Mohsen Mahkmalbaf, the Iranian new wave film director, published a powerful essay in Monthly Review last year called the “Limbs of No Body.” He described the destruction of Afghanistan over the last twenty years. The body of the world amputated Afghanistan. In this time of digital terror, various email snooping and commercial digital data mining technologies have been mobilized by the USA Patriot Act. The digital in this paranoid, authoritarian era is being used to disembody and to disempower. Today, I want to turn this around to reembody and reempower our politics, our analysis, our digitality, our critical art. We must resist any and all architectures of disembodiment which remove labor from manufacturing in the global economy, war from geography, privacy from security, gender from race, dissent from justice. These ideas, and all of us gathered here today, are limbs of one body, the phrase over the portal to the United Nations.

Our choice in this endlessly morphing swirl of phantasmatic nationalist discourse is quite simple: we are dead, or we are alive. We must issue a call to humanity, not as some universalized abstraction, but as a specific dialogic action across and with difference. And we must look to the dead, everywhere, not just here, and forge connection. The people dead from AIDS in SubSaharan Africa each day equal the dead of two September 11ths. We need to see, to really see, and then to see more, through a digital ultrasound of all of the complicated, messy, invisible politics that evades us. We can choose: we are limbs of no body. Or we are limbs of one body.

In response to the war resolution vote in Congress yesterday, my talk today is about blasting war. Blasting enfolds within and around itself many meanings from many different historical epochs and disciplines. We need to connect the limbs to the body. Blasto, in biology, means embryonic cell formation.

To blast is to open up, to make, to form. To blast is to proclaim. To blast is to criticize vigorously. It describes and sounds a process rather than a statement or a thing.

Mohsen Mahkmalbaf’s timely film, Kandahar, a film blasts our imaginary projections of Afghanistan as a place of rubble, death, drugs, amputation, murder, bombed buildings–a place of absence. Instead, with an expansive, compositional strategy of color, line, form it creates a place of presence. The real and the imaginary twist together: sand, burqas, poverty, madrassas, people trying to live. Prosthetic legs cascade from the sky.

In Kandahar, a Canadian/Afghani woman journalist journeys into Afghanistan to search for her sister. The film genders the nation of the mujahadeen and the Taliban through the vision of a diasporic woman. It is many stories folded into one. In the final shot, the woman journalist looks through the screen of her burqa at a distant city: we are inside Afghanistan, we are inside the burqa, we are not reaching our destination, we are not ending the story. We are looking out through a screen. We are looking beyond ourselves.

To blast is an expression of reprobation.

USA Today, CNN and President Bush’s speeches declare the tragedies of September 11 as a seismic historical shift, where nothing is the same after and where history is blasted away like rock in a mountain needing removal for a new tunnel. Books on Islam proliferate but Islam is seen as separate from the West, whatever that is in this post-cold war world. Books on 911 crowd bookstores but history is reduced to therapeutic repetitions.

History begins, in this view, with the horrific assault on the U.S. But as Robert Fisk has pointed out “ if you talk to a Palestinian in Lebanon about the September massacre, he will assume you are referring to the slaughter, at the hands of Israel's militia allies, of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in September of 1982". Arundhati Roy, Ariel Dorfman, and Zillah Eisenstein, have reminded us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Chilean coup, where 10,000 died, and other anniversaries of horrific and wrongful death and genocide, each different, each requiring our mourning. Around the world, there are many September 11ths, not only one. Iranians killed by Iraqis. Guatemalans killed by their government. Rwandans, Yugoslavians, Cambodians, East Timorese, African Americans murdered across many Septembers. These deaths surround us with a virtual archive which is not spoken, which is invisible, which is not connected.

These dead are the limbs of one body: When President Bush proclaimed you are either with us or you are with the terrorists, he blasted away history. His binaries are inoperative in a globalized, flexible, borderless economy, in assymetrical warfare without nation states, and invisible terrorists who blend in as suburbanites and “family” men. As Philip Rosen has argued, a radical historiography must replace the pursuit of authentic, immobilized pastness with a dynamic sense of multiple temporalities. These multiple temporalities must collide and produce frisson if we are to see anything at all.

The mediated immobilized pastness of mourning 911 throws out an anchor to our anxieties. But on 9/12 Bush replaces Osama with Saddam, Afghanistan with Iraq, corporate criminals with war resolutions, a plummeting economy with war, and coalitions with global domination. Yet more than a decade ago in the era just after the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz outlined exactly the same plan in their Defense Planning Guidance Report. They directed the military to retool for cyber, laser, and electronic warfare capabilities to dominate outer space, inner space, digital space, private space, domestic space, entertainment space, international space, and national space–full spectrum dominance.

War is no longer debated. It has been shorn from death. It is branded. Bush advisor Adam Card declares that the war plans against Iraq were delayed until September because you don’t want to introduce a new product in August. Yet, since August 6, 1990–the same date as the bombing of Hiroshima-the US imposed sanctions on Iraq. Over 1 million Iraqis have died, half of whom are children. Iraq poses a question for our politics: what is history? In 2002 alone, the US military has executed 30 bombing missions into Iraq. Will we declare war on Iraq when the image marketeers identify a good launch date? Or has the war been going on for over a decade anyway and all of Bush’s speeches performance art to camouflage the realignment of the US military with transnational capital? By 1992, capital spending on information systems exceeded capital spending on industrial age items, such as mining, construction and manufacturing equipment. The Department of Defense then shifted to an explicit policy of strategic information warfare because of the threat of open networks, no borders, and easily available software.

To blast is to blow air through the mouth to clear from particles.

Slavoj Zizek asks what are we to make of the greatest power in the world bombarding one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan, as retaliation? He observes that Kabul all ready looked like downtown Manhattan after September 11. The most high tech country in the world has bombed a nation with barely any electricity and no paved roads. The Department of Defense briefings explained Afghanistan was not “target rich.” The geography of war has been reorganized: within minutes of the first bombing of Afghanistan, the US repositioned 40 communications satellites over the country and bought all satellite time to prevent independent imaging from outer space.

Yet, as US ground forces and CIA agents penetrated, they captured not only what they thought were Taliban operatives, but hard drives from almost any computer they could find. Yet as Pakistani investigative Ahmed Rashid points out US military and oil companies have been involved in Afghanistan for twenty years. US popular culture imaged the end of the Taliban as a visual couplet between urban Afghani women (not all, maybe a few) disposing of their burqas and the importation of Indian musicals on video and satellite dishes hammered from soup cans.

Several weeks ago, Variety boasted a headline “Post Taliban production rebounds.” The article explains that the west–whatever that is now-- is no longer limited to Mahkmalbaf’s Kandahar for a point of reference. The Locarno Film Festival hosted a Afghan Film Day this year. But the Taliban destroyed 2,700 films in the Afghan film archives, a history of analog images incinerated. And just last week, the US Consulate denied Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian film director, a visa to attend the New York Film Festival.

Afghanistan’s history speaks dismemberment before the US bombings. Over the last twenty years, 2.5 million Afghans died from war, militarization, famine and lack of medicine. 10% of the population perished. Another 30% migrated to other countries in search of food and water. 6.3 million Afghanis are refugees–three times the number of ex-yugoslav refugees. People are dying as we sit here today.

But Afghanistan is not the only history to be rendered invisible. It is as though Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak has covered the globe like a digital rendering effect in a Disney film. Angola is an oil rich country recently visiting by Colin Powell. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, after 27 years of war, 30% of the Angolan people are malnourished from famine, with mortality and malnutrition rates 5 to 10 times emergency threshold levels for international relief agencies.

These histories articulate with the recent actions of Attorney General John Ashcroft. He responded to the terrorist attacks by arresting 6,000 people in two months with little or no evidence. But let us not amputate Ashcroft’s actions from US history: the Palmer Raids against Eastern European immigrants and communists in 1917 and 1918, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the Red Scare.. The USA Patriot Act, “rammed through Congress” as the ACLU describes it with very little debate, expands government power to invade privacy, imprison people, and punish dissent (ACLU 2). Under the Terrorism, Information and Prevention System, TIPS, the government militarizes citizens and service workers to spy on people in their homes.

Law enforcement agents now have a sneak and peek provision to enter a house or office with a search warrant when the occupants are away, photograph whatever they deem necessary to fight the war on terror, and confiscate any communications equipment.

To blast is to bomb, explode.

Susan Sontag, in a OP ED in the New York Times, wrote that the war on terror is a vague, ill-defined misnomer designed to keep us engaged in endless war. She says “this is a phantom war and therefore in need of an anniversary.” She says we are fighting Al Qaeda, not terror. Perhaps war is simply a vacuous invocation and cover for the complete reorganization, realignment and mobilization of the state, the military, information infrastructures, and transnational capital. Several weeks ago, Tom Ridge, head of Homeland Security, not only requested exemptions from congressional oversight, but also demanded that corporate records and infrastructures be exempted from the Freedom of Information Act. Perhaps an authoritarian coup d’etat has occurred within our own borders. Perhaps Bush himself is virtual.

This endless phantom war which is really not war lacks images and news: an invisible war. The Department of Defense has initiated the strictest press protocols in US history. Reporters have no access to military personnel anywhere independently. They are covering the story from destroyers 2,500 miles away in the Indian Ocean. All images must be approved, or are supplied by the DOD. 3D virtuality replaces muckraking. CNN is now our collective burqa.

We must rewire for cyberwar. Bush’s new war, and the wars that will follow, will no longer be total wars like World War II, Vietnam or the Gulf. They are, and will be, nodal wars, practiced and perfected in the war on drugs in the US and Latin America and the civil wars against the cultures of difference and public arts practices. Nodal wars are no longer wars of images and propaganda, but are instead about the policing and circulation of virtuality in assymetrical warfare.

Since 1989 at the end of the cold war, the military has converted to something called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The 20th century moved wars into the air and off the ground. In the 21 st century, war is etherized by digitizing it. The 1999 bombings of Serbia signaled a decisive shift in the military from weaponry to cyber- infrastructure. 1500 bombing sorties required 30,000 computer technicians, engineers and analysts. Now, with the largest military contract in US history–$200 billion -- awarded to Lockheed Martin, an aircraft manufacturer, there is virtually no difference between planes, weapons and computers. The CIA, for example, has targeted financial networks and organizations that might have harbored Al Qaeda money, employing the hackers they once pursued for copyright piracy. The Predator, an unmanned spy plane, can also do reconnaissance. Commando Solo, a special operations communications plane, drops anti-Osama reward leaflets and blasts world beat hip hop music over Afghanistan like a mobile rave machine.

Digital technologies developed for the Cold War have now migrated into and merged with the entertainment industry. The information sector represents 15% of the US economy. Copyright products– film, video, games, software-- are now the largest U.S. export. Firms that depended on military financing from the Department of Defense moved into special effects, computer design and interactive entertainment.

These digital conversions do not so simply mark a technological shift. They signal a political economy reorganization from a military industrial complex to the military information media entertainment complex. Last fall, Variety announced that the military had convened a group of screenwriters of action and cult films like Die Hard, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich to brainstorm terrorist scenarios. Yet computer games currently outsell Hollywood films. But even more significantly, Michael Powell, son of Colin, was installed as head of the FCC. In the last year, he has peeled back rulings on media concentration. He has endangered the diversity of voices and opinions on broadband internet, which the ACLU and many US and Canadian media rights organizations have dubbed the “free speech issue of the 21st century.” Soo-to-be-unregulated media transnationals may control all portals and filter content.

In Variety, the network news executives bemoaned how to cover a war with no clear enemy, no single location, no beginning, middle or end, no images, no news bureaus in Central Asia, and no advertisers. As one executive put it, “we’re not entirely sure where “there” is now.”

To blast is to infect injuriously.

Ethnic anxieties have escalated: Muslim, South Asian and Arab men were “tracked, interrogated and rounded up on 200 college campuses”. A Muslim woman was subjected to a humiliating body search at O'Hare Airport in Chicago when she refused to remove her scarf. Visitors from specific countries will be fingerprinted. And we can spy on our neighbors and at the person sitting next to you at this conference through the TIPS program. Pro-Palestinian college faculty have been targeted in the U.S.

The Department of Homeland Security, the second largest Federal Agency, institutionalizes ethnic anxieties. It will have more armed federal agents than any other agency. It limits openness and accountability, threatens the freedom of information act, and advances racial profiling. It has the potential to turn whistleblowers into enemies of the state. The budget allocations for Homeland Security demonstrate that racialization of anxiety can be translated into dollars: the largest budget area, more than 50 times that allocated for 21st century technology, is designated for “SECURING AMERICA”S BORDERS.”

On the internet, anti-Osama, anti-Arab gaming sights have multiplied into the hundreds. The image of Osama Bin Laden is the most circulated digital skin on the internet for gamers, with George Bush second. These games express that which George Bush, whose endless claims that we have no quarrel with the peoples Afghanistan and Iraq, repress: they are the fanstasmatic projection of power over the unknowable, the invisible and the unfindable. They are called Bye Bye Bin Laden, The Kill Osama Game, Bend Over Bin Laden, Slap Osama, Capture Bin Laden,Where’s Osama Bin Hiding? Special Ops. These games displace the Revolution in Military Affairs. They elaborate the digitalization of warfare with the psychic manifestation of racialized, gendered and sexualized hatred.

These revenge fantasies are the psychotic underside of the national phantasmatic that pledges restraint and precision bombing. The user’s mouse and keyboard kill, explode and delete Arab men–a pathological, racist compulsion.

These interfaces racialize our computer keyboards as white, American, male killers for whom linear narrative eroticizes death. We are the machineries of war. Touch merges with the fantasy of the screen which is Arab, which is male, which is silent. Our audio speakers engulf us with the blasts of explosions.

To blast is to produce a shockwave. To blast is hot air on steel to smelt something new. In the end, I am not sure what shapes our politics and critical art will assume in this slippery, chaotic, authoritarian world. I only know we need both. Echoing the narrative of Kandahar, indymedia journalists Jeremy Scahill and Jacquie Soohen are now in Baghdad, reporting the invisible story of Iraq through daily webcasts on iraqjournal.org. We need their reports and their dissent. Perhaps, through digital art as a prosthesis of hope and shockwave of peace, we can relearn that if we are alive --and not dead - -we are all, indeed, limbs of one body.

Blasting War was presented at the Race in Digital Space Symposium sponsored by University of Southern California, Annenberg School, and MIT Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, California on October 11, 2002

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College in Ithaca New York. She is the author, most recently, of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana 1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota, 2000)

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