Avaital Ronell argued a couple of points in her eloquent yet hard-to-follow essay “a disappearance of community.” It seems to me that her two main arguments are that virtual realities are giving us a sterile impression of a war that is dirty and bloody, and that the virtual reality discourages community. These are good points and make sense, however, I don’t fully understand the relationship between them.
Her major and most concrete argument is on the virtual and sterile nature of the first gulf war. She writes that, “on the American side of language usage, this was a clean war, a clean-up job accomplished according to the moral, political, and military evaluations that were represented… The point is that the other side never got to us.” I think she is basically writing that the gulf war was portrayed to us as being undertaken with such surgical precision that we never fully realized that it was a real and bloody war. I was too young at the time to remember much, but I have heard that the images shown in the media were of bombs so precise that they could fly through a window to kill only the designated target, or airplanes dropping bombs with the Americans inside of them safely out of the way. Thus she argues that the messy and bloody side of the war was never really conveyed to the public.
Ronell goes on to write that “In the name of symbolic health, a unity of world that sees its image in wholesomeness and the project of renewal, we have waged war on what was repeatedly represented as degenerate, sickly… America has been carrying out its newly transcendentalized project of killing the unwell.” To rephrase that in more simple language, I think the she is arguing that if the war becomes a metaphor for sterility, than by fighting it we are cleansing the unclean. In a popular impression of the war, Iraq would be the unwholesomeness that we have to heal, by medically operating on it from a safe distance away. In a sense, our bombs to sterilize everything they touch. We are consequently removing the unclean from Iraq with them. I think Iraq had also been portrayed in the media as a dysfunctional nation, that in some sense we were healing by invading.
This impression of the public would not be possible with the technology that allowed this war to transpire the way it did. Ronell’s other argument involves this technology, that it is depressing our sense of community. She writes that “A question that VR poses, in its full positivity, is where to locate the community. Because we are vanishing. In the absence of the polis, something like VR obligates us to see ethical questions about contact, memory, the prosthetic subject, and it teaches us to dislocate our proper place.” It seems to me that she believes the community to be something that needs to be more concrete than the “virtual” relations that one has through technology. However, by restating her point in this manner I may be grossly oversimplifying it, and losing some of its subtleties.
But how does this lack of a community relate to the sterility of the war? Ronell admits that “the connectedness between virtual reality and the war was not always entirely evident to me.” After reading her essay, I feel the same way – I’m not sure I understand their relation. Is seems like she may suggest that two major effects of contemporary technology are this sterile war and our emerging lack of community. Or, on a deeper level she may be suggesting that our lack of community has allowed us to view the war in as a way of cleansing the unwholesome. Either way, although she makes two good points, she never fully teases out the relation between them, and I would have been interested in understanding her thoughts on that relationship.