I.
Reading about the genocides in Rwanda recently, one aspect of their carrying out struck me in a way it had not before. This was the sealing off of the areas in which the killings were to be done not only physically but electronically. All electricity within these zones was cut, as well as all phone and cable lines. Not only was the area sealed from “actual” view and hearing, in terms of virtuality it had been “deleted.” While the population as much as possible “ceased to exist,” it had already been made entirely “never existing” in virtuality.
The Israeli government recently announced a new policy which one representative called “sucking the infrastructural oxygen out of Gaza.” Gaza is already a Walled off/in population subject to attacks and the withholding of human services necessary for survival. The new policy extends this “diet” to electricity. (Another official used “diet” to describe this policy.) This opens the possibility of a virtual deleting of a population, even if the members of it do not entirely die from an existing starvation level further aggravated by “dietary” strictures in terms of fuel, medicines, food, and water.
While virtuality, with its “clean” digital representations, can be used in effect for ethnic cleanings, it paradoxically also produces the materials in the physical realm which can be used by others not only as evidence of the events, but also paradoxically provides the refuse which survivors and those condemned to live in these “erased zones” can use as a refuse-all of this enforcement of a physical and psychological status as “garbage.”
“The world as we see it is passing,” Saint Paul writes in a letter. The Haiku poet Basho seven centuries later notes, “The basis of art is in change in the Universe.” And Baudelaire defines Modernism as.
II.
What is striking is that in all these cases the visual is equated with reality, the reality of the material world and flesh as they are changed through time. And in relation with time, both “eternal” spiritual time and physical historical time.
Virtuality is able with an instantaneous deletion to erase any of these things from a “visual” existence. The increasing dependence on virtual networks and representations is a form of training in the erasing of the visual work of the subject in the presence of the physical. More and more of the physical world is eradicated in favor of its representation via “sites” in the realm of webs, links, blogs, galleries, streams. The more things exist in the virtual the less need to find them in the actual. Via this transposition from one realm of being to another, the evacuation and disappearance, the confinement and exiling of billions, can pass unnoticed in an unprecedented crisis taking place “off screen.” And in order to make sure that these “dirty” events do not contaminate the “clean” virtuality, sites and persons in the physical world are increasingly walled or fenced out, or in, and guarded against and controlled by the operations of security and Surveillance.
III.
The virtual/actual interface, a site of great possibilities and liberations, communications, availabilities of informations, can be sealed off and out by the pulling of plugs and building of barriers. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
A “dispersion of anatomies” can found in the differences of the anatomies of those on opposite sides of these barriers. Physical existence for the mushrooming populations of those existing in extreme circumstances is increasingly invoked as the work of charitable organizations and the Situationist concept of “tourism in other’s misery.” The latter entails the likes of recent reports in the New York Times. Accompanied by bright, cheerful photos of Palestinian children earning a living and eating from trash sites “enriched” by the garbage of illegal settlers and the ragpickers. Castes in India fighting for the most meager of rights and health protections in the only profession open to them. These reportages offer a kind of patronizing reassurance for the desperately poor.
