War

In recent years, wars and other catastrophes, appear connected, continuous, close. There are many, especially in the west, who claim we are newly living in an age of ‘perpetual’ and ‘everywhere’ war.

The chaotic digital mix of the conventional and the transgressive, the official and the unauthorized, impresses a new immediacy on the very character of warfare, no longer with clear boundaries and finitude it seeps into the everyday. But is there really much more war and threats of war today than at any time since the end of the defining world wars of the twentieth century? Is this experience rather a matter of the transformed perception of warfare through the technologies of how it is seen by militaries and audiences alike, via drones and digital networks? 

I argue that a new concurrent war imaginary, fostered by digital technologies and media, has enveloped a great deal of the western experience of and commentary on war in this emergent century. And despite war and memory being intricately and intimately connected, with the ongoing memory booms, the new war imaginary is shaped through a digital forgetting – a crowding out of a post-world wars past in which wars raged as intensively as today.