03/05/2009 11:13 International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS) - Volume 11-2 May 2013 Page 1 of 26 http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-zevnik.html ISSN: 1705-6411 Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014) SPECIAL ISSUE: BAUDRILLARD AND WAR War Porn: an image of perversion and desire in modern warfare Dr. Andreja Zevnik (School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK) Due to their omnipresence, due to the prevailing rule of the world of making everything visible, the images, our present-day images have become substantially pornographic. […] they embrace the pornographic face of the war. (Baudrillard, 2005a: 205 – 206) For its cruelness and brutality, albeit organised, the space of war is a highly contended and emotionally loaded landscape. Over the past few decades the fascination with the phenomenon of war, its space and in fact even with its cruelty – manifested in a desire to make suffering visible – permeated political and social discourse. War is no longer a distant affair affecting only those ‘on the ground’ (and the families of the wounded soldiers), through television and media war became a virtual and an entertaining phenomenon (Der Derian 2003). From the Vietnam War where media turned into an unwelcomed partner on the battlefield via the First Gulf War when embedded journalism became an integral part of a military-complex, to the most recent soldier-driven accounts from the battlefield (Kozol 2012), media and reporting from the frontline radically re-shaped public perception of war. Not only is there a desire to see more, further and to a greater detail, but also, when there is nothing to see, an expectation (to see, create or produce) persists. It seems that that which cannot be represented (or is excluded from the realm of the visible) simply does not exist. Such an attitude to war and to the space of war, I argue, poses an interesting question about the relationship between not only war and the media, but most importantly between war and ‘reality’. What war in fact is: