TV Series (Jun 2016)
« Tu n’as rien vu [en Irak] » : Logistique de l’aperception dans Generation Kill
Abstract
As Paul Virilio has argued, warfare has relied since the First World War on a “logistics of military perception”. My argument in this paper is that Generation Kill does more than merely confirm the huge part played by technology in modern warfare. In addition, the series focuses on the omnipresence of optical devices on and around soldiers to reveal the dark side of the military apparatus by exposing the implementation of a logistics of aperception. This recent development comes as a complement to the one described by Virilio. Still by using technology as a go-between, aperception allows the foes to be at best seen in the distance, and at worst un-seen, which means that the Marines are meticulously deprived of their ability to perceive the enemy.Generation Kill’s critical scope thus lies in its ability to devise both narrative and visual solutions, as a fictional program, in order to bear witness to the horror of combat in spite of a technology that constantly puts violence at (more than) arm’s-length. Rather than pursuing the impossible challenge of filming a conflict that has become immaterial, the series identifies what motivates the inevitably objectless gaze that characterizes the Marines it depicts. The same as Hiroshima mon amour had invented a way of dealing with nuclear warfare, Generation Kill acts on the observation that war movies must be reinvented, lest they should show nothing at all.To achieve this goal, the series submits its viewers to a logistics of aperception, in the philosophical meaning of the term. Indeed, it enables them to access the “conscience or reflexive awareness of [perception as an] internal state”. Generation Kill suggests that it is central to focus on vision in order to report on modern warfare. It thus exposes the current technological hypocrisy, which maintains the invisibility of the enemy under the pretense of amplifying the perceptual accuracy of soldiers. Thanks to its original critical method, Generation Kill locates the origin of the sustained emptiness of the gaze in contemporary visual culture, by emphasizing the impact of the war on terror on the Iraqi conflict.
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