ok, I admit: I spend quite some time at the moment to read the posts on UNDER FIRE. I guess its general theme just became too inevitable in these times of ongoing wars to be ignored. And aside the fact that the military sector does show most clearly effects of new technologies, interpretations of scocial layouts, .. in short it displays most clearly the state of mind of the involved societies before they even really realize its back striking impacts on itself. The following recent quote comes from a reply of John Armitage on Alan Joxe’s earlier post and stands exemplarily and more eloquently for what I wrote above – even though further reading might help the understanding:
… Much of Joxe’s commentary is then the commentary of ‘military humanism’, of the leading nations allying themselves against weak dictators from Saddam to Milosevic. Equally troubling, it seems to me is Joxe’s notion that the ‘World has by definition retained its shape’ in the post-Cold War era. I remain unconvinced, since, for me at any rate, the world is currently losing its shape as hypermodern America’s postindustrialized cyberwar shifts from derealization to geopolitical deterritorialization, to the virtualization of both its military and society. For whilst the American military increasingly bases itself on the supposed legitimacy of virtualization, of airpower, American society increasingly bases itself on the absence of any attachment to its own grounding, to its own physical territory. Here, then, we shift from the derealization of the combat zone, from its deterritorialization, to its aerialization or what Virilio calls ‘orbital space’, a space that is currently the site of an extraordinary cybernetic, accelerated, strategic, and political revolution. ….
