Soft Imperial Eyes
2017-2019
Video work installation
Trondheim kunstmuseum.
Cultural educational materials equip soldiers with speech that commands, warns and instructs: helpful words, phrases and questions to negotiate interactions, or interrogations, seek locations or conduct mine warfare. These phrases are what Martin Joos calls `formal and frozen registers` (1948) and observed by Theodor Adorno (1981) as those verbal expressions that are pre-filtered, mediated by consciousness, by wider social structures and by language itself.
The special formal and frozen registers of the linguistic handbooks stand-in for the military body revealling a way of seeing, and using cultural understanding of the other to control - through violence.
The special formal and frozen registers of the linguistic handbooks stand-in for the military body revealling a way of seeing, and using cultural understanding of the other to control - through violence.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfe01d86e784d327e02670327b6dcf028752af5835fe9e920fc1fb8869b0fbfa/KateButcher.SoftImperialEyes.The8StrandsofAfghanistan.jpg)
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