Thank you to Oleksiy Radynski for this intriguing example. Video of the tank being driven off its pedestal can be found here →; more information about the tank can be found here → and here →. Since the video was recorded, the tank was reportedly recaptured by Ukrainian forces and taken to Kiev, although none of these accounts could be independently verified.
This is also addressed in Brian Kuan Wood’s recent text “Frankenethics,” in Final Vocabulary, ed. Mai Abu ElDahab (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 30–41.
Thank you to Stephen Squibb for mentioning the movie Demolition Man (1993), a science-fiction scenario in which weapons are banned. The main characters have to get them from a museum because it’s the only place they still can be found. (This is not the case in Ukraine.) The institutional effort to preserve peace by remembering violence becomes the raw material for the recommencement of civil war.
Giorgio Agamben, La guerre civile: Pour une théorie politique de la Stasis (Paris: Points Collection, 2015). I can only hint at the genealogy and multiple implications of this term, starting from Carl Schmitt’s idea of a “global civil war” (Weltbürgerkrieg), which itself might have originated with Ernst Jünger. In the 1980s, Ernst Nolte’s use of the term led to the so-called Historikerstreit, and triggered a sort of revisionist mutiny by right-wing German historians seeking to minimize German responsibility for WWII and German crimes of all sorts. However, many other thinkers, including Hannah Arendt in On Revolution (1963), have reformulated this notion. It has also been used by Negri/Hardt and Jean-Luc Nancy, among many others.
Even though, of course, civil wars mainly produce the pauperization of people unwilling or unable to militarize their forms of organization.
On the Russian side, Igor Strelkow is probably the most famous reenactor of historical battles. He is currently being sued by the families of the people killed on Malaysian Airlines Flight 17; forces he commanded are suspected of having shot down the plane. On the Ukrainian side, “a military reenactment group is fixing the Ukrainian Army’s decrepit Soviet equipment,” according to Alexander Nieuwenhuis of Vice News →.
Thank you to David Riff for mentioning this film to me.
Full disclosure: I certainly wouldn’t be writing so much about Guernica if I hadn’t had first-hand experience of its current setup at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, where I just had a show. As usual, I assume a fully non-objective position in relation to just about anything.
See Hito Steyerl, “Duty-Free Art,” e-flux journal 63 (March 2015) →.
This was initially Oleksiy Radynski’s idea.
“The context for this possible alteration is defined by two major, partly interconnected conditions. One is the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s resulting from various forms of globalization. These range from economic privatization and deregulation to the increased prominence of the international human rights regime. The second is the emergence of multiple actors, groups, and communities partly strengthened by these transformations in the state and increasingly unwilling automatically to identify with a nation as represented by the state.” Saskia Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 46 (2002) →.
Saskia Sassen, “Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage, 2003), 277–91 →.
For trolls, see Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015 →.
See Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014).
See Josh Meyer, “Are ISIS Geeks Using Phone Apps, Encryption to Spread Terror?” NBC News, November 16, 2015 →.
See Jarret Brachman and Alix Levine, “The World of Holy Warcraft,” Foreign Policy, April 13, 2011 →.
It is fascinating to see how security measures to protect Guernica have evolved over time. While on display at Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid recently, the painting was inside a massive bulletproof glass case and was watched by guards with machine guns.
In a private conversation, Stephen Squibb mentioned to me that Agamben writes about people freeing themselves from sacred, looping, repetitive time by “forgetting” it in human time.
This paper was written at the invitation of Pip Laurenson for the conference Media in Transition at Tate Modern, London. It was a great event, thank you so much. I could never have written any of it without the amazing support of Oleksiy Radynski and the many discussions I had with him. Also vital for the development of the ideas in the text were Program-Ace, Kharkiv; Max Schmoetzer; David Riff; Anton Vidokle; and participants in the Landscape Class, Berlin. I would also like to thank João Fernandes and Manuel Borja-Villel of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, who gave me lots of in-depth explanation about museological strategies and decisions related to Guernica and the role of the model of the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Reina Sofía.