“…Watches are worn by almost all, registering the time of day and the duration of deployment: ‘if you sleep twelve hours a day it’s only a seven-month deployment, one soldier explained’ (Junger, 2010: 81). Since deployment and death are inextricable, the watches of these men at sleep mark their literal and figurative life, tracking the minutes of any act that could potentially be their last.…”
In this article, I explore sleep specifically as a weapon of war, as a logistic of war, and as a metaphor for conscience in war. In proposing the capacity to sleep as a measure of the effects of strategies of war, and to recalibrate understandings of intimacy and vulnerability in war, I highlight the distinct effects of war on all its denizens. I make no claim for sameness among their experiences – far from it. And yet, at the same time, I wish to draw attention to what this exploratory essay also conveys, namely, the possibility for a sort of what Judith Butler terms ‘sensate democracy’ in the experience of sleeplessness, exposing a counterintuitive commonality among those deemed friends and enemies. Such a focus brings to the fore that which Simone Weil so powerfully articulated – that violence and force destroy those who wield them and those who are subject to them, potentially reducing each to something less than human, rendering them ‘brothers in the same misery’. Far from facilitating or structuring a relativistic moral equivalence, this potential solidarity provides a form and a measure that, in turn, make way for an analysis of distinct relations of power.
“…Watches are worn by almost all, registering the time of day and the duration of deployment: ‘if you sleep twelve hours a day it’s only a seven-month deployment, one soldier explained’ (Junger, 2010: 81). Since deployment and death are inextricable, the watches of these men at sleep mark their literal and figurative life, tracking the minutes of any act that could potentially be their last.…”
In this article, I explore sleep specifically as a weapon of war, as a logistic of war, and as a metaphor for conscience in war. In proposing the capacity to sleep as a measure of the effects of strategies of war, and to recalibrate understandings of intimacy and vulnerability in war, I highlight the distinct effects of war on all its denizens. I make no claim for sameness among their experiences – far from it. And yet, at the same time, I wish to draw attention to what this exploratory essay also conveys, namely, the possibility for a sort of what Judith Butler terms ‘sensate democracy’ in the experience of sleeplessness, exposing a counterintuitive commonality among those deemed friends and enemies. Such a focus brings to the fore that which Simone Weil so powerfully articulated – that violence and force destroy those who wield them and those who are subject to them, potentially reducing each to something less than human, rendering them ‘brothers in the same misery’. Far from facilitating or structuring a relativistic moral equivalence, this potential solidarity provides a form and a measure that, in turn, make way for an analysis of distinct relations of power.
“…It has been commonplace to talk of the “cold gaze” of the photographic lens at war (Jünger, ; Kaes, ): of a distanced, remorseless objectification of embodied experience, seemingly symptomatic of the character of industrialised warfare . Berndt Hüppauf () argues that: Aerial shots do not represent sensuous or moral experiences of space … .…”
Section: Photographic Reconnaissancementioning
confidence: 99%
“…See Ernst Jünger's, “War and Photography," New German Critique, 58 (), Anton Kaes', “The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilisation and Modernity,” New German Critique, 59, special issue on Ernst Jünger (), and Brigitte Werneburg and Christopher Phillips', “Ernst Jünger and the Transformed World,” October, 62 ().…”
This paper addresses the impact of technological modernity on the tactical conduct of the First World War and on how it was subsequently remembered. Specifically, it considers a now lost archive that has received scant historical attention: the collection of photographic intelligence material, comprising negatives and prints, housed on airfields and in military headquarters in Egypt, generated during photographic reconnaissance missions flown during combat operations over enemy held territory in the Middle East. In the absence of the archive itself, the paper asks: what did veteran flying officers who had employed military imaging technologies while on duty, do with the prints they chose to retain, examples of which abound in their private photograph albums. The paper argues that veterans’ photograph albums served as condensers, crystallising personal memories of wartime experience in Egypt through a process whereby their makers ordered the material at their disposal as they saw fit in order to give shape to memories, and thereby construct a privatised sense of their wartime past. It addresses three categories of image: those sourced from the military intelligence archive; photographs of British flying stations and aerodromes (used as airborne navigation aids); and training mission photography of locations in Egypt associated with Nile tourism. It concludes that while albums made by flying officers might contain images more commonly associated with Nile tourism, the inclusion of salient images from the military intelligence archive elevated them to the status of trophy objects: private trophy albums owned by former air warfare practitioners signposted their membership of a wartime in‐group defined by its mastery of state‐of‐the‐art technologies, the conduct of an unprecedented type of combat, and of quotidian life on a new type of military installation‐the aerodrome, a restricted place in which a gated community of high‐value specialists went about its professional duties. Moreover, flying officers’ trophy albums were constitutive of a post‐war fictive kinship in the British veteran community, and informed the cultural construction of a family of remembrance without precedent.
“…They practice long and in-depth investigation, sometimes risky ones: twelve years of relationship to a poor Puerto-Rican family for Adrian Nicole Leblanc (2004), eight years following and deciphering a complex case in a Massachusetts court for Harr (1995). Junger (2010) shared during months the experience of an infantry platoon in Afghanistan. The phrase "immersion journalism" used by some of these reporters is illuminating.…”
Section: Rehabilitating the Art Of Narrative Reportingmentioning
International audienceNews-making and reporting are caught in a process of rationalisation which can be summarized in the injuction to produce fast, to write short and simple and to value useful news for audiences only interested by practical matters. This paper would firstly suggest that if this new style of journalism has produced interesting innovations, its costs are worthier debating than its contributions. It would then argue that mobilising the competitive advantages of a tradition of investigative and narrative journalism may be a reasonable bet to struggle against the news supplied by blogs, aggregators and short-format news sources. A third part suggests how this apparent "back to basics" involves however significant changes in both the training of journalists and the nature of the medium used for the diffusion of this renewed style of reporting
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