The sense of virtual violence: mimesis and immediation during nocturnal combat in modern warfare

Antonius C.G.M. Robben
Utrecht University

Abstract

Night vision technology has transformed the nocturnal combat culture of today’s wars and profoundly affected the sensory perception of their soldiers. Image intensifiers turn night into day, allow soldiers to engage enemy combatants unawares, and give them a sense of real-life ocular vision through immediation. Immediation is the process by which users no longer realize that sight and interaction are electronically mediated. For example, U.S. troops in Iraq became so accustomed to such high-tech devices that they failed to realize that the night remained dark for unsuspected civilians whose behavior and spectral representation became vulnerable to misinterpretation. The life-threatening combat zone, the just war rhetoric, and the dehumanization of Iraqi civilians and insurgents influenced how soldiers saw and acted upon the green and white silhouettes produced by image intensifiers and thermal imaging systems. The ambivalent sight of people as both human and virtual, and the emotional distance of a mediated battle space, arose from a mimetic process through which images became realities. This presentation combines the emerging fields of media anthropology and the anthropology of the senses to explain how modern warfare has altered the visual culture of nocturnal combat and is causing innumerable civilian deaths under the suspension of natural darkness.

Antonius Robben is Senior Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held research positions at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University. His most recent books include Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005 & 2007), which won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006, and the edited volumes Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader (2007 & 2011; co-editor Jeffrey Sluka), and Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War (2010).