![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Patterns in contemporary conflict highlight the failures of traditional views of the relationship between humanity and technology. This paper proposes that modern conflict is characterized by something called “dissimulation,” referring to numerous phenomena together emphasizing the inadequacies of conceiving man as the overseeing creator of technological advancement. It shows rather that man, particularly man in conflict, is always already implicated and concealed within complex technological networks and mediums, wherein humanity is just another player amongst others. This paper diagnoses and defines the condition of “dissimulation” in drone warfare, modern partisanship and terrorism, raising further the question of the conceptualization of a technological object in doing so. It highlights the danger of an observed technological tendency too, particularly in terms of its shaping of contemporary conflict as well as our relationship to space and time. Having considered dissimulation’s characteristic phenomena and effects, a strategy for dealing with it is then suggested.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Aristotle 208.
2 Ibid. 207.
3 Heidegger 11–12.
4 Ibid. 16.
5 Ibid. 19.
6 Ibid. 24.
7 Ibid. 32.
8 For a handy brief summary of this, see Harman 1–2.
9 Stiegler 245.
10 Heidegger 33.
11 Stiegler 276.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange 183–93.
15 Ibid. 183.
16 Ibid. 193.
17 Ibid. 184.
18 Ibid. 193.
19 Deleuze and Guattari 412.
20 Ibid. 413.
21 Ibid. 411.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid. 484–85.
24 Stiegler 17.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid. 64.
27 Ibid. 88.
28 Virilio and Lotringer 75.
29 Ibid. 82.
30 DeLanda 12n2.
31 Ibid. 11.
32 Ibid. 9.
33 The term itself I have adapted from Negarestani, who uses something similar to analyse/translate a specific doctrine (or reading of a doctrine, adopted in a “new wave of terrorism”) which is called Taqiyya. The meaning of Taqiyya is what he calls “strategic (dis)simulation.” See Negarestani 53.
34 The phrasing of this is specifically adopted from Negarestani, albeit generalized to something not only resulting from a particular case of modern terror. See Negarestani 90.
35 See Virilio 39; Prior 135.
36 Rogers and Hill 8.
37 Ibid. 7.
38 Borger.
39 Schmitt 5.
40 Ibid. 13.
41 Virilio 5.
42 Wilson, Helmore and Swaine.
43 Helsel.
44 Negarestani 62.
45 Chamayou 50.
46 Fang.
47 Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies 111–15.
48 Negarestani 59.
49 Virilio 39.
50 Ibid. 24.
51 Stiegler 111.
52 Ibid. 125.
53 Hegel 10, §18.
54 Prior 135.