ATTA - Jarett Kobek - Semiotext(e) - Usa, December 2011

ATTA

Jarett Kobek

Semiotext(e)

December 2011

Ours is a century of fear. Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, “rogue states,” jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber.

In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master’s thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the “Islamic-Oriental city.” Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek’s novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history’s great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, “The Whitman of Tikrit”–a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein’s last day before capture–ATTA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.

Jarett Kobek is the son of a Turkish immigrant and a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction has been anthologized alongside Haruki Murakami and F. X. Toole. His first novel was commissioned and published by Book Works of London as part of the experimental literature Semina series. He lives in California.

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Lines of descent - Derek Gregory @ Opendemocracy

‘It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound – far more than prayers and anthems – that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we – not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born – will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.’ 

Virginia Woolf, Thoughts on peace in an air raid (1940) 

The distance of death

Virginia Woolf composed her brief essay in August 1940 during the Battle of Britain. The Heinkel and Dornier bombers in the night sky over London seem a world away from the buzzing of Predator drones over Pakistan, but there are genetic pathways between Woolf’s hornets and what the Pashtun now call the machay, the bees that have their own deadly sting.  Daniel Swift, the author of Bomber County, a haunting study of bombing during the Second World War, claims that ‘We live today in a world made by bombing; Britain and America still fight wars under the impression that they may be won from the skies, and today’s Predator drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the direct descendants of the Heinkels and Lancaster bombers of the Second World War.’ [1]

These are very different sorts of war, but there are several senses in which today’s drone wars in the global borderlands were anticipated by the advocates of what has variously been called ‘progressive’ or even ‘beneficial bombing’ in the 1940s: ‘progressive’ because air war was supposed to be short, sharp and decisive, avoiding the protracted carnage of trench warfare. [2] In 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, A.P. de Seversky could already see a future in which bombing would be conducted over such vast distances that intermediate bases – like the United States Army Air Force bomber stations being prepared in Britain – would be unnecessary: ‘The entire logic of aerial warfare makes it certain that ultimately war in the skies will be conducted from the home grounds, with everything in between turned into a no-man’s land.’ [3]; By the end of that year, when Germany had successfully tested its first ‘Flying Bomb’, it was even possible to imagine bombers without pilots. Soon after D-Day in June 1944, Germany launched a barrage of V-1 and V-2 rockets against Britain, and in response the USAAF toyed with Operation Aphrodite, in which hundreds of worn-out B-17 Flying Fortresses (‘Weary Willies’) filled with high explosives and a new weapon, napalm, would be directed to targets in Germany from accompanying aircraft using television cameras mounted in their Plexiglas noses and remote (‘robot’) control.  Test flights showed that the aircraft would crash at best within a mile and a half of the target, and only fifteen, unsuccessful missions were flown.  Still, General Arnold’s staff argued that robot aircraft were more accurate than radar bombing, and Arnold asked for further research into remote controlled, television-assisted aircraft that could ‘fly over enemy territory and look through the leaves of trees and see whether they’re moving their equipment.’  On VJ Day he predicted that ‘the next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all.’ [4] (...)

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A hundred years of bombing: what has it done to us? Paul Gilroy and Les Back, 18 October 2011 @Opendemocracy

"One hundred years ago this November, the world was irrevocably and significantly altered. The development of aerial bombardment, initially over Libya by an Italian pilot, would create and routinise a new kind of warfare. The character of violent conflict was transformed along with the legal and moral systems that made it intelligible.

Though fire and rocketry were old weapons, the risks of warcraft were acutely redistributed in the novel discrepancy between bombers and bombed. Terror itself became a weapon. Attackers from above were virtually inaccessible while those they attacked beneath were rendered absolutely vulnerable. Any distinction between combatants and non-combatants, civilians and soldiery was rapidly outmoded. It is our contention that development of aerial bombardment was more than just a military revolution.  Through a careful examination of its history we can understand differently the history of empire, nationalism and the racial ordering of humanity.  

These airborne technologies of mass death manifested an imperial drama. The world it revealed, exhibited all the necessary Darwinian discrepancies in the value accorded to different, contending forms of life visible along racial and cultural lines. The imperatives of nature combined readily with those of linear, progressive history. Vertical, technologically-mediated relationships overdetermined the encounter between civilised and savage, altering the sense of scale involved. It would now be much easier to extinguish distant, infra-human shapes remotely, as if they were nothing more than insects or vermin. A critical assessment of bombing reveals more than just a hidden history of empire but reveals similarities between this past and contemporary military interventions that are made in the name of freedom and liberty. Today’s operators of automated, aerial weapons are said to refer to the results of their global work as “bug splat”." (...)

Read the entire article from the website Opendemocracy

Shock and Awe Conference in London: from 10th to 12th November 2011

Opening Lecture

From 6:30 pm until 8:00 pm on Thursday 10th November, 2011

• Keynote Lecture: Bombing Savages: In Law, in Fact, in Fiction - Sven Lindqvist

Session one: Law, Violence, Legitimacy

From 10:00 am until 12:00 pm on Friday 11th November, 2011

• Creating a Cordon Sanitaire: U.S. Strategic Bombing and Civilians in Korea - Prof. Alexander B. Downes
• Kobe 1945, the Unnatural History of Restoration - Dr. Hiroki Ogasawara

Session two: Colonialism, Airpower and Race

From 1:00 pm until 3:00 pm on Friday 11th November, 2011

• The Day that Buenos Aires was bombed - Dr. Miguel Mellino
• ‘The Colonial Guernica’ – 8 February 1958: The Bombing of Sakiet as an International Turning Point in the Algerian War of Independence - Prof. Martin Evans
• Trust Your Senses?: Militarism and Multiculture - Prof. Les Back

Session three: Writing, Poetry and Peace Monuments

From 4:00 pm until 6:00 pm on Friday 11th November, 2011

• Sylvia Pankhurst, The Stone Bomb and Eric Benfield - Prof. Patrick Wright
• Virginia Woolf: 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" - Prof. Michèle Barrett
• 'In a blitz you notice people's virtues': Louis MacNeice, Virginia Woolf, and the cultural response to bombing - Prof. Daniel Swift

Session four: Shock, Rubble, Clearance

From 10:00 am until 1:00 pm on Saturday 12th November, 2011

• Pyschoanalysis and the Blitz - Prof. Daniel Pick
• Bombers and Bombing in Britain's postcolonial melancholia - Prof. Paul Gilroy
• Bombed Out - Dr. Nirmal Puwar

Closing Lecture

From 2:00 pm until 4:00 pm on Saturday 12th November, 2011

• Closing Lecture: From a view to a kill: drones and late modern war - Prof. Derek Gregory
• Response - Eyal Weizman - Prof. Eyal Weizman

Bombing from Above Programme

A Hundred Years of Bombing from Above - Conference: London School of Economics 10th November 2011

Shock and Awe: A Hundred Years of Bombing from Above

November 2011 marks the centenary of a world-historic event. An Italian pilot, 

Guilio Cavotti dropped the first bombs from an aeroplane on to the oasis of Tagiura outside Tripoli. The development of aerial bombardment was more than just a military revolution. It changed both war and peace.

It redrew the legal and moral boundaries between civilians and combatants, spread the theatre of war into new environments and expanded the battlefield, making cities into places of mass death and taking warfare into private, domestic spaces.

The conference Shock And Awe: a hundred years of bombing from above will mark this anniversary and explore important elements of the century of bombing that followed the fateful attack on Tegura.

This multi-disciplinary event brings together internationally renowned critics, sociologists, geographers, philosophers and historians to reflect on all aspects of a hundred years of bombing from above.

It will develop a conversation between very different historical experiences and cases of bombing and establish a cosmopolitan conversation about these difficult issues.

The conference will be held at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Goldsmiths, University of London:

    on Thursday 10th November 2011 atLondon School of Economics, on Friday 11th    and Saturday 12th November 2011 at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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