Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008

Insulation is the silent twin of "mediation".
It is the wrapper of refusal that surrounds and protects an act of transmission, of exchange, or of transport. It is then a systemic, "objective" part of the ways in which we distribute ideas, information, and materials.

When visible, insulation provides an image in outline, of the symbolic order: shapes that tell the story of distribution, mark the boundaries of commodities, their flows, and provide a surface for continuous conflict... a Wall across which to imagine and produce an outside, and an interior. But then, do not these very materials also produce the shelters, camouflages, isolations, prophylactics, inductions and touch-me-nots that mark the conceptual limits of an era of advancing "networks" ?
Could there be a political possibility here, a line of defence?

Lenin once made a proposal to melt down enough church bells to provide the copper conductors necessary to wire yet un-electrified Soviet villages. In a contemporary response, we should be melting down and reusing things with quite the opposite properties, offering a different articulation of what is urgent, and a different order of sacrifice.

DICTIONARY OF WAR / dictionaryofwar.org
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