___________________________________________________________________________________________________

The delivery of the weapons of conflict and the provisions of peace by air, then, casts a shadow of political privilege onto the ground below. As Eyal Weizman writes in chapter 11 of Politics of Verticality: Airspace is a discrete dimension absent from political maps. But it is a space of utmost importance – cluttered with civilian and military airways, allowing a vantage observational point on the terrain under it, denying that position to others. The deliverers assume, by little stretch of the imagination, the traditional perspective of a Holy Purveyor. Hito Steryrl, in her essay In Freefall, A Thought Experiment in Vertical Perspective says: One might conclude that this is in fact a radicalization—though not an overcoming—of the paradigm of linear perspective. In it, the former distinction between object and subject is exacerbated and turned into the one-way gaze of superiors onto inferiors, a looking down from high to low.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________



___________________________________________________________________________________________________


The receptors, then, assume the role of the inevitably grateful, fearful, and humble Mortals of Earth – so reminded of their mortality by their inability to refuse what comes to them from the air.
This inability, it can be argued, is a double-bind that ultimately, and vastly, benefits the position of the Purveyor.

This was perhaps none better exemplified than by the Berlin Airlift in 1948, in which Soviet forces blockaded all roadways and railways into an out of Berlin,
where survival provisions were dwindling. Left only with a written agreement that three corridors of airspace would give free access to Berlin, Allied forces used the precarity of the hostage situation to regain footing over the Soviet Union,
and providing aid to the people in Berlin and thus forcing through the Soviet blockade.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

< < < /// > > >

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10