in defense of "real" women has its casualties just as much as any other war, trans women facing a sort of soft violence with outbreaks of hard violence9 that most heavily impacts racial minorities. If set free from fear entire groups would massacre those perceived as "degenerate elements". The drug war was a defense against someone else controlling the human territory much like the Opium Wars were fought, one's population being addicted extended control over them, the control being in someone else's hands. These wars are wars of controlling territory that lacks a geographic element. The war waged against transness is one that is waged in order to control identity and the movement of the soul. Clear War is a type of war where there is so much war it seems to become transparent, where war disappears. The often mistranslated10 Clausewitz phrase "Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln"11 has been flipped on its head to become "Policy Is a Mere Continuation of War with Other Means" from the traditional "War Is a Mere Continuation of Policy with Other Means" but of course the world is not solely war. War has disappeared, it is said to be located somewhere else, somewhere off in the distance. War has become a method of management, of correcting or eliminating alternative bodies. War has become clear, the assertion that war lacks theaters is somewhat correct, the concept of theaters "being separated"12 from each other is less able to be applied in an age where speed has shrunk the entire world, something happening in one theater will be able to impact another almost instantly. But there is a new theater of war, a global one that seems to have much in common with the classical theater13 of actors than the theater of Clausewitz.
This is all to say, the military space is dead, the civilian space is dead, and the theater of death is here. Clear like a lens on a security camera. Clear like a screen.
“Lights! Camera! Fire!”
Twitter user @plasticflowers18.
We remind the reader that decades never die when they are said to, the 60s died on December 6th 1969 and not on January 1st 1970
The security apparatus is ready to be placed into action at any point, a free flowing power justifies the capture of a "potential terrorist" purely with the fact there is some amount of data that suggests they are going to strike. This is not located in any single city but rather a constantly moving flow of data, flowing from an institute in Chicago to a data bank in California to Pine Gap. A screen located anywhere able to justify any peacekeeping action in an instant.
"In fact, the worker's body cannot be compared to a human model, which is ideally composed. Vitruvian man is essentially reasonable and harmonious, since he is contained in the circles and grids of Euclidean geometry—a symbol of social superiority since it is the geometry of the invader's, the dominator's, trajectory." (Speed And Politics, 2006 edition, Paul Virilio, Page 106).
See page 56 of Speed And Politics.
We quote Madness and Civilization here, "Hence the Hôpital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age, infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral 'abeyance' which does not merit the tribunal of men,but cannot be corrected by the severity of penance alone." (Madness And Civilization, 1988 edition, Michel Foucault Page 59). Here there is a moral element added to the breaking of movement, the camp of the Hôpital fixes bodies out of synch, it breaks them into the proper method of movement.
We must also note that recently there was a mass eviction of the homeless on the beaches of California, the police presiding over it like a military operation, forcing these soulless bodies to once again be on the march under the threat of a military gun.
One of these Wars is a war being played out by letting everyone watch fantasy wars, an example of this best shown in the Marvel movie series, We remind the reader that the first movie in this series was one focused on a manufacturer of war technology. This new man became a war technology himself, he was ammo, vehicle, power source, and military general all at once.
We are reminded here of the quote "War is a model for violence against women; the widespread acceptance of violence against women is a template for war." (Sarah Thistlethwaite, Women's Bodies as Battlefield).
This mistranslation is one that even Virilio treated as true or at least the translator Mark Polizzotti did.
The full quote being "This term denotes properly such a portion of the whole sphere of war as has its boundaries protected and thus possesses a kind of independence. This protection may consist of fortresses or important natural obstacles presented by the country or in its being separated by a considerable distance from the rest of the sphere of war. Such a portion is not a mere part of the whole, but a small whole complete in itself." (The Book of War, 2000 edition, Sun-Tzu & Karl von Clausewitz, Page 519).
We suggest the reader of this piece searches out a copy of Gerald Raunig's A Thousand Machines to gain a better insight to theater and war.