24 Dec, 2014
We are passive consumers of the pornography of violence – The Guardian
Ours is the culture of the repeat, the freeze-frame and the slow-motion action sequence; ours is the highly advanced civilisation that developed the capability to put a camera on the nose of a laser-guided bomb so that, like Major “King” Kong (the deranged cold war warrior played by Slim Pickens in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove), we could “ride” – albeit virtually – the ordnance all the way down to its computer-selected target. It was this bizarre phenomenon, debuted on British television screens during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, that first alerted us to the full inception of an entirely new form of warfare. The Gulf war was also typified by feedback loops of mediatisation: US military planners reacting to information gleaned from CNN reporters in Baghdad, and those reporters then reporting that reaction. Baudrillard’s infamous series of essays, beginning with The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, were published in the French press in real time to coincide with the dissemination of imagery the philosopher believed constituted the hyperreal. By instantaneously controlling the collation and dissemination of imagery, the US military arrogated the power to make a movie about a global crisis at the same time as it created the crisis itself.
Read the rest: We are passive consumers of the pornography of violence | Will Self | News | The Guardian.
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