Geometry of empire

Abstract

As far as I know, this project is the first sustained treatment of logistical media. Logistical media mimic the communicative cosmos. They intrude, almost imperceptibly, on our experiences of space and time, even as they represent them. They are devices of cognitive, social, and political coordination that are so fundamentally communications media that they intersect and envelop much of our lives without our conscious awareness. Lighthouses, clocks, global positioning systems, temples, maps, calendars, telescopes, and highways are just a few of them. In modern terms logistical media are at once bureaucratic and militaristic. They intersect issues of social organization, power, and economics. My tidy description of logistical media is this: logistical media are media of orientation. They have to do with order and arrangement first, and representation second, if at all. This study will reveal the critical and historical impact of radar as a logistical medium, as a technological architecture that was developed for national defense and to remotely survey the earth and its atmosphere, but that also contributes to the endocolonization of the "masses" and controls their collisions with "others." Principally I am interested in how historical objects, including those from MIT's Radiation Laboratory in the 1940s, inform what Walter Benjamin (1999) theorized as the now, in how their arrangement as a dialectical image or constellation can momentarily disrupt our sense of chronological progress and denaturalize ideology. In its simplest form radar is an application of electromagnetic waves for purposes of communication, a fact not lost on