Paranoid culture can be understood as a set of post 9\/11 \u00adsensibilities resulting from the seismic shift and subsequent reshaping of global \u00adcommunication, economic, surveillance, security, and transport \u00adnetworks. These transformations are not brought to bear by the U.S.A.\/ U.K.\u2019s \u00addecision to invade Iraq alone, but reside in a more encompassing logic of economic and social control of which the invasion of Iraq is the most visible component. Paranoid culture is constructed from an integrated fear of an unknown and unidentifiable enemy, a psychological economy manifesting itself in the collective anxiety over the \u201csleeper cell.\u201d This new formation of terrorism is defined by its aim to go beyond merely \u00adintegrating itself into the fabric of everyday life. The sleeper cell resituates the terrorist \u00adparadigm by becoming a valued member of a community. Camouflaging his\/her operations in earned responsibilities causes society at large to question its most basic systems of relationship building and social \u00adhierarchies when the cell activates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
9\/11 is unique in that it marks a global paranoid culture where fear of the unidentifiable travels from the United States to several points \u00adglobally. Because Canadian foreign policy does not employ its military industrial complex to inscribe external boundaries by force, Canadian socio-political culture remains nervous rather than paranoid. By way of example, the \u00adgovernment\u2019s attitudes towards mediatization of its training camps expose a more laissez-faire attitude than could ever be expected in the U.K.\/U.S.A. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201ctraining camp\u201d holds connotations of a covert site of terrorist education. Occidental versions of training soldiers in anti-terror \u00adtechniques are equally as annexed from media focus or speculation when located in the U.S.A.\/U.K. The openness of Canada\u2019s camps is representative of its nervousness, demonstrating concern but not concealing its tactics for engaging with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While participating within the economic and military nexus of a post-9\/11 order, Canada nevertheless remains peripheral on the radar of immediate threat due to foreign policy strategies such as its promotion of diplomacy over military action in Iraq. Canada\u2019s international relations do not channel anxiety into paranoia, rather, they tacitly observe as a \u00adnervous witness of struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pretendahar<\/em> by Never Lopez is a series of photographs documenting the Canadian Indoor Urban Operations Training Centre near Toronto that \u201cprepares\u201d Canadian troops for effective combat in Afghani urban \u00adenvironments. The training facility, located in an airplane hangar, \u00adfeatures a refugee camp, community centre and shantytown, organized in a gridded cellular manner resembling the cubicles of an office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The photographs reveal a series of \u201cnervous\u201d spaces\u2014the \u00adventilation and structural systems of the hangar comprise the majority of the \u00adinstallation\u2019s images. These shots of Pretendahar<\/em> reveal a visceral space possessing a nervous structure that supports a cellular system within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such spatial organization recalls Foucault\u2019s analysis of Bentham\u2019s 1785 panopticon, where he argues that the prison\u2019s cellular space allowed for effective rehabilitation through surveillance and repetition. This notion of cellular surveillance is preserved in Pretendahar<\/em>, broken up into a gridlike city; it structures the concomitant disciplinary techniques of the Canadian Army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Commenting on Pretendahar<\/em>\u2019s training tactics in Toronto\u2019s National Post<\/em>, one officer remarks that it produces \u201cmuscle memory.\u201d This tactic, achieved through repetition, is borne out through the spatial paradigm of the martial body. However, Pretendahar<\/em>\u2019s spatiality short-circuits between the nervous grid and the muscle. The information transmitted appears to fail to result in a coherent replica of middle-eastern spatiality. Rather than replicating the other, it is a structural projection of the occidental self, the antithesis of Jean Nouvel\u2019s Institut du Monde arabe<\/em> in Paris, with its skin of 240 motor-controlled apertures that react to sunlight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pretendahar<\/em> simply presumes that the other extends the self\u2019s \u00adspatial constructs. Its architecture is capable of handling occidental guerrilla warfare, but does not appear suited to the spatially responsive, mutating and nomadic structure of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Never Lopez highlights the cellular spatiality of the training camp, the simulated chaos in its cubicle-like architecture suggesting the aftermath of a western office party gone awry whilst attempting to mimic the look of Kandahar. Structured by Cartesian logic, overhead grids of electrical, air conditioning, surveillance and fire systems sustain the hangar. This unreal life-support system, absent in Kandahar, manifests itself on a micro-level, as the office furniture and anti-Canadian propaganda painted upon the walls mocks space instead of defining Afghani social experience. Training on the cellular model with logistic structuring procured from the realm of a reality TV show, Pretendahar<\/em> rehearses for an unrealizable experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the cellular space dictates movement, the soldiers exist as \u00adsimulated antibodies, navigating the arterial passageways of Pretendahar<\/em>, \u00adattempting to locate the debilitating elements within the body whilst being the foreign elements within the system. Akin to the passengers in the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage<\/em>, about a group of scientists \u00adjourneying inside a wounded diplomat\u2019s body to repair it, soldiers journey into the fictionalised body of Pretendahar<\/em> attempting to locate simulated \u00adpotential threats to its structure. Fantastic Voyage<\/em> is dominated by Cold War logic where an enemy can be identified; within Pretendahar <\/em>this \u00adconcept is not so simple. Here, the logic posits a fictional nexus of \u00adlocating a disembodied enemy within the social corpus through the \u00adfriction of disinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the climax of Fantastic Voyage<\/em>, post-op, the miniaturized \u00adscientists exit the body, and through scientific endeavour, grow back to their \u00adnormal size. The goal of Pretendahar<\/em> is to grow out of the hangar\u2019s body, the \u00adsoldiers growing in confidence, experience and knowledge that will enable them to endure without the support system of surveillance and the safety of the simulated environment. Once blooded in Pretendahar<\/em>, the soldier is presumed to shed the nervous skin developed in the \u00adexpectation of \u00adtraversing future hostile urban environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scientific and distilled nature of Never Lopez\u2019s clinical \u00adphotographs exposes the environment at rest, absent of a resolution of bodies and thus deprived of its dynamism. This system without a body implicates the \u00adart-making process within Never Lopez\u2019s \u00adphotographs. Pretendahar \u00ad<\/em>supplies us with documents that look strikingly like \u00adcontemporary \u00adinstallation art, representing a chilling vision of military \u00adculture \u00adimitating art. Given that Israeli Defence Forces \u201cthink tanks\u201d \u00adcurrently utilize the same theorists (Debord, Virilio, and Deleuze and Guattari) as do many contemporary artists, an anxiety surrounding \u00adsocio-political location has developed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As cultural producers and commentators, we should feel anxious as Never Lopez draws the larger picture of military training into his lens and onto his iris, and then enlarges and re-exposes it for the viewer to \u00adwitness. These photographs document the ushering in of a new era of uncertainty. As strategies of cultural production become employed as martial tactics, they force us to contemplate our own personal rules of engagement \u00adwithin the everyday of a nervous culture\u2014a social network whose \u00adtraditionally cultured defence systems of philosophy are in the process of being \u00adco-opted and re-territorialized by the military-industrial-culture complex.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_AC03_Hennlich_Bolduc_UN-office-scaled.jpg\")
Market #2<\/em>, from the series Pretendahar<\/em>, 2007.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNervous Architecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/65_AC03_Hennlich_Bolduc_-scaled.jpg\")
Pretendahar<\/em>, 2007.
Photo: courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNervous Body<\/h2>\n\n\n\n