What does a Weapon See: hbo goes to War 1
Conclusion: The Empathic Vision of Becoming Subjects
Download 4.49 Mb.
|
| Conclusion: The Empathic Vision of Becoming Subjects
I have evoked the concept of empathic vision in the analysis thus far. To elaborate: An episode of empathic vision is a way of seeing that derives from an encounter that yields “an openness to a mode of existence or experience beyond what is known by the self.”44 One of the protagonists in HBO’s Generation Sergeant Brad Colbert, evinced that kind of vision in a way that distinguished him from others in both the central command and his combat unit. He was affected enough to occasionally extract himself from the coercive force of the militarized gaze that was directing his crew toward their targets. Colbert, seeing civilian victims of the Marine firepower, especially when they looked back at him, was affected. Seeing Iraqi children, for example one who makes clownish faces” at him, he has his men deliver gifts saying, “Break out the humrats (humanitarian rations); Let’s feed the ankle-biters.”45 And subsequently, he prevents “Trombley,” one of the Marine snipers, from firing at civilians. As his unit is taking fire from a hamlet and they see heads poking out from behind a palm tree, he says in response to Trombley’s request, “Should I light’em up?”, “No, not yet, Trombley. Those are civilians.”46 And later, when he sees (through the scope of his M-4 rifle) a head popping up behind a parapet on the roof of a “little building that looks like a Spanish church,” he restrains two of his crew – Person and Trombley: “Don’t shoot...Jesus fucking Christ! It’s a kid.”47 Finally, toward the end of the ethnography, Wright sees a fatigued Colbert who is appalled by the lack of concern that other units have for civilian casualities. Wright reports, “We draw past a hamlet lit up so heavily by Delta [another patrol]…’That was a civilian target,’ Colbert says, ‘I saw them’..He sounds tired. I think the war has lost its allure for him.”48 What Wright’s ethnography reports is shown with images in the HBO version, as the face shots of the actor portraying Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard), registers increasing ambivalence about the war and increasing concern about the deaths of civilians (Figure 15). 
Figure 15: A Concerned Brad Colbert Finally, as is occasionally the case with Generation Kill’s main protagonist, the HBO episodes as artistic texts themselves, constitute modes of empathic vision. “Art as Jill Bennett notes, “makes a particular contribution to thought, and to politics specifically: how certain conjunctions of affective and critical operations might constitute the basis for something we can call empathic vision.”49 As the arts are increasingly deployed against weapons through which the military gaze is deployed and against what Foucault famously calls the “truth weapons” that deny the atrocities associated with their use, they perform what Jacques Rancière famously calls a “politics of aesthetics” by “undoing the formatting of reality produced by state-controlled media, by undoing the relations between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable.”50 1 Prepared for delivery at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, California, April 3-6, 2013. 1 Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Vintage, 1991), 185. 2 John Urry, “Inhabiting the Car,” in E. R. Larreta, ed. Collective Imagination and Beyond (Rio de Janeiro: UNESCO.ISSC.EDUCAM, 2001), 279. 3 The quotation is from Ann Markusen, “The Rise of World Weapons,” Foreign Policy 114 (Spring, 1999), 40. 4 C. J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 7. 5 Thanks to Chivers (Ibid.) for reminding me about that remark in the film. 7 Evan Wright, Generation Kill (New York: Putnam, 2004), 306. 8 Jacques Lacan, “The Eye and the Gaze,” Chapter 6 in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979), 73. 9 Dick, A Scanner Darkly, 58. 10 See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989). 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, `997), 886-88. 13 Hannah al-Shaykh, Beirut Blues trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Anchor, 1995), 67. 14 Wright, Generation Kill, 51. 15 Ibid., 367. 16 Ibid., 48-49. 17 Ibid., 159. 18 See Herman Melville, The Confidence Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Chapter XXVI on “The Metaphysic of Indian Hating.” 19 See Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). 20 Ibid., 149. 21 Ibid., 146. 22 Ibid., 160. 23 The quotation is from Geoffrey A. Wright, “The Geography of the Combat Narrative: Unearthing Identity, Narrative, and Agency in the Iraq War,” Genre 43 (Spring/Summer, 2010), 166. 24 The quotations are from Daniel Morgan’s reading of Max Ophul films; see D. Morgan, “Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement,” Critical Inquiry 38 ((Autumn, 2011), 135. 25 Quoted in Ibid., 128. See also Luc Moullet’s repeat of that line in his “Sam Fuller: In Marlow’s Footsteps,” in Jim Hillioer ed. Cahiers du Cinema Vol 1 The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 148. 26 See Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977). 27 Wright, Generation Kill, 17. 28 The expression is from a review of and book on war simulation games: James Ash, “Between War and Play,” Cultural Politics 8: 3 (2012), 495. 29 G. Wright, “The geography of the Combat Narrative,” 174 30 Wright, Generation Kill, 295. 31 Ibid., 114. 32 Ibid., 251. 33 M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," in Michael Holquist ed. The Dialogic Imagination (Autin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 34 Ibid., 243. 35 Ibid., 244. 36 This view of the television aesthetic is suggested by Stanley Cavell, "The Fact of Television," Daedalus 111:4 (fall, 1982), 79. 37 Ibid., 89. 38 The quotation is from Jonathan L. Beller, "Identity Through Death/The Nature of Capital: The Media-Environment for Natural Born Killers," 57. Post Identity (on the web at: liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/PI1.2/PI12_Beller.pdf. 39 Ibid., 59. 40 The Observation belongs to Pascal Bonitzer, “Hitchockian Suspense,” in Slavoj Zizek ed. Everything You Always wanted to Know About Lacan (But were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock),” (New York: Verso, 1992), 23. 41 Wright, Generation Kill, 33. 42 See M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel,” trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 259-422. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation trans. Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2005), 59. 44 See Bennett, Empathic Vision, 9. 45 Wright, Generation Kill, 168. 46 Ibid., 170. 47 Ibid., 174. 48 Ibid., 373. 49 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 21. 50 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. Directory: uthinkcache -> gpa -> globalnotes globalnotes -> [Draft Book Chapter] South Asia in transition: India-Sri Lanka relations in the twenty-first century Arijit Mazumdar, Phd assistant Professor of Political Science University of St Download 4.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
|