I

1"Enlightenment – Aufklärung: that is a word in the history of ideas. In German Aufklärung also has a military meaning: reconnaissance." These words are repeated by the narrator of the German director Harun Farocki’s essay film Images of the World and the Inscription of War [Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, 1988], which explores the relations between modern war, vision, and image. Aufklärung means the movement that illuminates (qui éclaire): on the one hand, elucidation through knowledge, as in German the word is used to refer to the Enlightenment and its ideas; on the other, wartime reconnaissance. There is some complicity between these meanings, between the effort to "enlighten" (éclairer) through reason – enlighten the masses, enlighten the world – and scouting (l’éclairage) as a military practice, which reached an apogee during the period when aerial reconnaissance (Luftaufklärung) predominated. This instance, where the name of the Enlightenment suddenly takes on the features of war, forces depictions together that one would have liked to keep separate, stored away in drawers marked "war" and "peace." The rise of progress, where people manage to move beyond war once they are sufficiently enlightened, is faced with the organization of violence and destruction.

2Images of the World and the Inscription of War explores the collusion between the perfecting of vision machines and the intensification of war’s violence, where "vision machines" [2] refers to the machinic assemblages that format seeing. In this case, it means apparatuses that reveal more to the eye and participate in the production of a certain ideal of vision: that of continuous, unobstructed visibility. A whole logistics of perception is put in place to serve war: still and moving picture cameras become part of the military arsenal, alongside the overhead perspective enabled by aircraft as well as a panoply of techniques designed to reveal the enemy’s secrets and camouflage. This collusion can go as far as complete union, when "reconnaissance" begins to coincide with the operation of destruction itself. During World War II, bombers started to be equipped with cameras, in order to have a better record of an attack. During the Gulf War, a laboratory for war by remote control, cameras began to be directly embedded into missiles. [3] "The preserving photograph, the destroying bomb – these two now press together." [4] This union plays out on several levels. The bomber is both a testing ground for the military use of cameras, and a weapon whose base of operations is airspace: a continuum, a transparent and unobstructed space. It is a weapon that configures vision vertically, while administering violence unilaterally at the same time. Furthermore, the airplane is also a symbol of the idea of universal peace, which brings about the unity of the world and the undeniable achievement of exchanges on a global scale. [5]

Figure 2

Evidence in Camera, the journal of the intelligence service of the British Air Ministry (4.7, 1943)

Evidence in Camera, the journal of the intelligence service of the British Air Ministry (4.7, 1943)

3There is complicity, then, between the gesture that enlightens the world and the intensification, through that enlightenment, of destruction. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer wrestle with that ambivalence within the project of the Aufklärung. "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity." [6] It is a real aporia of reason: the more total it becomes, the more it destroys any force that would remain outside it, and the more it destroys itself. In the course of their work, using their own philosophical grammar, Adorno and Horkheimer carry out a diagnosis of modernity that constantly returns in a series of variations. These take the form of what was a veritable obsession of the xx^th century: treating the act of laying the world bare – its exposure to the light that would flush out everything opaque and mysterious within it – as the fundamental gesture of modernity. "There shall be neither mystery nor any desire to reveal mystery." [7] In this revelation, the subject is in turn laid bare, and incorporated more and more completely into the process of objectification that they thought they controlled: "the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul." [8]

4This act of laying the world bare increasingly appears to be a gesture that dooms it to violence, especially since World War I. At the same time (and in one movement, as Adorno and Horkheimer might say), the period that followed the war resonated with new calls from the depths: with the obsession, nurtured by the various fascisms, for the event that enabled a break, a restoration of depth and a return to the authenticity of historical action in a world that was increasingly deprived of interiority, given over to the forces that left it vulnerable to endless violence. In a world that was laid ever more bare, an experience was sought that could give politics a new kind of interiority.

5And yet war is precisely what is best suited for this new search for interiority. During the interwar period, war became the site upon which a scene of violence unfolded whose two poles are exposure and depth. On the one hand, we had a world that was increasingly on show, where everything seemed exposed to violence, and where that violence was unending. On the other, war was constantly reappropriated by new calls from the depths, by new requests for interiority. This is what Walter Benjamin suggests in his fragment "To the Planetarium," at the end of his collection One-Way Street published in 1928. In a modern era pervaded by the disenchantment of the world and the loss of the sacred, Total War presents itself simultaneously as what carries out this modern gesture of laying bare, and as the site where a new experience of the sacred asserts itself under the very guise of technique. [9]

6The present text focuses on this twofold movement, which dooms the world to war twice over – in the gesture of laying it bare, and the calls from the depths that claim to respond to it. To be more exact, the goal is to highlight a perspective on the basis of which the short-circuits within these totalizing movements become conceivable. To this end, we will draw from the work of Walter Benjamin, whose texts from the 1930s are haunted by the need to wrest thought from the horizon of war. But his attempts to divert history from its catastrophic course are ensnared between these two tendencies and their infernal dialectics. On the one hand, there was the phantasmagoria of social harmony surrounding the construction of the Crystal Palace, [10] serving as a facade for an accumulation of exploitation, misery and destruction. On the other, there were new fascistic invocations of the sacred and its mysteries, within the industrial era and in its terms. [11] A leap into the past of this nature is impelled by the two-part idea, an idea turned toward the present, that there is always, on the one hand, a political approach that is envisioned by way of war, and that counts on war to endow it with an interiority, while on the other, the times of peace we experience are constantly ready to take on the features of war. Both aspects are caught up in movements of collusion and permanent states of instability.

II

7In Benjamin’s "Experience and Poverty," published in 1933 – five years after One-Way Street – the possibility of such a perspective comes into focus. The Great War reappears in this text, but here Benjamin no longer speaks of it as a place where a new experience of the sacred asserts itself. On the contrary, he sees it as the site from which a new poverty spreads: a poverty of experience itself, a poverty of interiority. If we reflect on these two texts at the same time, an intuition emerges that we could reformulate as follows: in an era imbued with the loss of experience, the technological war submits to the temptation to save interiority through sublimation. Benjamin’s gesture, then, consists in resisting such a call in order to find a way to emphasize this new poverty that asserts itself more than ever in wartime.

8And yet we are struck by something strange in Benjamin’s text. In order to embody this poverty of experience, which I propose to read as that which manages to resist these new calls from the depths, he makes use of the motif of the glass habitat as the space best suited for it. This new poverty has many faces, and the renunciation of secrecy is one of them. Glass gives it its form, or rather its material. "It is no coincidence that glass is such a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed. A cold and sober material into the bargain. Objects made of glass have no’aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession." [12] In writing this, Benjamin places himself within a whole tradition of fictions, whether utopian or dystopian, that accompanied the beginnings of the industrial production of glass, and that present it as the material of a psyche stripped bare, transparent, deprived of all interiority. In other words, glass is the material par excellence that meets the demands of exposure and visibility. In his essay "Surrealism," Benjamin writes: "To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus." [13] In creating their own secrets, modern individuals create themselves. To do that they need an inner, private space of their own, protected by opaque walls within which they can leave traces. This is a specific figure of the secret. We see it again in the work of Georg Simmel, who treats that private space and personal interiority as the shelter in which the secret finds refuge when social matters start to function according to an increasingly generalized demand for openness. [14] So to what extent does Benjamin, calling on the image of a glass house and therefore refusing the possibility of such refuge, distance himself from the unreserved requirement for exposure that Adorno and Horkheimer perceived in the "thought in progress" known as the Aufklärung, whose bellicose dialectics they brought to light? Despite Benjamin’s radical suspicion of ideas concerning progress, [15] Michaël Löwy feels in this respect that "Experience and Poverty" belongs to a brief "progressivist parenthesis" [16] in Benjamin’s thinking. On the contrary, I think that what comes through in these texts is an attempt to resist – radically so – the continuing catastrophe of progress, right down to the modernist enthusiasm with which it is suffused. One of the things that indicate this to us in the text is precisely that these new ways of inhabiting the world, whose imaginaries of glass are the sign, are impoverished ways. It is a matter of learning to live with a new poverty that the generation that survived the Great War had to experience. It is not a matter of leading the way to a new victorious march of history after the debacle, but of exploring the potentialities of loss.

9Conversely, this does not mean that Benjamin’s reference to glass is unrelated to the demands for exposure and their bellicose repercussions. On the contrary, he does not attempt to disjoin the two tendencies whose collusion was demonstrated by Adorno and Horkheimer as well as by Farocki. In this respect, Benjamin’s manner of alluding to glass is completely different from its first major appearance in a revolutionary utopia, in the form of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is to Be Done? [17] (which inspired Lenin’s pamphlet of the same title). In this avant-garde socialist novel from the mid-19th century, the Crystal Palace appears as a dream destined to overcome the violence of exploitation dominating the world. In "Experience and Poverty," however, the reference to glass habitats is entirely bound up with images of violence. It fictionalizes ways of resisting, but by starting with its closeness to those images, and not by dreaming of moving beyond them. The point is to think on the basis of what is being conceived before one’s eyes. Here, utopia is built out of the raw material of the real, in the very radicalization of its most disturbing features.

Figure 3

An Interior View of the Crystal Palace. Charles Parsons (1821-1910), artist. Endicott & Co. (New York, N.Y.), printer. George Swett Appleton (1821-1878), publisher

An Interior View of the Crystal Palace. Charles Parsons (1821-1910), artist. Endicott & Co. (New York, N.Y.), printer. George Swett Appleton (1821-1878), publisher

10The spatial image of a glass habitat as the possibility of asserting the poverty of experience ends up serving as a response to a spatial image of devastation: the landscape of the front, which Benjamin describes as the space within which experience fell in value. At the beginning of "Experience and Poverty," he writes: "A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body." [18]

Figure 4

Valloton, Verdun, 1917, 146 x 114 cm, oil on canvas

Valloton, Verdun, 1917, 146 x 114 cm, oil on canvas

11The specific image that Benjamin invokes here is of the no man’s land, that landscape of a dead planet in which the devastation extended to the horizon, a landscape that had to be crossed while completely exposed to fire from artillery and machine guns. And yet the landscape of the front is precisely a space in which that "dual historical scene" mentioned earlier – between the act of laying bare and new calls from the depths – finds itself condensed and entangled. It is certainly a space that destruction has metamorphosed into an immense desert, where it is impossible to hide oneself and that must be crossed despite this, where the soldier is exposed to blind violence. At the same time, it is a place where a new kind of experience is asserted, avowed, crafted. Benjamin expressed concern about this tendency in his text "Theories of German Fascism," a thorough attack on Krieg und Krieger [War and Warriors], a joint publication edited by Ernst Jünger.

12In 1922, Jünger tackled what he presented as the intimate reality of war in his book precisely titled War as an Inner Experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis), a narration with mystical undertones of his experiences of the front. The title is a twofold allusion to the depths of that experience: it is an "Erlebnis" (unlike "Erfahrung," the word used by Benjamin to refer to the kind of experience that in his view has become impoverished), [19] an experience captured in its lived, even vital dimension that, furthermore, is "inneres." On World War I, he writes: "[N]ever has a generation stepped back into the light of life from a gate so dark and mighty as from that of this war." It "is in us," "we" who felt we had "solved the world’s puzzles," "sons of an age intoxicated by the material" in which "progress seemed to us perfection," and "telescope and microscope our organs of knowledge." But, he adds, under that "always shining and polished shell" into which modern civilization had retreated, elemental forces still lay dormant, forces that the war brought forth by tearing aside the veil of appearances and conventions. [20]

13"We plunged like divers into the experience and return changed." [21] It is a strange return of depth, depth that nonetheless materializes for Jünger, this front-line combatant, in a place, a landscape turned into an utter wasteland. In Storm of Steel, Jünger himself had written that the landscape of the front was "utterly pellucid." In the same passage, he wrote that he felt alienated from himself, as if he were able "to view [him]self through binoculars." [22] And yet it is in this very space where Jünger sees in war the most intimate, the deepest revelation of man. He turns to such an experience, one that takes place in war as an event and that is the war in its inner reality, in order to answer the question, "What was going on at the bottom?" [23] The interiority that asserts itself here is not that of the modern individual. On the contrary, it is as if such a space no longer contained any of those shelters in which that individual could find refuge, in which they could create for themselves a private interiority. In the midst of the no man’s land, the most total form of exposure is precisely that which becomes the site where depth returns. When the Collège de Sociologie – in particular Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille – took up Jünger’s inner experience on their own account, they specifically reread it as the site of a new expression of the sacred, a return of the sacred in terms of modernity, where modernity, by laying the world bare, had disenchanted it. [24] In such a space, the experience can only reappear in the form of a total expression. At the opposite extreme of any withdrawal into private matters, it becomes the site within which a new era emerges, and creates an event. Seen along these lines, this new experience furnishes history and politics with a new interiority.

14If the demand for maximum exposure can be thought of as the end of all secrets, does the reassertion of depth coincide with their return? This is what Caillois infers when he says that total war, as glorified by Jünger, becomes "the sacrament and the ecstasy, the symbol and the secret, all in one." [25] Benjamin, in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," also alludes to this rehabilitation of the concept of the secret through the sublimation of its religious form, but in order to indicate the need to resist such a rehabilitation. Here, we could say that the reinvocation of the secret demonstrates a lack of respect toward loss. And that is where the danger lies. Stricto sensu, this rehabilitation is doomed to failure, but the process generates new, catastrophic effects – moreover, effects that lead straight to war, as Benjamin writes in the epilogue to "The Work of Art." And it is true that this demand for a total expression of depth, which "tears aside the veil of appearances" once and for all, does not under any circumstances permit the interplay between the visible and the invisible that is always presupposed by the concept of the secret. By way of the demand for absolute revelation, leaving nothing inside, the invocation of the secret seems to be transformed into its other. Paradoxically, the act of laying the world bare and the requirement for profound interiority share one imperative: radical exposure.

15Through its continual metaphysical extrapolations, Jünger’s text on war as an inner experience may be a never-ending fabulation, but it is one that is constantly fuelled by the event. There is a great deal of historicity to this text, right down to its most mystical features, insofar as the "total experience" that Jünger describes is directly anchored in the conditions of attrition warfare: a crystallization of destructive forces that draw their energies directly from the deepest nerve centers of activity in public life. [26] In the light of this, Benjamin dares to formulate a powerful proposition in "Experience and Poverty": the idea that World War I confronted humanity with the necessity – but also by the same token the possibility – of relinquishing depth. To start all over again, this time adopting a surface view of things. There is something of a cri de cœur in this position: to keep the devastation away from any interiority, to refuse to say that the devastation is the intimate experience within which everything is to be rebuilt from scratch. There is something powerful in the fact of having been able to make such an assertion at that precise moment in history: to affirm the possibility of a radical surface approach, at that point where violence had never been so total up to then.

16Glass is a transparent, cold, and smooth material on which no traces are left: the enemy of mystery and ownership. Glass is like the material of the fiction that gives materiality to the poverty of experience. The loss of experience is consequently not a void, a gap: it is a "tabula rasa." [27] The revolutionary motif of the tabula rasa is a spatial image: the idea of a surface where everything was erased, a perfectly smooth surface, free from rough spots. Benjamin speaks of it as if it were an architectural plan. And glass is the material with which this poverty can become the subject of a construction. There are thus two images serving as pendants to each other on either side of this gesture invoked by Benjamin of wiping the slate clean: on one side, the landscape of the front, a zone of destructive forces, a blasted landscape; on the other, glass, a smooth, transparent material.

17It seems obvious that the image of a glass house inhabited by men who have put their experience behind them resists the calls from the depth. Conversely, however, how does this image resist the continual catastrophe of progress, and the idea of an unveiling of the world that would constantly take on the features of destruction? To the very extent that there is complicity, and therefore a point of contact, there is the possibility of resisting. But at the same time, one senses the danger that that entails: since the point of contact, while it allows for the creation of resistance, is also what allows it to serve as an intermediary, to restart things. How does the invocation of glass, which plays on the qualities of devastation themselves, fail to point to a continuation, a solidification of the damage?

III

18The organization of poverty involves a reinvention of space: glass offers the possibility of an affirmation after the devastation. It is not a matter of exalting nothingness, but of a featureless space for which only impoverished materials are suited. This raises the question: how could loss, materialized in this form, be anything other than the inscription of devastation right onto daily life? For war does have a tendency to make its presence felt in the very organization and construction of spaces. Besides, with World War II and the bombing of European cities, the clean slate – or the liquidation of traces – takes on a new aspect: the massive destruction of urban fabrics, followed by reconstructions that were driven to a large extent by an architectural vision founded upon the liquidation of the past. [28] These reconstructions were based above all on those materials that accompanied the rise of heavy industry, the materials of the poverty of experience according to Benjamin: concrete, iron, glass. According to Paul Virilio, who witnessed the Allied bombings of Nantes, whereas the ruins still left room for the memory of what was once there, the reconstruction swept away every trace of the destruction. By doing so, on its own initiative, it completed the liquidation that the bombings had begun. In L’Insécurité du territoire [The Insecurity of the Territory], he writes: "The bombed zones still contained an uncertain hope; the newly built zones held no other hope than that of their eventual destruction." [29] Devastation through destruction is carried further by devastation as construction, by the solidification of devastation, a way of making it last indefinitely. In the same book, Virilio additionally alludes to glass architecture. He mentions it in a passage that points to that other version of history, one in which glass architecture does not play the role of the fiction resisting the totalization of war’s horizon, but as that which keeps it alive, by leaving its mark within the very organization of the territory. In this passage, Virilio says that the revolutionary utopias that dreamed of glass architecture already revealed glimpses of their intrinsically totalitarian features. The utopian image of the communal dwelling already harbored the omnipresent phantasm of the policeman’s gaze, and the military rationalization of space. In other words, Virilio induces reflection on the way in which the utopias of glass could be translated in terms of the violence of power and war. On the other hand, comprehending the operations in play here will enable the discovery of ways to resist that translation.

19Virilio writes: "Glass architecture, sometimes called’architecture of light,’ is a product of an idyllic vision of society: one of constant exchange, of intercommunication between groups inhabiting the same housing unit, the same block. It was the optimistic vision of the 1920s, directly inspired by the communal housing of the Russian utopianists." But, he adds immediately, "that is all long past and the urban reality is completely different." Actually, "behind the myth of reconnecting with nature, of a maximum of sunlight, the myth of omnipresence creeps in." Glass architecture, "the symbol of a transparent society," is in fact and for that very reason the symbol of a society that is "overexposed to the obscenity of the policeman’s gaze," where "that image of bringing to light, unveiling interior spaces, is misused." He then asserts that this ideal that the glass architecture of the 1920s has handed down to us, despite the pacifist vision of communal life that it conveys, in itself translates and incorporates military necessities, and bears them within its very principle. [30] The way Virilio sees it, this translation stems from the fact that glass architecture is based on the principle of unobstructed visibility, visibility enabling a gaze that can take in everything. This all-encompassing, unobstructed range available to the gaze is equally available to weaponry: [31] "the functioning of weapons and that of the eye are similar." We thus return to the same gesture that Farocki examined, interrelated with glass architecture: the gesture that brings the plane of visibility together with that of destruction. There are a great many things in this passage to expand on, to differentiate, to discuss from their beginnings: the Russian utopias of communal housing; the cyber-ideal of permanent, transparent intercommunication; the systems of police control; the military rationalization of space… Without dwelling on the relevance or irrelevance of such associations, what I wish to point out here is the operation that allows Virilio to connect them together – with such apparent ease – and to involve them in a single movement, a movement totalizing violence that runs through all of his work.

20Virilio recalls that glass architecture is also sometimes called "architecture of light." And that is exactly how he deals with it: here, glass is nothing but a vehicle for transparency, a vehicle that transmits light and the gaze. With this approach he concurs with a whole current of fascination for glass as a material that is always on the verge of its own dematerialization. As a vehicle for transparency, it appears as an intermediary within all of these movements of violence. For transparency is indeed one of the prisms through which Virilio reads the proliferation and intensification of these movements. It is a concept that he sets in motion in relation to a series of other concepts, such as the aesthetics of disappearance, [32] the war on the milieu, [33] and the negative horizon. [34] All of these concepts are in line with an approach to modernity, in particular of its spaces and technologies – or rather their mutations during the xx^th century – based on the idea of the act of laying bare. Transparency is a prism through which Virilio presents one image of violence after another, in continuums of war and peace that causes the plane of peace to fall back onto that of war. A movement mapped out by war is carried further by peace, where the intent is to "disqualify the planetary habitat as a whole by depriving people of their status as inhabitants." [35] Speed’s destructive conquest culminates in a disqualification, in contempt, in a scouring of milieus, in an abandonment of the rough, opaque aspects of territories. This is a movement that goes from the conquest of the seas – in principle an unobstructed nautical glacis [36] – to that of the skies: the smooth, transparent space par excellence (borrowing "smooth" from Deleuze and Guattari, [37] who associate it with Virilio on several occasions). It is an infernal machine in which we find the bombing of cities and systems of aerial reconnaissance, the naval strategy of the "fleet in being," the landscape of the front, jungle defoliation through the use of Agent Orange, glass architecture, surveillance technologies, etc. In such a movement, transparency appears as the visual perspective that accompanies the disappearance, disqualification or destruction of milieus, territories and habitats. Here, this prism of transparency allows for the deployment within thought of an infernal machine of this sort, and for the conceptual operation that links all of these movements together. This is because, in Virilio’s reading, transparency functions as a pure vehicle. We implicitly recognize a common way of comprehending transparency: as continual visibility in the absence of any mediation, of any medium. What Virilio retains from transparency is the way it frustrates any grasp of it. It is uninhabitable and correspondingly it destroys any inhabitable space. Through it everything becomes a vehicle, an intermediary: and glass is the intermediary par excellence of that optical ideal based upon an empty space tolerating nothing that would obstruct light. That is why there is something intrinsically monstrous about the glass house: it is the habitat that materializes the liquidation of the possibilities of inhabiting. [38]

21Benjamin’s attempt, consisting in thinking on the basis of the properties of glass as a material, enables the construction of other prisms, and lets transparency express something else. For Virilio, the importance of transparency lies in its abstraction, the void it produces, hence its totalizing aspect. Now, with the imaginaries of glass and the real-world experiments that proliferated in the 1920s, [39] we may adopt the opposite perspective: glass is precisely the contrivance, the material, that mediates transparency. Transparency is not the abolition of any mediation: on the contrary, it is what forms a medium. [40] This approach infers that we consider transparency on the basis of the materials, the contrivances, and the apparatuses that convey it. Glass, as a material of the poverty of experience, provides a way out for thought from the infernal dilemma where refusing to heed the call from the depths and its demand for opacity means finding oneself given over to the immediacy of transparency and its own totalizing movements. Glass is the vehicle of transparency par excellence for producing a multiplicity of effects. And that is what gave rise to the first wave of architectural and utopian enthusiasm for glass in the early xx^th century, whose main representatives included the pacifists and revolutionaries Paul Scheerbart, [41] Bruno Taut [42] and Velimir Khlebnikov. [43] This first wave took an interest in colored glass, variations in lighting, and the reflective properties of glass, i.e. in the formal possibilities for creating a plethora of visual effects. We are not dealing here with the vehicle of abstract transparency, but with surface phenomena that redistribute themselves. Taking the risk of reappropriating a space from the poverty of experience, while resisting its totalizing movements, can only come about through the reinvention – by other means – of that ambiguity that the renunciation of secrecy seemed destined to sacrifice. Even so, there is no reintroduction of density, opacity or mystery: there is instead an interplay of surfaces that produce multiple fields of the visible.

22These two "prisms" on glass – as an intermediary between transparency and its totalizing movements, and as a material that creates numerous framings and perspectives – may come into conflict with one another, but they may also encounter, subvert and thwart each other. To understand this, let us briefly discuss Glass House, an aborted film project by Eisenstein, precisely insofar as the project made use of both prisms at once. [44] Eisenstein imagined a film that would take place entirely within a glass skyscraper: while the screenplay would explore the dystopian impulses motivating transparency, such as the act of laying bare and the visibility of all by all, Eisenstein’s direction would simultaneously play on the formal, cinematic potential of the material. Far from being limited to the role of a vehicle for consistent visibility, glass would then appear as the source for multiple points of view, and overlapping shots. [45] To return to our problem, we could say that there is a movement of transparency by which it tends to free itself from the mediations that allow it to exist, and produce its own abstraction. At the same time, it is always possible to return to the materials, the contrivances, the assemblages that allow it to exist. The problem is not merely one of "interpretive frameworks" that are more or less adequate. There are operations of violence that are quite specifically fuelled by these abstractions, just as the demand for a profound experience of war truly tends to widen war’s scope.

IV

23What would be the consequences of this way of approaching war by its surfaces, its exteriorities? In his text on war as an inner experience, Jünger looks down on those soldiers who, despite being "unmistakable types of the front […] battered by mechanical action," seem oblivious to the profound reality of the war, and incapable of experiencing it from within. [46] Thus Jünger opens a breach, despite himself to a certain extent: even on the most intense line of the most intense of wars, the great processes of internalizing war experience flaws and points of exteriority. Here, exteriority means neither "outside" nor "unrelated to." It means that war does not become the inner reality of the person going through it. This does not mean that it is not real, or that it is not destructive: on the contrary. But it reestablishes nothing and redeploys nothing.

Figure 5

Harun Farocki, from Ausweg, 2005: "From the Bomb’s Point of View" ("Aus der Sicht der Bombe")

Harun Farocki, from Ausweg, 2005: "From the Bomb’s Point of View" ("Aus der Sicht der Bombe")

24In his installation Ausweg (A Way), Farocki assembles a series of "operational images," images used within the execution of a technical process, within apparatuses of production and destruction: these images are completely integrated within these processes, and yet they have no interiority. They are produced outside of any experience, but here they are extracted from their operations and edited together, thereby revealing the perspectives that they create. Ausweg is entirely contained within these vision machines deprived of interiority, and their equipment. We again encounter the images captured by the cameras attached to missiles. "The eye of the bomb": this does not mean the abstraction of any perspective, but on the contrary the production of a series of perceptual assemblages that lend consistency and reality to these abstractions. It is a completely different approach to "virtual wars" from the reading that consists in seeing these images as a derealization, as a loss of the real. Here, we do not say that reality dissolves into abstractions: on the contrary, all the materiality of the virtual appears.

25Between the wasteland of the front – a field of destructive forces, a devastated landscape – and the smooth space free from rough spots as materialized by glass, there is a game of mirrors, but at the same time there is a disparity, an insurmountable interval. They do not fall back upon each other: each keeps their distance from the other, while still forming a pair, and taking their places in the same world. Devastation does serve as the backdrop, and the question "What is there left to desire in such a world?" entirely depends on that other question: "What can still be invented on the basis of this backdrop of devastation?" We get a good sense of all the need for this search for the point of contact, but also of all the danger in it, something between an intermediary and a point of resistance.