“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Star?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.
I believe that, too. And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
-Billy Pilgrim
The hope of this dissertation is to identify operators or machines in the emergence of war that confound the tried and true questions of sovereignty, security dilemmas, and the now apparent absurdity of circumscribing global political change to the behavior of ‘Great Powers.’ The commitment to a world run by the causal agents of states, regimes and norms (whether thick or thin) appears to me like the velveteen rabbit: toys whose straw stuffing is beginning to poke through worn skin and whose button eyes have been long since lost. And unlike the mythic rabbit, there is nothing real for these fetishes to become.
However what I have in mind is not the new realism or instrumental empiricism of Latour, DeLanda, and others who seek to ‘un-black box’ phenomena by simply adding actants or more complex mechanisms to the list of empirical tools. This is not, in my estimation, possible for war. There are many more black boxes to identify before we can even know what sites we should begin to investigate. The problem with the desire to explain or un-black box phenomena is that it produces a tendency to focus on those phenomena we think we have the best chance of explaining. Those more subtle connections or resonance whose effects are felt but not yet explained are overshadowed by those relationships we can chart and measure. This limits or circumscribes our thought rather than remaining open to the emergence of thought as provoked by objects. From this view the universe is still mechanistic and predictable just not to humans, yet. I think this diminishes the creative and chaotic elements of becoming and reinvest the desire for order and control with a false and dangerous hope. The alleatory or more generally chance is reduced to a question of epistemology rather than being seen as a the generative principle of the cosmos.
While this dissertation will rely heavily on new scientific research the examples from neuroscience, physics, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence and experimental psychiatry will not be used to build some new more stable method of inquiry but will be allowed to provoke or trouble the image of the world as law governed.
I admit it is tempting when new scientific discoveries verify our own theoretical beliefs to think that somehow science has finally gotten it right. However, one need only look at what happens when the image of thought founded on this new empiricism combines with the shabby categories of International Relations to see how quickly scientific facts about complexity and chaos can be put to use for preventive war and social control. Even insights about uncertainty can become a predictive social scientific method. The postcolonies find that the ‘study of their culture’ once again serves the interests of those that would obliterated difference rather than those who would insist upon a new pluralism. Anthropologists, Sociologists, and Economists all armed with the latest in social-actor-network theory, complexity equations, and advanced alogrithms are being deployed as part of the Human Terrain Project in Iraqi.
So when discussing method I draw on political theory, scientific inquiry, complexity theory, A.I. modeling of swarm and network behavior, affect theory, and sometimes plain old reason. Each because of the degree to which they complicate the predictive and explanatory approaches that fail and in the case of preemptive threat identification work all too well. All in hopes of eschewing the vivisection of social science for a sense of the real that can be created by a more impressionistic approach. American landscape painters like Andrew Wyeth produced their real effects through varying degrees of intensity rather than detail or anatomical knowledge. The appearance of grass from miles away or the temperature of a day captured in paint, the reflection of light. They are not illusions, they are instead effects without sufficiently identifiable cause. The effect becomes not less but more apparent in such a context.
Search too long or look to hard at any isolated or specific point in the painting and you will lose the image all together. The point is not to marginalize or forget the more detailed or anatomically correct modes of analysis. After all such a landscape approach will rarely predict the outcome of a single election (of which the importance should not be forgotten) but neither can it tell you which leader or individual must be detained or liquidated. What is gained is insight into emerging phenomena that are produced by relations we are not capable of describing much less catching red handed so that they can be detailed. Theory of this variety is useful in that it is attempting to describe and think what cannot yet be measured.
Those who cling to predictability and measurement are unsettled by thought orient around the assemblage, resonances, the milieu, or the species because it means letting go, at least for a moment, of the desire to ascribe blame or culpability—from my perspective consonant with causality—to particular individuals in time and space. This is a deficit, but it comes with the benefit of illucidating even if only vaguely the operators in the generation of affect and weak or novel connections that often determine or at least circumscribe the incipient possibilities of action by the individuals we so desperately want to hold accountable for their failures or vices. The question in the context of this research is why there is so consistently an arrangement of power and violence to prosecute or distribute war not why once such an institution or assemblage is in place the titular head succeeds in making actual the already present (virtual) tendencies of war.
It is not surprising to me that sovereigns make war or that they take advantage of democratic paradoxes to do so. The problematic that drives this project is how such a complex, mobile, and global assemblage so closely aligns and adheres with such a local decision. In order to amplify or magnify a sound and preserve the fidelity of the particular harmonic arrangement one cannot simply ‘turn up’ the volume. It requires a certain interface between the means of amplification, the ambient qualities of the room, the number of people present, the resonant capabilities of those people, furniture, walls, floor, and ceiling. Similarly political decrees or decisions to produce effects must reverberate and interface with complex assemblages of institutions, economies, and other machinic operators. From this perspective sovereign ‘decisions’ whether by Presidents or suicide bombers appear to be on both sides of the razor edge between cause and effect. Such an approach requires as Deleuze writes “not so much…convincing, as being open about things. Being open is setting out the “facts” not only of a situation, but of a problem. Making visible things that would otherwise remain hidden.”
The five chapters that follow look for ‘loose association’ or different assemblage that may not yet have converged or connected but have tendencies and internal resonances that I think organize war’s various becomings. The chapters do not follow one from the other. They are disjointed in their locations and themes. The hope is that the consistency that does connect them be one of possibility not that each will inevitably be captured or territorialized as war. Some will appear more inevitable than others.
Chapter one follows the waxing and waning of the American nuclear sovereign as a result of the materiality and actancy of the technological assemblage of the nuclear arsenal. In part I begin here because it is territory more familiar to security studies. The second chapter attempts to think about the ontological structure or aesthetics that organize and distribute the apprehension of bodies in war. The third chapter looks for homologies of these aesthetic practices in contemporary video games and movies. Drawing upon recent neuroscience regarding the plasticity of the brain and the brain-body interface in relation to the body image this chapter attempts to locate some of the feedback loops between preparing for, playing at, and fighting wars in crowded urban environments. Chapter four enters the milieu of the contemporary emergence of war. The city, its inhabitants and its complex assemblage of architecture, nature, built and unbuilt structures take center stage amongst the other more expected actors in warfare such as soldiers and combatants. The urban milieu as a security milieu provokes a confrontation with the military apparatus over the relations between poverty, violence, control, and sovereignty. Chapter 5 returns to the world of the war planners of chapter one but this time in the aftermath of the State system of international security and focuses on their attempt to metabolize the insights of nomad sciences such as complexity theory and evolutionary biology for the Royal science of war planning and threat management. The conclusion of the dissertation explores the world of ‘art gaming and hacking’, the NGO Voices in the Wilderness, and Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Redline as attempts to restore belief in this world via redistributions of the sensible or thinkable. Each represents an attempt to engage in a world of becoming that need not equate flux, bifurcation, and the unexpected with disorder, violence, and threat.
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