Conclusion: Becoming Otherwise than War

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Chapter 5: Taming the Unknown

The goal of 'futuring' is not to predict the future but improve it. We want to anticipate possible or likely future conditions so that we can prepare for them. We especially want to know about opportunities and risks that we should be ready for.
-Edward Cornish from the Proteus Mission Statement

This chapter focuses primarily on two bodies of source material. The first is the 2006 Counter-Insurgency Field Manual and the documents and transcripts surrounding its development. The Manual was developed in responses to the apparent failure of the Rumsfeld Revolution in Military Affairs to produce success in Iraq. General David Patreaus and John Nagl headed up a team of military personnel, journalists, human rights activists, academics and politicians to develop a new theory of warfare. The manual represents a victory for those like John Nagl that insisted that the U.S. armed forces had willfully ignored the lessons and failures of Vietnam. According Nagl insurgency defines modern warfare and the United State military is in no way structured to fight a war of insurgency.

The second body of source material comes from an international network of academics, security intellectuals, and military theorist named Project Proteus. The focus of the program and their sponsored publications and conferences is the integration of new scientific insights into complexity and chaos to benefit the national security of the United States.

The basic upshot of this chapter is that the Counter-insurgency manual and Project Proteus are attempts to control or dominate complexity. There is in both an attachment to transcendence or redemption. Complexity is reduced to an effect of limited knowledge rather than accepting it as a metaphysical principle of the universe. The alleatory is not actually a ‘chance’ or the entry of the new it is simply the inability to accurately quantify the terms. Even when those within Proteus seem to accept the chaos at the heart of the system being studied—the earth—it is instrumentalized as a necessary precondition for making better, more effective decisions. Risk and the possibility of eliminating risk just-in-case fills in the for the ‘incomplete’ calculation of the system. Proteus’s harnessing of complexity theory becomes a way to ensure the logic of the preemptive doctrine. Uncertainty can only be managed by determining potentiality and violently ‘erring on the side of caution.’

By way of critique I attempt in this chapter to explain why the attempt to mimic the enemy ‘swarm’ and predict the future ultimate fail. In part, I argue, this is because the insurgent approach is much closer to the war machine. The weapons used are almost purely expressive or excessive in the sense that they exist in a liminal space between strategic and tactical actions. The tactic of creating more death and disorder (normally indexed in military terms as failure) is an end in itself. The anti-colonial lesson that is apparent in the fighting stile of those in Iraq and Afghanistan is that there is power in “weakness.” While the U.S. Military can mimic network organizations it cannot give up on the chain of command, unified war aims and other control protocols that predispose it to an aboreal liability.

I also speculate that Al-Qaeda in so far as it exists is also more aborescent than insurgency and thus is more likely to engage the U.S. Military on the battlefield. Al-Qaeda is ‘tree-like’ at the level of religious ideology. Al-Qaeda like the U.S. military aspires for the state form in relationship to territory. As a result the U.S. Military and Al-Qaeda will fail to succeed at holding their respective territories because of the war machines that disrupt or re-territorialize the battlefield.


Proteus Mission Statement

Chapter 4: Between Two Surges: Security Milieus, Density, and Control

Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
-Gilles Deleuze

There is a predominant opinion in IR and security studies that networks are little more than operational means rather than an entity ontologically distinct from its components. The network simply being a seemingly less efficient or decentralized means that gains its advantage from its dispersed and redundant organization minimizing targetability and decapitation. However the humanism of this interpretation misses the productive and directive capacity of non-human and even inorganic heterogeneous unities with in the network metaphor. What is present is in fact an assemblage that is not a metaphor but an actual plurality of relays, resonances, and physical interfaces that emerge as something we can metaphorically refer to as an assemblage but which in fact is of an order of consistency unto itself. The assemblage is real.

In their study of network behavior, Galloway and Thacker persuasively make the argument that network architectures are not necessarily more democratic or less controlled than more hierarchical structures as has often been advanced by those who celebrate the supposed democracy of the Internet revolution. In fact this is what marks the transition from disciplinary institutions to societies of control. The network shifts from power or coercion to control, a multivalent, highly graduated continuum of modulation such that interventions can occur at the level of populations and the intimate processes of individuation without the humanism of disciplinary models which require a human or personal element. What Galloway and Thacker refer to as protocols can alter the arrangement and formation of bodies without any-one (in the anthropocentric sense of the term) at the wheel. In fact protocols can even emerge as control structures without having been designed or introduced. In network architectures control can emerge.

Resistance even in its most descriptive sense—the microphysics of power redoubled by the friction or refraction of that power relation by the subject on which power was directed—ceases to have much application. The mobile and elastic nature of the modulation—control protocols within a network architecture—is part of a dynamic equilibrium (a range or average of control with an acceptable and even useful margin of error) that lacks the traction to push back. It is like trying to fight underwater without a bottom to stand on.

However the prerequisite of this mobile, frictionless, protocol of control is a network architecture that accelerates and facilitates flow or movement. Whether that is the flow of desire and enjoyment, capital and bodies, or simply a deluge of information, the axiom of the control society is mobility. To put this in contrast to earlier power dispotifs using the example of controversial or disruptive knowledge, the sovereign or juridical power arrangement would be characterized by the censorship of disruptive or undesired knowledge, a disciplinary dispotif would invest in discourse the language of expertise such that alternative knowledges could be dismissed as backward or naïve, in CS systems knowledge would be replaced all together with more data than can be metabolized by whatever at a given moment is considered the public sphere. Expertise gives way to perspectival overload. Every blogger has a different tidbit of information every news show a new take on the same problem each allowing the news consumer to find the best modulation of the story to fit their specific needs whether that be reactionary, ‘radical’, concerned but complacent, or angry and needing a grounds for decisive revenge. The control society optimizes rather than either repressing (sovereign/juridical) or managing (disciplinary) bodies. The CS is a difference machine with a refrain or protocol of control.

To accomplish this task everything must be rendered surface or exterior; density does not work in a control society. Everything—much like the programming of a three-dimensional video interface—has to be coded. Every wall, doorway, affect, story, identity, street, sidewalk, sexual preference, product and place of exchange, otherwise the network cannot maintain flow instead the attempt to redirect, accelerate, modulate, movement will be confounded by cul-de-sacs, dead ends, or worse yet other control or even anti-control protocols.

Network integrity requires totality to optimize effectively. This chapter focuses on three main ‘failures’ of the contemporary urban network architecture—what I think is a central feature or terrain of the control society. First the slum or ghetto’s cluttered, unplanned, density introduces machines or protocols of anti-control that result in the reintroduction of carceral or even sovereign violence but with the twist of the new aesthetic sensibility regarding flow and the city. Second and related, the lingering persistence of racialized bodies is an obstacle to the dream of perfect optimization—interchangeable bodies and free flowing space are interrupted by raced material differences and its tendency toward spatial segregation. The resonance between the drug war and the terror war point to the fact that race is still an operator or maybe more appropriately a strange attractor in the organization and distribution of violence and surveillance unleashed on the city. Third the incompatibility of CS surveillance techniques and control protocols when the first two failures culminate in the emergence of war.

The two locations for this investigation will be the homologies of the New York “Surge” campaign after September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent “Surge” campaign in Iraq but more specifically in Sadr City. In both cases we find a miasma of the drug war, racism, urban decay, ghettoization, poverty, anti-colonial resistance, revenge, hatred, and technological arrogance colliding into one another. In both campaigns we see a desire on the part of the state to transition from traditional forms of either policing or war to a Control Society model. In the case of New York this is the globalization of its information and data collection including but not limited to the use of foreign operatives, the deployment of warfare techniques and SWAT techniques to create a spectacle of control rather than having to demonstrate actual control.

For the military the movement has also gone in both directions. Increasing the military’s capability of waging urban warfare but also creating new means of control, and ways to refine or direct force more microscopically. The human terrain projects attempts to map the affective tendencies of the population so that the ‘risk’ or ‘alleatory’ nature of urban warfare can be better managed and predicted. As well and best characterized by the new Counter-insurgency Manual, the emphasis is on development and social-actor-network theory for literally building the network architecture so that new means of control can be introduced and will not be undermined by poverty and urban density.

The point of interest is that both New York and Iraq force the state-military apparatus to confront the same three problems. First, Urban sprawl and density afflict both highly developed cities like New York and underdeveloped or in the case of Iraq and a decade of sanctions de-developed urban centers. Second, the problem of race or the problems racialized difference present for cooperation and integration are differences of degree not difference of kind when one looks at the ethnic conflict of Sunnis and Shiites or urban minority populations in the United States. Third, the overwhelming force capacity of the U.S. military and the NYPD become liabilities not assets in the urban environment or what will be discussed in this chapter as the security milieu. The term being borrowed from Canguielhm and Foucault to describe the particular alleatory properties of the urban assemblage which contain living (humans, animals, disease, plants), non-living (hunks of concrete, water, collapsed buildings) , anthropogenic built-environments (buildings, streets), and non-anthropogenic built structures (erosion or tectonic movement). All of which play an active and productive role in the constitution or texture of the milieu.

In short, the slums strike back. The control society reaches its limit. Uneven development and the problems of density and intensity make the discrimination between urban denizens and insurgents almost impossible from the contemporary logic of war fighting and policing. The excessive application of force begins to resemble Samson in the temple. The escalating fight for control or the dream of an optimized future pulls the temple down on the heads of those that desired it and tragically on everyone else.

Chapter 3: The Deteritorialization of Training: Affective Machines of War and the Biopolitical Aesthestics of Mass Slaughter

Problematic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal [I think this should be incipient] objects of little perceptions. As a result, ‘learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind.
-Gilles Deleuze

Video games and movies are pedagogical. And what they teach is more in the movement and perspective or framing of the image than in the ‘narrative’ component of the media. Our bodies change in their relationship to time, space, and the unexpected. Certainly the narrative of a film can be powerful, but often the power of the story is the result of lighting, sound, camera movement, the rational or irrational cuts that create a sense of time or even duration. It is also the case that movies and video games I will be discussing in this chapter are almost completely devoid of story and dialogue. They are though intensely affective films.

It will be the claim of this chapter that liberal discourse regarding censorship and the more general, and highly moralized, debate regarding violence in Hollywood demonstrates the failures of presupposing the enlightened self-possessed subject. Movies and video games alter our highly plastic body-brain network and thus which games and films we interface with on a daily basis alters everything from bodily movement, skill, emotional tendencies, to how we see and process the world around us. As neuroscience increasingly ventures into the virtual realm of experience what they find is that the body does not index experience on the measure of truth and fiction nearly as much as affect and intensity. Mirror neurons, the role of adrenaline in forming memories, all speak to the possibility that our most defining and intense experiences can be those that we feel in others or even those that we experience through the screen of film or television. The ever increasing intensity of gaming has even resulted in a number of murders in China demonstrating the affective intensity of war games and other interfaces of stylized killing.

The U.S. military of course knows the value of the simulated world; using video games to train soldiers as well as recruit them. Again preparation redoubles unto the terrain of prosecution. Numerically how would one compare the enlisting of children via the game “Call of Duty” or the use of children in Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance army? There is universal moral outrage concerning child soldiers but this dismisses what American Armed forces not to mention entertainment companies do to millions of children when they create games to play war, to enjoy, be rewarded for killing. The obvious retort is that no one actually dies in a video game. But from the position of a child playing or the adult that child will someday become what is the difference at the level of encouragement and paternal direction much less the cultivation of enjoyment.

Watch a clip of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare


The game designed and freely distributed and networked by the U.S. Army, called the U.S.’s Army, has more than 8 million active members and players. The game involves the highly realistic killing of Arab-like characters in an urban setting that is a kind of hybrid between Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike other multi-user-domain games you do not have to pay a monthly fee for access. However, in order to gain access to the game you agree that you results can be tracked for the purposes of recruiting. Unlike earlier versions of U.S. Army distributed games America’s Army is not simply a ‘free gift’ to encourage contact with young recruits, it is itself a diagnostic tool. Each element of the game tests ones aptitude at any number of skills from intense pressure and rapid response time in urban settings to how to disassemble and reassemble a weapon.

Watch an 'All-Star' Performance on America's Army


Now compare the layout of the video game to actual footage from 'helmet cams' from the attack on Fallujah.



Now compare that to a clip from the Discovery Channel's hit show Future Weapons. The host introduces the 'solution' to urban warfare. A fully automatic shotgun that appears to be taken directly from the video game Doom.


Unlike the Military-Entertainment-Complex described by James Der Derian, what I am trying describe does not end with the Military deploying video games as 21 century propaganda. I am trying find the particular images and arrangements of space, killing, and bodies that seems to have an even more powerful hold over the apprehension of cities and others outside the military. This problematizes the inside/outside distinction showing the transversal connections and internal resonances. While there is a difference between being enlisted or being a civilian there may not be a difference between being in training for war and playing games of war. For instance how does the most successful video game in the world right now borrow from military aesthetics of urban combat and the perspective of a ‘first-person-shooter’ for marketing success? The game in question Crysis sold a million copies in the first financial quarter and has exceed market expectation every quarter since.

The hero or point of identification in Crysis was designed after the United States Future Force Warrior 2020 program —despite having been designed by a German company—that represents for the U.S. Military an attempt to integrate the physiology of the soldier’s body with the U.S. global information and weapons network. Future versions of the integrated suit include artificial sensory technology directly fed into the body’s neural network as well as a real time reactive exoskeltons that responds to the bodies muscle impulses rather than the bodies slower movements (the effects of those impulses).

Heralded as "Best Crysis Game Ever"


This suit was not created ex nihlio it also feeds back into the world of gaming and science fiction. A U.S. ranger developed the idea for the suit after reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The U.S. ranger was recovering from a broken back caused by a parachute accident and has sense spawned several exoskelton projects. Each iteration pushing further from the exo to the interior of the soldiers body.

There is thus a feedback loop between popular film, gaming, and military gaming. Something draws these various media together. In addition to war games the chapter wil investigate the rise of zombie films that both borrow and contribute to a sense of claustrophobic space and hordes or unstoppable numbers as problems for killing and control. The aesthetics of mele and the suppression or destruction of that mele play a role in the imagination and organizing of contemporary urban warfare.

The film 28 Weeks Later is a case in point. The film starts with the military reclaiming London after a debilitating outbreak of zombies and then follows the military and medico-bureaucratic discussions regarding population control that are in some sense the extreme case of the physiocrat dilemma ; how do you maintain order when the unexpected exceeds the mechanisms of social control? The model of social control is in this case organized around the norm rather than the crisis and the consequence of failure is global extincion. The answer to this problem in 28 Weeks Later is to eliminate the population. The military ultimately fails to contain the spread of zombies thus resulting in the end of the world. This is a common theme in zombie films, what makes this film interesting is that it was the freedom given to the population and the mercy shown to those who broke the rules that results in extinction.



Those who think this is beyond the current moral sensibility should consider the video game that was created with the movie as well as many other first person shooters, success or wining is always extinction of the other. It is also the case that the stakes of the current war on terrorism oscillates wildly from the existence of Western Democratic Civilization to survival of the human race in the case of public scenario planning for nuclear, biological, and checmical attack.

I am not claiming there is a simple causal relation between violence and games but there is a complicated but powerful resonance. To provide some insight into some of the ways games and films may organize the body as well as how the films and games frame the subject/viewer this chapter will look at the ‘priming’ and ‘framing’ techniques that produce particular kinds of affect. The central argument is that the affect generated by the complex of new media form part of a highly destructive resonance machine that builds connections between fear, hate, enjoyment, killing, and control. The result is an emerging biopolitical aesthetic of violence that can both manage the population—the global—while telescoping in on the body—the local, all within a particular milieu of the city and the newly emerging battlefields.

In all of the movies and games discussed there is a signature sequence I call the biopolitical shot in which a Point-of -View camera angle (or the digital camera effect in the case of video games where a POV shot is created by the movement of the game not an actual camera) zooms out from a single entry wound or bullet impact in a body until the entire population or in the case of the film Resident Evil: Apocalypse the entire earth can be seen. The bodily and the global are interconnected coordinates in one truly universal or total system under the purview control or potential control.

Biopolitical POV Shot


The last section of this chapter emphasizes that the images of totality and interchangability (every person a possible kill shot or target) is not however egalitarian. The resonance machine built from the new media, the military, and gamers share archetypes of racialized bodies whether it be the overt Arab stereotypes or the zombie body that codes abnormality with threat and abjection resulting in what I will call a racial affect even if not a racial image. The body, the city, and the affect are not neutral or ahistorical configurations. They are not generic categories. Each finds its ‘local’ expression in the racially marked bodies that organize other forms of violence.

Chapter 2: Life During War Time: The Phenomenology of the Enemy and Biopolitical Aesthetics

Here too, how could the concept of error account for this unity of stupidity and cruelty, of the grotesque and the terrifying, which doubles the way of the world? Cowardice, cruelty, baseness and stupidity are not corporeal capacities or traits of character or society; they are structures of thought as such.
-Gilles Deleuze

What would it mean to say that the current war in Iraq is a careless war? Certainly the overwhelming discourse surrounding the war has been the language of incompetence. In part, I think, because accusing the Bush administration of ‘bungling’ the war’s prosecution cunningly sidesteps the question of having gone to war. It is in fact the one thing that both Democrats and Republicans agree upon. Whenever the discussion veers off course and hard questions get asked about why one supported the invasion, or why one voted for continued funding, or why one thinks we have failed to succeeded in Iraq the question is always redirected to the issue of competence. It is the way that Republicans, in particular but not exclusively, depoliticize discussion of Iraq.

The emphasis of both parties and many military analysts in the popular media highlight the lack of an exit strategy, the failure to deploy enough ground troops, the decision to dismantle the Revolutionary Guard, some even lament the failure to use sufficient force to pacify and coerce the civilian population. To any critical eye or even part-time cynic these questions fail entirely to challenge the U.S. occupation and continued presence in Iraq. In fact the latent assumption of all of these criticisms is that there is a right way to prosecute the Iraq war.

All of the candidates who won delegates in the 2008 U.S. Presidential primary when asked do you think the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein responded yes. Even the most adamantly anti-war candidate Barack Obama agrees to the basic proposition that pursuing the removal of Saddam Hussein was desirable. In his case he merely preferred sanctions and containment as the primary means of prosecuting the war.

So how bad can a war really be if there is unanimous bi-partisan support for its goal—the removal of a brutal dictator? And more to the point how could such a seemingly indisputable goal be so hard to achieve. Why weren’t U.S. troops greeted in the streets of Baghdad as liberators?

There is the Anti-Colonial response of Arundhati Roy and others that the United States was perceived as a racist empire trampling on the nation of Iraq to serve its craven oil interests. There is the Conservative critique of those such as John Mearsheimer who see the war as a closeted and outdated liberalism in the hearts of Neo-Conservatives who still believe in democracy promotion and national building. In both cases there is an attempt to circumscribe the cause and failure of the war amongst a few idealogues that came to power with George W. Bush.

There is of course an element of truth in both positions. Certainly the United States secured the oil infrastructure of the country before addressing basic necessities such as human security and clean water. It is also true that, in so far as there was a plan, the Administration planned to create a stable regime in a region where it was quickly running out of friends and places to set up camp for U.S. forward deployed forces.

But the failure of these theories seems at the heart of the initial statement “the Iraq war is a careless war”; the majority of people at home in the United States, in the administration and in the U.S. government more broadly are more or less indifferent to the consequences of either success or failure for those that will bear the burden of either success or failure. The U.S. soldiers, the civilians of Iraq, the insurgents, and everyone in between from contractors to those Iraqis who fight simply because they are tired of dying are of little to no significance to the institutions of the United States whether that be the executive or the public. In this regard and in relation to those who pay the price of the war in terms not of money or lost political capital or declining consumer confidence or U.S. credibility, but in blood; We do not care about these people.

How can I make such a broad sweeping claim? Isn’t this just the worst kind of polemics barely masquerading as political theory? Maybe. However there is an argument too. The proposition: The institutions of the United States do not care about the war in Iraq, relies on the simple observation that there has been no impeachment, no uprising, minimal protest, and only enough discontent to produce, in the best-case scenario, a 7 percent victory against a candidate “prepared to be in Iraq for a hundred years.” In deed, yet again, this election will likely be about “the economy stupid.”

I also have in mind a very specific and somewhat idiosyncratic concept of care and therefore careless-ness. Because while it is certainly true, as many on the left in the United States have made quite clear, that beginning with Shock and Awe and culminating in the massacre of Fallujah, the United States has been both cavalier and cruel with the lives of Iraqis what is only now becoming apparent is the degree to which it has the same disregard for U.S. troops. It is not the position of this chapter, quite to the contrary, to say that American lives matter more than those of Iraqis or to equivacate about the relative numbers of Americans lost versus the loss of Iraqis. Certainly and without a doubt more Iraqi lives have been lost, and for me they are all lives. Instead the point is to note something that ought to seem quite strange. Despite the near normative reign of terror that insists that everyone must “support our troops” we don’t.

It is hard to feign surprise when the world’s largest and most powerful army speaks easily of collateral damage. What is surprising is the seeming disregard for all the lives involved even those expected to most symbolize the possibility of national heroism and honor. A quadrupling in the number of troop suicides, refusal to provide support for those injured by the war physically and emotionally, the lack of political will to provide protection against IEDs or body armor for combat troops in harrowing urban quarters all represent a strange dissonance with the prevailing tenor regarding “the proud men and women of our armed forces”. A phrase so frequently invoked by leaders across the political board.

The Iraq war is a careless war in so far as the U.S. troops, the insurgents, Al-Queda, the Kurds, Iraqi civilians, all have been rendered standing reserve. In that they have been deprived of their dignity as objects. They exist in a system of variable exchange determined only in external and relational terms. And more importantly they exist in the same system. The ontological claim made in this chapter is that a particular way of apprehending the world, revealing the world, in terms of standing reserve applies to both friend and enemy. While there maybe political differences regarding the war—whether to keep fighting or not, whether to return to sanction etc.—there is no ontological difference in this dispute. The focus on the economic casualties of the war (consumer confidence and the value of the dollar) and the alternative proposal of sanction by many who opposed the war represent a fundamental agreement about the value of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. Which is to say they agree that the value of their lives are relative to the gains accrued or lost in fighting the war. Both Iraqis and Americans are at best placeholders, markers, in an exchange economy.

I argue in this chapter that the treatment of those involved in the Iraqi conflict and contemporary warfare more generally as standing reserve results from a lack of care at the most basic level of human being and a lack of care in a very specific way. I don’t want to argue that people do not regret the loss of life that results from the conflict in Iraq or that the institutions of the United States take pleasure or are even indifferent to the murdering Iraqis. The concept of care I wish to develop helps explain how it is that people who seem to believe in a ‘culture of life’ can both obliterate a people and give them charity; praise the heroism of its soldiers and disregard the skyrocketing rates of troop suicide or veteran homelessness.

This is because care is not about being kind or being benevolent. Care in the Heideggarian sense I am trying to invoke is the ontological structure at the root of apprehending or making sense of objects in the world. When people only approach the world in terms of its use or capacity as a resource, as Heidegger says, they get ahead of themselves. They miss what occurred to make the thing being evaluated as a resource a ‘thing’ in the first place, they gave in to ‘predilection’ or a common sense that they understood their relationship to things. They miss that they first had to be concerned with the world, care for the world. Not in a normative sense i.e. the thing cared for is good or bad, but care in that they had to apprehend that it was some-thing. I think that this opens an ethical dimension to the ontological structure of perception and interaction and that it helps explain a transition from a disciplinary politics of war where institutions are intimately invested in each soldier and each enemy to what Deleuze calls a Society of Control in which the meaning of particular bodies is constantly fluctuating resulting in a system where singularity melts into violent but highly rapid and efficient exchangeability and thus expendability of life.

According to Heidegger, “care is ontologically prior” to the event of a phenomenon in that one must apprehend something before it can be a phenomena. In this way apprehension proceeds the taking place of a particular bringing forth of a phenomena. That is not to say that that which constitutes the phenomenon is not ‘present’ until the ‘idea’ of the thing that is present is apprehended. Instead the materiality of the thing does not ‘make-sense’ to the being apprehending until there has been concern; care or apprehension. This need not be reduced to the visualization or even conscious apprehension of an object; it is merely to say that the way in which an object is revealed can be altered by the ontologically prior characteristics of care.

In Deleuze’s account of the thought/object relation, “something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon.” (Deleuze, D and R, 139). It is the position of this chapter that this should not be read as a simple inversion of Heidegger’s argument instead it points to something between the object of encounter and the object of recognition which I am calling care. I will suggest later that this between is a temporal ‘between’ that I think is roughly ½ a second long.

The reason to hold on to this between is that while the object has a certain agency that far exceeds either the idealist or even Husserlian account of the phenomena ; the object cannot only provoke a subject. The moment of encounter is a co-emergent phenomena, an encounter between two objects each with its own material composition and organization.

In the case of the neural-perceptive network of the human there are a multitude of incipient actions all with a history and structure that are while not law governed at least organized by the habits and affective fields of the subject. The subject’s attunement or disposition in regards to its particular structure of care alters the revealing of the object. In turn the structure of care may alter as a result of what is revealed but it can also in some sense be confirmed or alter the perception of the object and on and on.

So there is a feedback between the subject’s particular structure of care and what is revealed; the revealing being the emergent properties of the object in its encounter with the subjects particular structure of care. I think although Deleuze says “there is only involuntary thought” this is more of a dramatization and should not be read as being wholly opposed with this liminal category of apprehension I am trying to develop. After all just after this dramatic declaration Deleuze writes “It [the object] may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this way it is opposed to recognition.”

In this reading, Heidegger’s concept of revealing or apprehending is not a problem of representation—the thing in itself obscured by the gap between the idea of the thing and its thingness—it is an encounter between the subject (a particular, situated, and historic structure of a subject designated as care) and the thingness of the object. In Heidegger’s example from The Question Concerning Technology (TQCT) the matter or properties of silver are co-responsible with the silversmith for the chaliceness of the chalice; “the silversmith is not a causa efficiens.” (QT, 8)

However not all structures of revealing are equal. The reason for moderating Deleuze’s emphasis on the object as the cause or provocateur of the encounter is to make possible the comparison between kinds or different structures of care/concern. In TQCT Heidegger distinguishes between the poesis or the ‘unfolding’ he associates with the poetic or early Greek encounter with truth as alethia, and the more restrictive and even violent tendencies of technological thinking which demands or challenges the object to extract that which the subject has determined to be valuable and nothing else; what Heidegger calls standing-reserve. Everything apprehended must be ‘immediately at hand’ in Heidegger’s words “even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.” (QT, 19) This explanation demonstrates a difference in the two modes of revealing but it does not establish the initial assertion of an inequality between modes of revealing. What accomplishes this task is the peculiar characteristic of technological thinking, as a mode of revealing, as a structure of apprehension, to denigrate and even obscure other modes of revealing. In its metaphysical commitment to lay things bare, to enframe—meaning to order in such way as to be predictable and therefore knowable—the possibility of other behaviors or tendencies are banished as myth or falsity.

The ‘essence’ of technological thinking is the attempt to banish or manage the alleatory. Unlike the poetic that waits or dwells without expectation giving over to the object the mode of revealing, the technological is like a small child who cannot wait for a flower to bloom and so cuts upon the bud in hopes of revealing what is inside. The technological represents a kind of will to vivesect or a will to know as such, not a will to know an aspect or tendency. In the claim to know as such, at its most fundamental level (think early Newtonian physics that thought it had discovered the laws of the universe) all other forms of knowledge or revealing, other structures of care, are marginalized as unsophisticated or wrong.

One need only compare the eviscerated pieces of a once closed flower to the beauty of a bloom to see what is lost in technological thinking. Even the proper dissection, identification, and cataloguing of the flowers parts will tell you nothing of the majesty of a blooming rose; how each petal will unfurl or tip ever so slightly more towards the light. The presupposition of my example is that no amount of knowledge or expertise could teach you to manually open the flower in the way that it would bloom of its own accord. The chance or mystery of its opening is not the result of a lack of knowledge; the aleatory is built in to the universe itself; it is a metaphysical property not an epistemological deficiency.

This is all a long way of saying that care, while a fundamental or ontological structure, is not undifferentiated. Different structures of care or concern apprehend or reveal the world differently and not relativistically so. Some structures of apprehension preclude or marginalize others—as in the case of technological thinking. If this seems all to abstract from the practices of war then consider torture as a technological mode of revealing. The practice of torture is a kind of vivisection. It is an attempt to master the application of pain to extract truth from a body and to accomplish it faster and more efficiently in order to acquire the truth in time to stop the proverbial ticking bomb. What is finally uttered from a tormented and manipulated body bears as little resemblance to truth as the dissected petals and stamen of a flower to the bloom. What torture lays bare is not something deep inside the body it tortures it is a production or performance of torture.

Technological Revealing’s First Cousin The Biopolitical Mode of Revealing

While sharing many of the properties of the technological structure of care, I do not want to argue that the biopolitical and the technological are synonymous. I depart in many ways from the Heideggarian account of technological revealing. Foremost there is in Heidegger too much control attributed to humans. There is a sense in The Question Concerning Technology that something can be rendered fully standing reserve. This is just not the case. In this way Deleuze provides a kind of corrective. The object whether, resource, man, beast, or machine, can never become truly objectless as Heidegger says it does as standing-reserve. Foucault’s dictum “where there is power there is resistance” should be universalized beyond the circumscribed boundaries of man. All things resist. The properties of silver used to make the chalice cannot be repressed anymore by the ‘craftsman’ than by the technocrat. Neither can either turn silver into gold. One need only pause to see the catastrophic ‘eccentricities’ of production (the control and manipulation of resources thought to be standing-reserve) whether they be global warming or the pesky persistence of nuclear waste and fall out, to understand that man has no true dominion over the earth. Objects can still be manipulated though. There is a difference between composting and landfill. But it is a difference of an encounter or interface between the properties of organic material (the rate of decay relative to the presence of heat and oxygen) and the structure of the subjects that encounter the ‘garbage.’ Do the subjects bury it so that it can be repressed and forgotten in airtight landfills where decay will take centuries or do the subjects live with their garbage so that micro-organisms and oxygen can recycle and modulate the garbage into more useful raw materials. So when I argue that a particular structure of care is more violent or destructive I am not arguing that this is necessarily the case but that it is the tendency of how, as a structure of care, it will influence the objects encounter with the subject.

What I am calling a biopolitical mode of revealing is similar in this regard. It is not all-powerful but like technological thinking it has a tendency (a weak essence) to marginalize or even extinguish other modes of revealing that threaten its axioms of control and extraction.

What is biopolitical about it rather than technological? It is a structure of apprehending life. It might be said that it is a subset of technological thinking or a more specific form. For the purposes of this chapter the focus is on the human aspects of technological thinking about humans. In part to explain how biopower’s commitment to sustain life can give way to an indifference to particular lives and a transition to control society. How biopower becomes careless. Biopolitical revealing bears a striking and I think helpful resemblance to Jacques Ranciere’s notion of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible. Biopolitical revealing as opposed to biopolitics focuses on the practices that distribute or code bodies in particular ways so that they become exchangeable rather than singular. Deleuze says that in a Socitety of Control “Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or"banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.” As a structure of apprehension Biopolitical revealing is an attempt to describe the careless use of bodies both American and Iraqi in the ‘floating rate of exchange’ that Deleuze describes.

The purpose of this chapter is also to detail this process to provide the necessary background to analyze the videogames and films in the next chapter that I argue disseminate or train us to embody i.e. develop these structures of apprehending bodies as interchangeable rather than singular. It will also introduce how the biopolitical mode of revealing deals with space in particular urban spaces with relationship to the body. The question is how a biopolitical mode of revealing becomes a habit rather than asserting it as a ‘spontaneous accord of the faculties.’

Chapter 1: A Schmittian Century?: From Nuclear Leviathan to Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage

Atomic doom is not a necessary process that comes over us and has to be accepted. Every step depends on men who take it on the road to disaster; the discovery of natural phenomena as well as their translation into technology, the order to make the bombs as well as the order to drop them and its execution. We must recognize the difference between Man’s work, which is up to us, and the work of nature, which we can master only to a degree.
-Karl Jaspers

If in ancient warfare we could talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a “field.” The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier.
-Paul Virilio

The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is, to a set of relations among States.
-Deleuze and Guattari

The going under of the nuclear sovereign and in some ways the sovereign more generally confronts two different images of sovereignty. The first image is anthropocentric, or the Schmittian Ideal of one Man in charge. The second image is the anthropomorphic sovereign where the fiction of the state is maintained by the constitutive and performative utterances of a sovereign to cover over the lie of the state. Neither is sufficient. The first misses the point entirely, i.e. by what means can there be a fulcrum within a political order called the sovereign. The second focuses too entirely on the lie or ‘social construction’ of the state—the discursive arrangement that produces an image of unification—thus missing the actual material arrangements of power that make it possible, seemingly, for one individual to end the world with 6000 nuclear weapons or to order the death of a single person.

Initially nuclear weapons seemed to solidify even complete the decisionistic model of sovereignty once and for all. In Virilio’s reading of Schmitt’s the state of emergency became permanent and democracy ended once it became possible for a single individual to decide to got to war and to finish that war in 30 minutes. At first glance Virilio’s apocalyptic diagnosis seems accurate. Nuclear weapons at their current numbers could destroy the entire planet and given the structure of the United States nuclear command any Congressional or popular attempt to stop the war would be in vain. This is the backbone of Virilio’s argument. Politics and a democratic balance of power require time. Time to react, time to respond, time to debate, time to strategize, time to implement and ICBMS nullify time.

But Virilio is wrong. The threat of the extreme case has obscured the actual or present case that presents new opportunities for intervention. Politics, whether micro or macro, does not begin and end with the sovereign decision; the sovereign decision (both expressively and in its enactment) emerges from a relay of forces, connections, and other previous decisions, resonances, forces, and actants that are presupposed in each subsequent iteration of the sovereign decision, and layered in multiple streams of time. Even an increasingly automated nuclear arsenal requires the participation of literally millions of people and countless networks, objects, tectonic stability, stable solar flare activity and on and on. The decision only appears singular when Virilio truncates time to the moment the president ‘pushes the button.’ We are not as of yet in that moment so other temporal rhythms abound and each part of the nuclear assemblage follows a different temporal course.

The physical infrastructure of the nuclear arsenal for instance decays at every level. Even steel and concrete are not permanent and must be repaired and replaced. However the Department of Defense does not in fact have an industrial capacity of its own nor has it successfully deployed robots to run the nuclear silos or mined enough uranium or manufactured enough tritium to maintain the weapons we currently have. The liability of a neo-liberal system of procurement and production (including its all volunteer army) is that seemingly top secret and sequestered sites of nuclear stewardship bleed into the everyday economy of Americans citizen and the broader ecology of the planet.

Certainly the sovereign decision is a powerful, expressive, performative act of individuation for the sovereign and highly affective in mobilizing populations, but it is not self-constituted or self-causal. The process of individuation and mobilization necessitates a field of relations and resonances from which the sovereign decision emerges. The decision is also not decisive. Instead it territorializes the relations from which it emerges through its resonant modulation. The enunciation of a sovereign decision (a distinct inquiry from the ‘making of a decision. Certainly no less emeshed but nonetheless ought to remain analytically different) is something like a refrain, the sovereign—in so far as it is constituted by the enunciation of decisions—is a condensation point for national ethos, affect, and institutional identity making. Each decision is constitutive not of the ‘sovereign’ as is the case in Schmitt’s analysis but of a sovereign point of identification or reified, dogmatic consistency which can be recognized but need not remain static or immobile.

Again however such a node is only possible because of its attachments whether physical or resonant (both material) to the complex system of tradition, culture, wires, telephones, satellites, nuclear silos, television cameras, previous sovereign decisions, personal affective characteristics, character, etc. This list is not exhaustive by any measure however it gestures in the direction of what I am trying to get at. The sovereign is not an individual, at best it is an iterative series of moments of performative or expressive individuation resulting from a complex interface with machines, networks, affective fields. The assemblage has a life of its own that cannot and should not be reduced to a single point simply because that is most consistent with our common sensibilities.

In some sense the sovereign is a prosthesis or interface to be worn by whoever is elected to office. (President as first-person-shooter?) This does in part explain why there is so little transition time between each sovereign and so little variation in war powers. It is reference point or index for a history of actions and events made more complex by the function it is meant or believed to serve. It is the titular focal point of an assemblage that if recognized as such would undermine its own function. An assemblage that function because it can inspire belief in it is unity not its dispersed and multivalent organization.

The irony is that the development of miles of fiberoptic networks, new technological interfaces and mobility was supposed to save the centralized and hierarchical sovereign form from its obvious strategic liability—that of being an easy target. However in increasing its ‘survivability’ it has also opened innumerable points of access to the supposed center. Each access point whether it be technological, affective, or economic that can recenter, or reterritorialize the sovereign assemblage. I do not want to make this sound ‘easy’ or ‘painless’ however as this ‘dispersed’ or redundant network system has become ‘everyday’ increasingly the President has been unaware of exactly who is in control or even at how many levels the Nuclear-sovereign-assemblage can be engaged or reterritorialized.

The former Soviet Union has faced the dark side of this arrangement in the phenomena of ‘loose nukes’. In general the loss of sovereign control is seen as a ‘tragedy’, a prelude to destruction. As a result, the positive sites of intervention are less frequently recognized. However even the ‘dark side’ of losing control has a silver lining. North Korea has not been invaded and is now receiving significant food aid to relieve an ongoing famine in part because of it furtive nuclear development no doubt aided by the ‘loose nuke’ phenomena even if only the phenomena of ‘loose lips’ in the transfer of information.

It is also the case that the nuclear-sovereign-assemblage requires a massive industrial capacity to continue its day-to-day operations not to mention the difficulty of disposing of the waste made in its production. At both ends of the nuclear fuel cycle—mining and disposal—the Department of Defense lacks the industrial and waste management capacity to sustain either effort. Once private businesses, public and private land, and public finance become involved so to new population gain access to the assemblage and indeed become part of the assemblage. Effective divestment of South Africa and blood diamond producing countries demonstrate that the neo-liberal state apparatus cannot survive in isolation. The protest of many Indian nations from the Western Shashone in Nevada, the Navajo in New Mexico, to the Lakota Sioux, to allow new uranium mining and waste disposal on their land has politicized what was thought to be unpoliticizable. In each protest or hearing before the court the nuclear fuel cycle and its connection to a history of genocide and subsequent irradiation of the Indian survivors must be confronted. The Lakota Sioux—who have fought the expansion of Uranium mining and milling in the Dakotas—have as of December 20th, 2008 successfully succeeded from the United States and declared themselves a newly independent nation.

I will refer to this phenomenon as the neo-liberal liability a liability that is created from the economic and material assemblage required to support the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to oppose capitalism because of its dispersed and differentiated machinic capabilities however the logic of capitalism—flow—is at odds with the necessities of the Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage—secrecy and carceral terroritoriality, the restriction or repression of flow. New lines of flight are created by the attempt to enhance the survivability of the sovereign. As the assemblage becomes more distributed and more complex a new fragility emerges. The assemblage is not fragile, the redundant network system enhances its ability to ‘survive’. However it undermines its ability to remain aborescent to sustain the identity necessary for centrality and hierarchy.

As will be discussed later in the dissertation networks can lead to new forms of control, even strengthen the ability to regulate or manage populations however the networked model in so far as it achieves its goal of decentering and detargeting can only direct or re-direct flow it cannot effectively damn it up.

By way of a crude time line one could say that sovereignty in the United States can be characterized by three periods. 1. The Republican model where by the inherent advantage or tendency towards centralization through war plays out as a juridical struggle between the three branches of government (pre-media the role of the American public is limited but not non-existent). 2. The Imperial model where by the development of nuclear weapons enables the president to ignore the other two branches because war can begin and end without a single soldier putting their boots on. 3. The empire model where by the means of war becomes dispersed such that the sovereign’s function is more like a refrain to give consistency to a dispersed network pluripotential networks each on the cusp of escaping the state/military apparatus and becoming highly destructive war machines.

The transition from each stage roughly is cybernetic in so far as they are periodized by the evolution of ‘codes’. In the first model a code of conduct or an expectation of behavior, the gentleman sovereign. Second the monopoly of force the attempt to centralize the C3I of nuclear war through a centralization of codes vested in the president. Lastly the dispersal of codes such that the system can maximize survivability but can no longer maintain hierarchy or sovereignty in relation to war. Instead the sovereign survives as an expressive point of identification not as the causal entity of war. War then becomes more obviously emergent. Resonances and relations throughout the Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage exist in a continuum between non-war and war depending on the necessity for testing, alert, or accidental machinic statements such as weather balloons, reactor meltdowns, or acute paranoia.

The point is that the war/non-war distinction is not determined by an efficient causal chain—as in banal readings of Schmitt—where the Sovereign decides and presto-chango we are now in a state of war. The emergences of war follows a non-linear, multi-nodal, and thus often unpredictable temporal progression with many stages in between a state of war and a state of peace, although I don’t want to deny these shifts can take place rapidly. What the subsequent chapters will make apparent is that this refusal of the two images of sovereignty one anthropocentric, the other anthropomorphic will be necessary in other kinds of war and are not merely the product of automation and technology. The technology of ‘humans’ is no more predictable or linear once the field of affect, and non-human actants are introduced into the micro-geography of warfare. Nuclear weapons may have provoked the rethinking of the terrain of war’s emergence—as objects often do—but it is not its cause or inventor.