The Maternal Gun

You woke up one morning, and your grandmother was a gun. Even stranger, you could see through her eyes as you sighted the weapon at the sky, the clouds parting.

How can the “being-there” of vision allow for a side-stepping of perception (and what might be called an empirical understanding of the world)?  How can the contemporary notion of “play” undermine its evolutionary purpose?

The (relatively) new adverts for the United States Army are a good example of the confusion of not-here-and-now and the here-now.  In contrast to the televised adverts for the Marines, which deploy a series of nationalist icons (the Western Landscape, the Flag, the Eagle, the Salute, the Uniform) in a clearly montaged mise-en-scene, the Army spots utilize Hollywood cinematic techniques for immersion (including match cuts allowing the viewer to “look through” night vision scopes and project herself into the scenario).  This fairly clearly echoes the satisfaction of pretend play, although in this case, childhood pretence (and accompanying desire) and insertion into an imagined scenario is being utilized for ideological gains.  The Army televised advertisements suggest only the tenuous singularity of the role-playing game, or the singular cinematic hero of the Hollywood era (Wargames, Spygames, Deerhunter – the reference to play continues), reiterated in the tagline “An Army of One."

And the logical endpoint is drones, a mobile architecture for 'looking through.'

What is central to this idea of advertising is the removal of the idea of consciousness from other beings.  Through the utilization of cinematic and proto-cinematic machinery, subjectivities are being reduced to their mediated (insubstantial) counterparts, corresponding to the object-oriented world of the autistic child. One does not have to look much farther than the photographs at Abu Gharaib to see an example of a sort of learned autism.  Susan Sontag writes in “Regarding the Torture of Others”:

Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- part of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game ''Interrogation'' really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick.

We can see clearly here the role of visuality (and photography specifically) in disseminating ideologically dangerous ideas about play, simulation and entertainment.  The frivolous nature of “play,” divorced from its evolutionary intent of “being-in-the-world,” is amplified and expounded in end-of-the-world scenarios like those suggested cinematically in the television series 24, the films The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon, and religious teleologies such as Left Behind.  The “plausible” nature of each of these mediated events only serves to distance the viewer from the nature of the “real,” an archeology Sontag suggests in her essay. 

In these scenarios, the “actual situation” begins to disappear, leaving only a trace, fundamentally undermining the individual’s situation in society, and fundamentally changing (and challenging) the function of play, redirecting the functionality from “at-the-material-world” to “at-the-immaterial-world.”   In this inversion of materiality, “Grandmother” becomes Grandmother-image, gun becomes gun-image, and the world becomes a flux of image-vapor, groundless, but for the ghosting of a once (ever?) perceived world.