Teju Cole | geographical imaginations

Two short, accessible essays on bombing that appeared in the New York Times recently; they resonate with my work on the genealogies and geographies of aerial violence, and they are both beautifully composed and immensely suggestive.

First, Teju Cole on ‘The Unquiet Sky‘:

A view from a great height is irresistible. It is twinned with the ancient dream of flight. For millenniums, we have imaginatively soared above our material circumstances and dramatized this desire in tales from Icarus to Superman. Things look different from way up there. What was invisible before becomes visible: how one part of the landscape relates to another, how nature and infrastructure unfold. But with the acquisition of this panoptic view comes the loss of much that could be seen at close range. The face of the beloved is but one invisible detail among many.

The essay closes with a reflection on two aerial photographic projects, the collection of drone-shot images exhibited at Dronestagram and James Bridle‘s reconstruction of drone-strike imagery at Dronestagram:

The two Dronestagrams, the sanguine and the melancholic, add to our ever increasing archive of possible landscapes. Imagine all those pictures stitched together into a single image. In this ideal aerial view, neither the pervasive violence nor the sometimes cloying prettiness would be visible. Conquest and sentimentality would both be irrelevant. In other words, the image might be like the ‘‘blue marble’’ photograph of Earth, taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972. It is our world, serene and self-contained, seen in one glance. It is not a view that excites us into plans for bombing our enemies, for it includes us as well. It is a view that reminds us of how mighty we are, how fragile, how delicately connected and how beautiful.

Actually, I don’t see the ‘blue marble’ photograph in that way at all: as I argued in Geographical Imaginations, this is the global North inspecting the global South (it was, after all, shot from a NASA platform). But Teju’s penultimate sentence is key, and it intersects with thoughts suggested by the second essay.

Second, then, Paul Saint-Amour‘s ‘Waiting for the bomb to drop‘. Spiralling through some of my favourite authors, Paul ends with a reflection on Roy Scranton‘s ‘Learning how to die in the Anthropocene‘ (see here and here too), which he suggests may be the equivalent of Virginia Woolf‘s ‘“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” for our day’:

[I]n scaling up from one person to all humanity, we pass through a middle range — the social and political, Woolf’s home turf — where both connections and distinctions between people come into play. Yes, we are all at risk in climate change. But like our exposure to military violence, that risk is distributed unevenly. It falls disproportionately on those with the least protection from extreme weather, rising sea levels, hunger, drought, disease, displacement and the conflicts that can arise from all of these. Simply put, it falls most heavily on the poor.

With philosophy’s help, I am prepared to tell myself, “I must learn how to die.” I may even be ready to say to humanity, “We as a species must learn how to die.” But it is a different thing altogether to say to another person, “Because of how I live, or because of actions undertaken in my name, you need to learn how to die more than I do. And you must bear, more than I do, the cognitive and emotional burdens of a life lived in the shadow of imminent death.” This is what the rich are saying every day to the poor. It’s what whites in the United States and elsewhere are saying every day to people of color. It’s what citizens of drone states are saying to those a hemisphere away, under the drones.

Following my last post, Mustafa Dikeç has sent me a link to his brilliant reflections on ‘Hate’ at the Society & Space website here. Written from Paris, it takes us to the heart of modern French society and its divided spaces:

… if we are troubled about what has happened, troubled enough to take a hard look at, rather than falling in love with, ourselves, then it is important to inquire about the conditions that made such a mobilisation of hate possible. In the highly emotional aftermath of the incidents, it is hard not to feel moved by the extraordinary mobilisation of citizens. Newspapers are full of comments about how proud we should be as French citizens, how a united and solidaristic people we are, how the spirit of May 1968 continues despite the attack on its inheritors, how we value equality and freedom of expression, and so on. If all were nice and dandy, then what made such radicalisation of these three French-born and raised citizens possible? Why, a decade ago, did 300 cities go up in flames for two weeks, and what has been done since? How is it that the extreme right has become the second major political force in this land of freedom, equality and fraternity? …

This is not at all to suggest that the murderers’ actions can be justified by the circumstances. But to warn that despite the timely and admirable display of unity under an alleged one and indivisible republic, the French society is deeply divided, owing to its long history of discrimination and the increasing hostility towards immigrants – a poisonous mix of xenophobia and Islamophobia that several French politicians, endowed with the authority of the state, have unashamedly mobilised for their political ends. Muslims are the most stigmatised group of this divided society, spared neither by satire nor political discourse and action.

Mustafa’s essay begins not with the murders in Paris but with a bomb explosion in Yemen, and a second e-mail from Tim Raeymaekers has alerted me to his equally indispensable post ‘”Us” against “Them”‘ over at Liminal Geographies here. Tim moves in the opposite direction to Mustafa, zooming out above the arc of that explosion to provide a contrapuntal geography that reads the murders in Paris in concert with the global violence of contemporary wars, most of them fought under the tattered banners of counter-terrorism, undeclared in their particulars and less than covert in their killing. He ends with this reminder from Teju Cole‘s incandescent essay on ‘Unmournable bodies’ at the New Yorker:

France is in sorrow today, and will be for many weeks to come. We mourn with France. We ought to.

But it is also true that violence from “our” side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many more “young men of military age” and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go by, many of these people will be innocent of wrongdoing. Their deaths will be considered as natural and incontestable as deaths like Menocchio’s, under the Inquisition. Those of us who are writers will not consider our pencils broken by such killings. But that incontestability, that unmournability, just as much as the massacre in Paris, is the clear and present danger to our collective liberté.