W.J.T. Mitchell (Professor, Art History and English, University of Chicago)
“Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib" (Plenary Talk)

            While wars have always been fought over and conducted by images, the current "war on terror" has raised the imaginary component of warfare to a new level of importance. This lecture explores the role of images as weapons, targets, punctuating moments, causes, and framing metaphors of the current war. It will discuss new media technologies that have made the reproduction, circulation, and transformation of images much faster. It will also examine the metaphor of a "war on terror" as an imaginary, fantasmatic notion, a metaphor that has become all too literal, real, and deadly. The war on terror has thus had the perverse effect of strengthening and proliferating its enemy, or "cloning terror." The figure of cloning, moreover, provides the master image or "metapicture" of image production in our time, which is not merely mechanical or digital, but biocybernetic. The images of the war on terror converge, therefore, with the host of images that surround cloning and biotechnology. Images of viruses, cancers, sleeper cells, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders are woven through the discourse of terrorism, and the icons of terror have an uncanny resonance with images of doubles and duplicates, faceless, anonymous, and even headless figures of bare life.

 

 

 

 

 
 
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