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.’
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