Butler - Frames of war: when is life grievable?

This volume gathers a set of essays that return in different ways to common themes. There is no single argument here, but rather a series of forays into thinking about the ways in which visual and discursive fields are part of war recruitment and war waging. The point is not merely descriptive, but critical and oppositional. After all, there are conditions under which war is waged, and we have to know them if we are to oppose war. Indeed, the opposition to war has to take place, in part, through remaking the conditions of its possibility and probability. Similarly, if war is to be opposed, we have to understand how popular assent to war is cultivated and maintained, in other words, how war waging acts upon the senses so that war is thought to be an inevitability, something good, or even a source of moral satisfaction.

Any effort to understand must consider how wars are waged and the technology of war, but to understand the operation of technology we have to consider how it works on the field of the senses. What is formed and framed through the technological grasp and circulation of the visual and discursive dimensions of war? This grasping and circulation is already an interpretive maneuver, a way of giving an account of whose life is a life, and whose life is effectively transformed into an instrument, a target, or a number, or is effaced with only a trace remaining or none at all. Although no final or exhaustive account of war waging is undertaken in these pages, some suggestions are made about what form such an account might take. Such a task requires that we rethink the received terms of materialism in order to understand, for instance, how cameras work as instruments of war, how they both frame and form the human and non-human target along with a field of collateral damage (equally necessary to war, even if perpetually part of peripheral vision), and to develop an anti-war politics that focuses on the dispossessed and those rendered precarious in ways that require new vocabularies and new practices.

When we think about how wars are waged, what forms war waging takes, we tend to think first about the material instruments of war, assuming that we know what we mean by material instruments when we speak this way. Even if we agree that cameras are among the material instruments of war, it remains understandably difficult to say that the cameras themselves wage war, or even that they are part of war waging. Surely, common sense tells us that persons wage war, not the instruments they employ. But what happens if the instruments acquire their own agency, such that persons become extensions of those instruments? The populations targeted can be cast as instruments of war, as happened most recently in the effort to justify civilian deaths caused by the Israeli army in Gaza. Similarly, the soldier can be treated as an extension of the instrument he carries, when the soldier is considered one with the weapon he bears, but so too can the camera sometimes appear to be co-extensive with the cameras use. When cast as a mere instrument of aggressive military power, a threat to civilization, or as a potentially unmanageable demographic problem, populations are framed by the tactics of war, and living humans become cast as instruments, blockades, targets and shields. Similarly, very often the one who uses the camera is positioned within the perspective of battle, and becomes a soldier-reporter who visually consecrates the destructive acts of war. As a result, we have to pose the question of the material of war waging, what counts as material, and whether cameras and their images are part of that extended materiality.

Although we reserve some sense of materiality for the image, we tend to give priority to that materiality that belongs to guns, bombs, and the directly destructive instruments of war without realizing that they cannot operate without the image. In a way, that focusing on the target produces a position for the soldier, the reporter, and the public audience, structuring the visual field that makes each position possible. The frame not only orchestrates such positions, but also delimits the visual field itself. In the context of war photography, the image may reflect or document a war; at times it may rally emotional responses either in support of the war effort or in resistance to it. Other times the image becomes a dense site of political ambivalence about the war itself. So can we say that the image itself is really part of the waging of war? Cameras are literally appended to missiles and bombing devices, sometimes replacing human agencyas with the pilot-less drones whose destructiveness in the war in Afghanistan cannot be doubted. Indeed, the camera-bomber that is the drone has produced many civilian casualties, since its aim is imprecise and its destructive power always disproportionate to its target.