The War Machine and the Sight Machine - Critical Arts Ensemble (1996)

Over the past century, the two machines that comprise the general state apparatus have reached a level of sophistication which neither is likely to transcend. These complex mechanisms, the war machine and the sight machine, will go through many generations of refinement in the years to come; for the time being, however, the boundaries of their influence have stabilized.

The war machine is the apparatus of violence engineered to maintain the social, political, and economic relationships that support its continued existence in the world. The war machine consumes the assets of the world in classified rituals of uselessness (for example, missile systems that are designed never to be used, but rather to pull competing systems of violence into high-velocity cycles of war-tech production) and in spectacles of hopeless massacre (such as the Persian Gulf war). The history of the war machine has generally been perceived in the West as history itself (although some resistance to this belief began during the 19th century), and while the war machine has not followed a unilinear course of progress, due to disruptions by moments of inertia caused by natural disasters or cultural exhaustion, its engines have continued to creep toward realizing the historical construction of becoming the totality of social existence. Now it has reached an unsurpassable peak–a violence of such intensity that species annihilation is not only possible, but probable. Under these militarized conditions, the human condition becomes one of continuous alarm and preparation for the final moment of collective mortality.

The well-known counterpart of the war machine is the sight machine. It has two purposes: to mark the space of violent spectacle and sacrifice, and to control the symbolic order. The first task is accomplished through surveying and mapping all varieties of space, from the geographic to the social. Through the development of satellite-based imaging technologies, in combination with computer networks capable of sorting, storing, and retrieving vast amounts of visual information, a wholistic representation has been constructed of the social, political, economic, and geographical landscape(s) that allows for near-perfect surveillance of all areas, from the micro to the macro. Through such visualization techniques, any situation or population deemed unsuitable for perpetuating the war machine can be targeted for sacrifice or for containment.

The second function of the sight machine, to control the symbolic order, means that the sight machine must generate representations that normalize the state of war in everyday life, and which socialize new generations of individuals into their machinic roles and identities. These representations are produced using all types of imaging technologies, from those as low-tech as a paint brush to ones as high-tech as supercomputers. The images are then distributed through the mass media in a ceaseless barrage of visual stimulation. To make sure that an individual cannot escape the imperatives of the sight machine for a single waking moment, ideological signatures are also deployed through the design and engineering of all artifacts and architectures. This latter strategy is ancient in its origins, but combined with the mass media's velocity and its absence of spatial restrictions, the sight machine now has the power to systematically encompass the globe in its spectacle. This is not to say that the world will be homogenized in any specific sense. The machinic sensibility understands that differentiation is both useful and necessary. However, the world will be homogenized in a general sense. Now that the machines are globally and specifically interlinked with the ideology and practices of pancapitalism, we can be certain that a hyper-rationalized cycle of production and consumption, under the authority of nomadic corporate-military control, will become the guiding dynamic of the day. How a given population or territory arrives at this principle is open to negotiation, and is measured by the extent to which profit (tribute paid to the war machine) increases within a given area or among a given population...

If I Can See It, It’s Already Dead

The war machine and the sight machine intersect at two key points–in the visual targeting of enemy forces (military sites, production sites, and population centers), and in visualizing logistical routes. Once sited and accurately placed within a detailed spatial grid, the enemy may be dispatched at the attacker’s leisure, using the most efficient routes and means of attack. As long as the enemy can remain invisible, determining proper strategic action is difficult, if not impossible. Hence any successful offensive military action begins with visualization and representation. A strong defensive posture also requires proper visual intelligence. The better the vision, the more time available to configure a counterattack.