Conway

''Even Nietzsche knew of the vomit inducing nature of the citizen who voraciously consumes death as an utterly alienated practice of being informed, and treating it as the “latest delicacy.”

 

The ocular mechanism can only operate along the lines of recognizing, categorizing, and subjectivating. Ocularity cannot gaze upon itself. The eye of power never turns against itself, but those it gazes upon can stare back. 

 

We are told we must publicly grieve for those who partied at the gates of an open-air concentration camp, while ensuring that any tear shed for those living under a permanent state of exception is qualified with a litany of excising maneuvers and condemnations. 

 

 These enemies remain perfectly amorphous and undefinable, so as to ensure they are everywhere like vapor – perhaps even under the corpses of children. We are told that those who dissent stand guilty of valorizing terrorism, which is a powerfully meaningless term in the mouths of defense bureaucrats. And yet we are told that they are unquestionably stable, and we are exasperated, desperate, and hysterical – perhaps we are even dangerous.

 

The assertion of danger is for the vanquisher alone to attest. The ocular mechanism is wielded by power alone, and this is not a technology of governance that can become a ground of contestation and reappropriation. This risk assessment by the victorious remains their tool, and theirs alone.

 

Entire populations must be held out and suspended in the realm of death, because the occupier attests that their own vitality depends on it.

A nuclear weapon does not have to be deployed from a submarine; it does not even need to be present in the theater of war. It is instead a biopolitical paradigm that operates within the enduring state of exception it initiated. Palestine, disciplinarily, is the most heavily surveilled occupied population on Earth. The dovetailing of the panoptic world and the biopolitical fabric of technologies of devastation produces—for us in the imperial core—the conditions of maintaining a norm. Our comfort is always safeguarded by this subtle slaughter.

Every quotidian instance in the imperial core carries with it a fragment of atrocity''.

Will Conway