Nuria Enguita

Not so long ago on the subject of the war in the Balkans, the French sociologist Edgar Morin wrote “… in any event the harmful effects are irremediable. The disaster that has emerged from the heart of Europe has struck Europe in the heart. This disaster is now generalised. The barbarity of Total Nationalism has not been the only cause of the disaster. In the western area the ravages of a blind rationality, abstract, quantitative and mechanical, have divided and pigeon-holed the various complex realities, incapable of placing their facts and problems in an appropriate context, incapable of understanding the shortcomings of its own logic and incapable of conceiving its own blindness. Madness!* Madness! Madness! Not only the madness of Serbian Total Nationalism and of its ravages, but the lunacy of a war waged by computers, calculations, figures and of killing machines, silenced by a limiting techno-military intention.” The work of Daniel G. Andújar frequently unfolds between the intersecting spheres implied by the use of technology and its practice as a sophisticated instrument of control and dominance. A computer poses an illusion (due to its genuine incapacity): the possibility of hacking a telephone company, in the reach of anyone with a minimum knowledge of computer language. Sociologist and artist alike propose a reflection on contemporary war, in which the classical notion of hand-to-hand fighting disappears, giving way to a series of variable factors related to diverse realities, almost always far removed from the social and political reality of the true areas of conflict. The Gulf War was possibly a media war, but the present Balkan war is even more cruel for it only seems to take place inside the computers switched on in the various NATO headquarters. The consequences in terms of death, destruction and displacement of human masses originated by this designer war seem to be reduced, according to its architects, to undesirable yet necessary collateral damage. One final question before moving on — how important is it to destroy actual ‘territories’, now that the networks of power and money are totally decentralised and their tentacles oblivious to frontiers?

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