Under Fire

UNDER FIRE: an online forum on violence and representation
organized by Jordan Crandall with co-editors: Asef Bayat, Susan Buck-Morss,
Hamid Dabashi, Brian Holmes, and Gema Martin Munoz


Under Fire explores the organization and representation of contemporary
armed conflict. The project consists of a series of presentations and
discussions that will occur online and in Rotterdam, beginning January 22,
2004. The discussions will involve participation from individuals working in
politics, theory, criticism, the arts, and journalism from both the West and
the Middle East. A series of publications will be released during the
course of the year.

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Under Fire explores the organization and representation of contemporary
armed conflict. On the organizational front, it looks at the forms of
militarized agencies that are emerging today, including Western defense
industries and decentralized terrorist organizations. It explores the
forces that contribute to their emergence, whether operating at the level of
economy, technology, politics, or ideology. On the representational front,
it looks at the ways that armed violence materializes as act and image,
searching for new insight into its mechanisms and effects. In so doing, it
engages issues of economy, embodiment, symbolic meaning, and affect.

The project delves into the economic underpinnings of contemporary armed
conflict. It looks at the legacy of the "military-industrial complex," the
rise of the privatized military industry, and the repercussions of the
commercialization of violence. However it does not simply prioritize
economy. It looks to contemporary conflicts as driven by combinations of
territorial, market, and ideological imperatives, and new attempts at the
reconciliation of identity and universality. It looks to emergent processes
of organization that operate on multiple levels of temporality and implicit
form. Through this approach, the project aims to articulate emergent
systems of decentralized control and new global dynamics of power. Building
on historical conceptions of hegemony, it attempts to understand the nature
of emergent power and the forms of resistance to it, situating cycles of
violence within the modalities of a global system.

The project emphasizes the role that representations play as registers of
symbolic meaning and as agents of affective change. It engages images from
commercial and independent news media, as well as representations from
artistic, literary, and popular entertainment sources, both in the West and
the Middle East. These images are regarded in terms of attention strategy
and perception management, but they are also regarded in terms of cultural
imaginaries of conflict, where they can operate as "fictionalized components
of reality." They are studied in terms of the deeper truths they may offer
about collective identifications and aggressions, and their roles in the
formation of a new body politic.

The project consists of as a series of organized discussions that will occur
online and in Rotterdam, throughout the year 2004. These discussions will
involve participation from individuals working in politics, theory,
criticism, the arts, and journalism from both the West and the Middle East.
Rather than relying on discourses based upon Western conceptions of
modernity, the project is dedicated to opening up new historical
perspectives, exploring the potential of Islamist discourse as a source of
critical and political debate. It will thus include participation from
progressive thinkers in the Islamic world. While most of these discussions
will be conducted in English, sections will be translated into Arabic.

A series of publications will be released during the course of the year.
Each of these publications will be organized around a key interpretive
concept that emerges in the proceedings.

Through this approach, Under Fire aims to help open up a discursive terrain
that can offer new insights into symptomatic violence, and alternatives to
its perpetuation.

For more information contact Witte de With at [email protected]. Witte de With,
center for contemporary art, Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR, Rotterdam
http://www.wdw.nl [email protected]

special events:
January 24: Presentation of the project by Jordan Crandall in Witte de With,
Rotterdam, at 5.30 p.m. Exhibition open daily from 11 a.m. till 6 p.m.
January 27: Lecture by Jordan Crandall in the context of the International
Film Festival Rotterdam. Location: Off_Corso, Rotterdam, 3 p.m. (For
information see http://filmfestivalrotterdam.com)
May 28-30: Conference at Witte de With, Rotterdam with editors Asef Bayat,
Susan Buck-Morss, Jordan Crandall, Hamid Dabashi, Brian Holmes, and Gema
Martin Munoz.

Asef Bayat is the Academic Director of the International Institute for the
Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and the ISIM Chair at the
University of Leiden. He has taught sociology and Middle East studies at
the American University in Cairo an has held visiting positions at the
University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University and the University
of Oxford. He is currently program director of an ISIM research program on
socio-religious movements and social change in contemporary Muslim
societies.

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in
the Department of Government at Cornell University, where she is also
Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Art History. Her books
include The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (1979); The Dialectics of Seeing:
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1991); Dreamworld and Catastrophe:
the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002); and Thinking Past
Terror: Islam and Critical Theory on the Left (2003).

Jordan Crandall is a visual artist and media theorist. He is Assistant
Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San
Diego. He is the author of Drive: Technology, Mobility, and Desire (2002);
co-editor of Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network (1999); and
founding editor of a forthcoming journal of philosophy, art, cultural
studies, and science studies.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and the
director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and
Society at Columbia University. His research interests include the
comparative study of cultures, Islamic intellectual history, and the social
and intellectual history of Iran, both modern and medieval. His publications
include Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment
of the Umayyads (1989), Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation
of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1993), Truth and Narrative: The Untimely
Thoughts of Ayn Al-Qudat Al-Hamadhani (1999), Staging a Revolution: The Art
of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (with Peter Chelkowski, 1999),
and Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001).

Brian Holmes and is an art critic, cultural theorist, and activist,
particularly involved with the mapping of contemporary capitalism. He is a
member of the French activist association Ne pas plier (Do not bend). He
has recently published an anthology of his critical writing called
Hieroglyphs of the Future (2003).

Gema Martin Munoz is Professor of Sociology of the Arab and Islamic world at
Madrid Autonoma University and Director of Maghreb-Middle East at the Centro
de Relaciones Internacionales, Madrid. She is editor of Islam, Modernism
and the West: Cultural and Political Relations at the End of the Millennium
(1999).