Peggy Ahwesh Oliver van den Berg Wafaa Bilal ... - Mathildenhöhe

me aufgefordert werden, verlieren sie den
Glauben an ihr Handeln, melden sich krank,
entfernen sich unerlaubt von der Truppe,
beantragen ihre Versetzung, legen die Hände
in den Schoß oder machen sich einfach
davon. Der Anreiz dazu ist nicht groß, besonders
dann, wenn man sie mit dem Versprechen
rekrutiert, so der Armut zu entkommen
und eine Berufsausbildung zu erhalten.
Insofern werden sie zu Instrumenten
der Wirtschaft, beginnen sich in neoliberaler
Manier, Erfolgschancen auszurechnen,
statt danach zu fragen, ob der Krieg selbst
gerecht oder gerechtfertigt ist. Wenig hilfreich
ist zudem, dass der Rechtfertigungsdiskurs
praktisch strategischen Zielsetzungen
unterliegt – wodurch der Öffentlichkeit
die Unterscheidung zwischen instrumentalisierten
Argumentationen und standardisierten
Rechtfertigungen verborgen bleibt.
Um zu einer normgebenden Bewertung eines
Kriegs zu gelangen, müssen wir zunächst
dazu in der Lage sein, ihn zu begreifen,
ihn mit Hilfe unserer Sinne so zu erfassen,
dass wir offen und öffentlich die Frage
stellen können, ob solche Zerstörungen zu
rechtfertigen sind.
In gewisser Hinsicht ist jeder Krieg ein
Angriff auf die Sinne, was nicht im Umkehrschluss
bedeutet, dass nur diese uns jetzt
retten könnten. Es ist kein Denken oder Urteil
ohne Sinne möglich, auch nicht über den
Krieg, ohne dass diese soziale Formen akzeptieren,
die sich über die Zeit hinweg zuverlässig
nachvollziehen lassen. Der Angriff
kann verschiedene Formen zeitigen: Sensationsmeldungen
über Verluste, die eine
ganze Nation ertragen muss, wobei sich die
Identifikation damit durch individuelle Todessymbole
verstärken lässt; andere Verluste
dagegen werden nüchtern dargestellt, denn
würden sie beklagt, wäre ein Krieg kaum
noch zu rechtfertigen. Ohne Angriff auf die
Sinne wäre es dem Staat nicht möglich, einen
Krieg zu führen. In mancher Hinsicht beginnt
ja dieser selbst mit einem Angriff auf
die Sinne, sie sind sein erstes Angriffsziel.
Schon die stillschweigende oder explizite
Abgrenzung einer Population als Angriffsziel
ist ein erster Zerstörungsakt – nicht Vorbereitung
einer späteren Vernichtung, sondern
der erste Schritt im Destruktionsprozess.
Judith Butler [Vorwort], in: dies.,
Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable?,
London / New York (Verso) 2010, S. xiv–
xvi (Übersetzung: Wolfgang Himmelberg).
= Unlimited
Technically, the possibilities for doctoring
or electronically manipulating pictures are
greater than ever—almost unlimited. But
the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures,
staging them for the camera, seems
on its way to becoming a lost art.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
(New York, Picador, 2003), p. 58.
We may think that circulating alternative
images will rally resistance, but we have
to remember that graphic depictions can
sometimes do no more than sensationalize
events. When that happens, we respond
with outrage periodically, but the outrage is
not transformed into a sustained political resistance.
Is there another way to act upon
the senses or to act from them that resists
both sensationalism and episodic outrage
at the limits on the visual imposed by techniques
of war waging?
The image is nearly impossible to control
by virtue of the contemporary forms of
its reproducibility and circulability. But this
uncontrollability is not a sufficient basis
for utopian excitement. Images within digital
culture travel beyond the reach of those
who seek to censor them and sometimes
run counter to whatever intentions animate
them at the start. Circulation reanimates intentions
in new ways, exposes the image to
new animating conditions, and often ends
up producing effects that turn back and solidified
through the circulation itself. This
was one effect of the frenzied circulation
of the Abu Ghraib photos on the internet.
Indeed, the uncontrolled circulability of the
image and shifting contexts of its reception
helped to produce a public outcry against
the war across the globe.
On the other hand, that same uncontrolled
circulability can work to scatter the
effects of war, undermine our ability to focus
on its costs, and even naturalize the effects
of war as a presupposed background of everyday
life. This is a consequential metalepsis
when the visual effects of war become
the ground of everyday life. The destruction
of our ability to focus is yet another form
of collateral damage. As a result, intensified
circulability cannot be affirmed as an unequivocal
utopian effect of new visual technology,
since the transmutation of ordinary
life into the continuation of war is a clear and
present risk.
Indeed we must ask: Can there be the
continuation of war or, indeed, the escalation
of war, as we are now witnessing in Afghanistan,
without first preparing and structuring
the public understanding of what war
is, and by attempting to suppress any visual,
audible, or narrative accounts of war that
might help to break open a popular resistance
to war? Television coverage of war
positions citizens as visual consumers of a
violent conflict that happens elsewhere, at
least in the United States where geographical
distance from our so-called enemies allows
us to wage war without close domestic
scrutiny of our actions. It may be that
global media operations like CNN actually
export the perspective of the U.S., enforcing
a sense of infinite distance from zones
of war even for those who live in the midst
of violence. But if the framing of what we
see challenges the credibility of the claims
made about war, then we fail to be effectively
recruited into the war effort by the
news. Indeed, if soldiers fail to be interpellated
by the visual and narrative accounts
of the wars they fight, then they start to
loose faith in what they do, claim to be ill,
go AWOL, request a transfer, stop working,
or simply leave. The incentives to do
this are not great, especially when soldiers
are recruited with the promise of escaping
poverty and acquiring job skills. In this way,
they become instruments of the economy
and begin in neo-liberal fashion to calculate
their chances at success rather than ask
whether the war is just or justified. It does
not help that the discourse of justification
has been effectively subordinated to strategic
aims, at which point there is no operative
public way to distinguish between
instrumental forms of reasoning and normative
justifications. To achieve a normative
evaluation of a war, we have first to be
able to take it in, to register war by the senses
in ways that allow us openly and publicly
to question whether such destruction is
justifiable.
In some sense, every war is a war upon
the senses, which does not mean that, conversely,
only the senses can save us now.
There is no thinking and judgment without
the senses, and there is no thinking and
judgment about war without the senses assuming
a social form that can be reliably reproduced
over time. The assault can take
various forms: rendering sensational losses
that are borne by nations with whom identification
is intensified through the individual
icons of death, rendering insensate certain
losses whose open mourning might
challenge the rationale of war itself. Without
the assault on the senses, it would be
impossible for a state to wage war. Waging
war in some ways begins with the assault
on the senses; the senses are the first target
of war. Similarly, the implicit or explicit
framing of a population as a war target
is the initial action of destruction. It is not
just preparation for a destruction to come,
but the initiating sequence of the process
of destruction.
Judith Butler, Frames of War. When Is Life
Grievable? (London and New York, Verso,
2010), pp. xiv-xvi.
176 177