IMAGE WAR

Sotirios Bahtsetzis

Concept: Militarization of our everyday visual language as the new means of modern politics

All current debate on the political, social and ideological arena is driven less by an opaque discursivity but rather by a supposedly transparent “imperative to visualize”. The political and ideological  implications of our current “regime of visibility” (T. J. Clark, Bal, van Winkel) and its “politics of visibility” (T. Holert) can be seen as the basis on which ‘war-image-events” (such as September 11) function as hegemonic references towards a universal militarization of visual languages. Both mass-media and official politics have tried to “understand” with rather inept and fruitless attempts the “social”
reasons of the recent riots in Athens in December 2008. These mass-scale events have been declared by theorists, either as a true “event” of metapolitics (Badiou) or as a unique act of the multitude in action
(Hardt and Negri). Talking from the perspective of an eye-witness these 'images of war' during the Athenian riots (police, fire, looting, violence) should be counterparted with 'images of resistance' (naked
bodies, graffiti, carnavalesque happenings) in order to analyses how stereotypical and hegemonic war-imagery has been appropriated as contemporary means of politics, coexisting with conventional ones (i.e.
street demonstrations, political parties’ rallies)