Survival through placelessness: the speculative battlefield of “Remote Warfare”

Aktiviteetti: EsitelmäKonferenssiesitelmä

Kuvaus

Implicit to the military claim to remoteness, I argue, is the sylleptic speculation on technological proximity and distant violence. The vital claim to demarcate our place in the world is inextricable from the speculative narrative of proximity and distance through which which we survive the elusiveness of “our place.” The speculative response to the disabling instability of the place seems to culminate in a place-making ability that is always to come — precisely, as in survival fiction, through a normalised embrace of speculation. It’s not that we have lost our place; rather, “we” has come to sustain itself with reference to a speculative field. Just as interiority is the ever incomplete "folding" (after Deleuze) of a general exteriority, locality survives as the telos of invisibly violent forms of spatial totalisation. As a case in point, the focus is on the speculative battlefield of “remote warfare”: an idiomatic smooth-space, within which the present failure of spatial agency is displaced by the future success of agential spectrality. At hand is a military paradigm that, in view of its idiomatic totalisation, doubles as a normalised survival strategy. The omnipresent subjectivity that the idiom of “remoteness” implies is both a destroyer of place-based life and a survivor under self-speculated placelessness. From proxy wars to drone attacks, “remoteness” is effective not only as a normalised metaphor for physical violence at a distance, but also as a violent metonymy which normalises scopic proximity. While the drone-wielding, military-anthropological, cyber-vigilant narrative of “seeing everything, being everywhere” fails empirically, the concomitant survival strategy takes effect speculatively, in the placeless scope and presence it articulates. The survival fiction should not obscure the speculative effectivity of the “surviving” reality.
Aikajakso1 heinäk. 20212 heinäk. 2021
Tapahtuman otsikkoCurrent Research in Speculative Fiction - 10th Anniversary Conference
Tapahtuman tyyppiKonferenssi
SijaintiManchester, Iso-BritanniaNäytä kartalla
Vaikuttavuus / laajuusKansainvälinen