War simulations don’t cause internal reflexivity but aims to proliferate its own scenarios for conflict.

To wish to communicate some truth about war, to seek to represent it, to insist on explaining it or even justifying it (or one’s opposition to it) may be an ethical gesture. But to communicate, to seek and give meaning, or indeed to want to represent war (even by way of the immediacy or “real-time” effect of digitalized media) is still about thickening its fog. The representation of war, whatever form it takes, will never be much more than endless information/ prognostication, all the more so since war will never take place (since it will always already have taken place). Thus, seeking to make sense of war through/ as representation will always be a matter of describing a pathology without disease. Only proliferated symptoms will be made visible and granted significance in the flow of information and the desperate quest for meaning. Symptoms of a proliferated war without a core, a meaning, a purpose, or a subject are everywhere around us. They make up our mediatized universe of war and/ as terror. They are both the substance and appearance relayed by digital technologies and media on behalf of a demos that itself has become the medium, a network that processes and distributes images and events. As Baudrillard writes, “Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning: the equiprobability of all causes and of all consequences” (Baudrillard, 2008: 36). It is indeed in this manner that war gains its momentum and virulence. Not to recognize this representational virulence, and further to demand that war reveal an origin, a cause, a responsibility, or indeed a subject or object that could grant it meaning is to reproduce its fog and, possibly, to acquiesce to its violence. After all, there is no such thing as a benign representation or appearance (of war, or anything else, for that matter). The various attempts at representing, explaining, justifying, or making sense of war and its violence, often in traditional referential geopolitical terms, are involved in an infinite splitting of what war must be or mean as much as they are concerned with a deepening and widening of the violence/ virulence of its (global) representation. In its dissolution/ dissemination through political analysis, war reveals its violent representational forms. On the one hand, analytically dissolved and disseminated, war becomes unlocalizable, thus, in a way impossible to contain. It can no longer “take place.” On the other hand, although it can no longer be waged in one place, it still must proliferate its effects virally and virulently. Representationally unhinged from any object (and reifying no particular subject or, rather, all sorts of subjects at once), war can no longer be geopolitically maintained, cultivated, and made use of by way of any of the (modern) categories that once sought to give it gravity: geography, ideology, morality, sovereignty, domination, or history. Thus, war becomes strategically useless even if, tactically, it betrays the violence or virulence of representation everywhere it is found. Just like in the image of terror/terrorism, all we witness, then, is panic. Panic war is a “floating reality… where we live on the edge of ecstasy and dread” (Kroker, Kroker, and Cook, 1989: 14). Ungrounded, strategically indifferent, and yet representationally effective and virulent, panic war no longer stands in as the “substantial event” of time/ history, as the referential hinge that allows passage from one human epoch to the next. Today, Janus, the God of passages, transitions, and attributions of meaning in time, may still be worried about war. But Janus must now fixate his gaze in all directions (thankfully, today’s Janus is likely to have access to YouTube…). The once mythologized and later romanticized uniqueness of Janus’ bioptic talents has been transmuted into an impossible requirement of omniscience, omnivoyance, and omnipresence. The temple of Janus, which was once a symbolic spatial conduit for the inertia of time, has collapsed under the weight of an indifferent, perhaps more catastrophic, inertia: the inertia not of war’s violence (counter-actable through peace), but rather of the violence of war’s representation (that knows no bounds and no antagonisms). War no longer takes place in order to mediate time or to usher in a strategic (political) change through conflict. Perhaps it never really did. Rather, as representation, war tactically preserves and perpetuates violent conflicts and a propensity for doing away with things (starting with meaning) through a kind of digital/informational immanence (today’s preferred version of representation or mediation).