ABSTRACT
Introduction A screen is first and foremost a surface on which something can be projected. Simultaneously, it also protects, shields, and hides from view, and in this function it had been in use for millennia. In military usage, aviation fulfills similarly contradictory functions, visualizing the target, on the one hand, and distracting the enemy, on the other. Airplanes, which began to be used for surveillance as early as the Italo-Turkish War (1911-12), and then more frequently during WWI (Banerjee 2013: 49-52), later evolved into the principal instruments for staging screening attacks, which may include non-lethal or lethal bombardment to facilitate the movement of ground troops. Bodies of men serve as human shields for the same purpose. An uncanny convergence may be observed, moreover, between the visual functions of the screen, its instrumental linkages with aviation, and the psychological valences the term has acquired over the last century. “Screen memory,” a term coined by Sigmund Freud, found renewed resonance in the contemporary context of global warfare, with its associated condition of post-traumatic stress disorders. According to Freud, screen memory is a recollection whose actual function is to hide highly emotional material; thus the memory
offered up for analysis deliberately seeks to substitute itself for the unspeakable depths that it conceals (Freud 1996: 46). In Cathy Caruth’s formulation, screen memories constitute the predominant modality of negotiating the disjunctures among the subject, the state, and history in which veterans of late modern wars often find themselves (Caruth 1996: 28, 63).
