First: There are no terrorists only terrorism. The crisis (an opening more than a closing as the apocalyptic tone of crisis normally invokes) of terrorism, despite the rhetoric of barbarism and the images of medieval Islamic Jiahad, is the new enemy’s mobility, its globality, and its strategic recapitulation of modernity not its otherwise suspected counter-modernity. After all, IED’s are made of cell phones and garage door openers not scimitars and camels. As Deleuze and Guattari say of the new organizations of power, “These mechanisms cannot be understood without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs as a rudimentary, less organized, social form. Even in bands of animals, leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but rather inhibit the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations.”
The war machine enters the battlefield as the soldiers of Mai Lai that do their jobs horrifically too well and the AWOL that simply refuse to fight. The tragic irony of the Global War on Terrorism cannot be understood without understanding the relation of the war machine to the state. It is after all most apparent in the return of the Mujahedin—mercenaries armed and trained by the CIA against the Soviet army—that exceeds and escape the state apparatus to return as al-Queda. The attempt to change the system of bipolar conflict via non-state actors to wage proxy wars did not fail it worked too well unleashing a new means of organization to violence and warfare. The war machine of Mujahedin reterritorialized in the Post-Cold War era as al-Queda. Just as the entry of the war machine in Iraq could not be contained. The funding of opposition militias both Sunni and Shiite against the revolutionary Guard succeeded in the overthrow of the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein but the very fighting did not stop there it continued. Matter of fact in multiplied.
Second: The bodies that emerge from war, both friend and enemy, are deterritorialized bodies. In the case of the US soldier the body is prepared with salt peter to control sexual appetite, amphetamines for response time and alertness, new eyes for night vision and multi-direction sensation. The suicide bomber is prepared any number of ways with the elixirs of fear, hate, revenge, duty, religion, ideology, all of these not unlike drugs in their alteration of brain chemistry and perception. The body itself abandoning its organs, the anus, the rectum, to house the bomb that is its new organ, its machine that will alter the social space that it will soon be plugged into. Hence the productive to capacity of both bodies to produce more fear, anger, revenge, hate, sorrow, frustration.
Such an approach lays bare the difference between the mechanistic (Rumsfeld’s RMA and modern war) and the machinic war (IED’s, cities, terrorism). Critics like Heidegger saw war as only mechanistic, technological and in part it is. However, to understand war this way leaves out the bodies, affects, and practices that sustain war. War is not reducible to mechanisms: Sovereign States, Leaders, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy. This is what makes it possible to say as we have that there are no terrorist only terrorism. The war machine is what escapes and deterritorializes these mechanical constraints. The enframing [gestel] of war is never complete. The standing reserve (soldiers, bullets, bombs, civilians to be protected, totals of enemies to be killed, etc) is never wholly subsumed by their rendering as resources. The fog of war, unforeseen escalation, levee en masse, blind allies, the defensive advantage of weakness, all gesture towards the machinic elements of war. Those affects, bodily habits, and becomings that cannot be contained by orders and strategies.
Third: What if violence has become a way of being? What could it mean to speak of this war as a “fabric of immanent relations?” We, in my estimation, do not take seriously enough the metamorphoses of war. War is often relegated to the status of an effect rather than as a concept unto itself. Wars are declared, wars are waged, wars are ended, war is even outlawed. We do not speak of war as we do The Political, The Ethical, etc. What do wars do? What is war’s analogue to the political as the political is to politics? War is no less central to many ways of life. Like politics or ethics, each tactile act in war is another comportment of the body, a technique of musculature, posture, style, gate, each their own possibility not just to survive war but to live war.
Which raises the question: How long can peace be absent before the body finds its rhythm and fit in an assemblage of war only to find the transition to peace as abrupt and violent as the outbreak of conflict? Are we really so convinced of a future ‘pacific’ human society, as Kant was in his theses for a Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Intent (1784), that we cannot imagine the possibility of war ceasing to be an aberration. What is at stake is not trivial; it does not seem decided that we were meant to live in peace. Even if one takes this term peace to be relatively unproblematic it is not the case that it has been a tendency or even a defining characteristic of the last century. It should not shock us—but it does—that new ways of being have emerged from the last one hundred years of intense and continuous preparation for and prosecution of war.
The death of the warrior in modern life was not replaced by the civilian but by new machinic interventions and affective investments in the state apparatus and the war machine. War aims, peace, dominion, control, do not consider what shall be done to the individuated then de-individuated bodies in the pursuit of those aims. It is the tendency of bodies to adjust, form habits, and perfect their techniques of movement.
The swing of a machete, the sight of a gun may be no different to the infra-assemblage of our bodies than the swing of a bat or the sighting of a jump shot. What differs, what differentiates is the minimal difference in affect. The body is charged no less by hate, anger, rage, and fear than it is by joy, pleasure, generosity, but it is charged differently. The swing of an arm can be the opening of a dance or the mad charge of a bayonet. The affective field, the habit of the muscles, and the encounter by which each of these is engaged alters the effect of the movement, which is actually what is meant by “meaning”. The effect is made sensible retrospectively and we call this meaning. The movement itself is indivisible it is not instrumental.
It is in this slight or even simply analytic difference between axes swings—one to chop wood, the other to sever arms, that we can puncture the myth that the preparation for war and the prosecution of war can be a difference of kind. In the preparation—the becoming war, it is not just the habit of sighting and pulling triggers, innovating new strategies and means to eliminate populations, it is the affective mood to accomplish those new habits which charges them, organizes their incipient possibility.
It is not new or even uncommon to find the discussion of affect and hate in the research into nationalism and patriotism. It is rare though to look closer at the residual effect on the micro and macro (or if you like disciplinary and biopolitical) organization of our bodies. The slippage between intra-subjective and inter-subjective preparation and organization is enmeshed in a worldwide becoming war.
What becomes more apparent with the outbreak of war may be no less present, according to this project, in other habitual activities. We should not be fooled by the common sense of our habits of perception that because things are not at the fever-pitch of war that they are not otherwise present and working behind the scenes of our imaginative and judging faculties. Some preparations for war are moving to slow to be seen. In a sentence this dissertation is an attempt to make more apparent those preparations that get lost in discussions of armaments and troop movement.
Failure of Pacific Reason
Rather than attend to these subtle practice Liberal International Relations theory, whether it be the democractic peace theorist or the providential tone of Cosmopolitanism, try, like Kant, to expel war from the world. The predict and argue for the end of war as part of ‘nature’s secret plan’ as the cosmopolitan ‘desire’ of man or the completion of geist in the Liberal Democratic state. War is something that can simply be outlawed, regulated, and governed out of existence. This is what makes people believe that war is a legal condition, or a procedural question—a phenomena that is either present or absence.
Not so, becoming war is a moment of a suspended present. Like the bullet time of the matrix in which the incredible speed of moment produces an interminable slowness there must a moment of duration just before war that makes possible no-war. To understand war as a becoming is not only lay bare the facile and destitute liberal understanding of peace but to make possible a becoming otherwise than war. This cannot be peace and would likely be illegible in the current indexes of war and peace. The normative markers of peace—the absence of conflict—need not define the limit of possible becomings otherwise than war. Becoming agonistic, becoming active, becoming rage, becoming justice, becoming quiet, becoming still, becoming disobedient, becoming graceful, becoming kind, becoming indifferent, becoming defiant, becoming gentle, becoming sacrifice, becoming fire (as many monks in Vietnam did and at least three individuals in the US have in the face of the Iraq war), becoming generous, becoming courageous… The restoration of belief in the world requires affirmation in excess to a regulative or repressive model of peace.
We must reject the model of peace exemplified by peace-keeping. War cannot be restrained, repressed, or deferred. The return of the repressed is the inevitable outcome of managerial practices of peace. To approach peace of this kind is war rendered standing reserve—saved up, stockpiled, trained, honed, targeted, scenario planned. Each model of peace defines a pole of international politics. One can see at the heart of the attempt to distinguish peace from war the absurdity of deterrence or hegemony. After all, peace is a funny way to characterize either the nuclear threat of the United States—the only country to use an atomic weapon—or the racial division of Israel and Palestine watched over by the Blue Helmets of the UN.
War cannot be disowned or expelled it must be diverted by other incipient becomings. Other forks must be taken, the moment just before war must be extended and inhabited such that the otherwise becomes apparent. This does not require that the world slow down in fact it might require quite the opposite that we unblock certain flows corralled by the aborescent strategies of fortress state craft. Redirecting the affective economies of war towards other attachments—arguments, justice, compassion, forgiveness, politics, resistance, grief, art, beauty, the world—cannot be accomplished by repression or separation—that is the recipe for ressentiment. In refugee camps, detention camps, on either sides of walled borders, identities assert themselves, harden and intensify. The wasteland grows.
Becoming Otherwise Than War
This is why war cannot be disavowed or expelled as it is in the Kantian tradition. Only the affirmative has the power to make the otherwise possible. The seeming impossibility of affirming destitution, battle, conflict, violence as part of life—a becoming of the body—brings into focus the possibility of becoming otherwise than war. War is most present, most under our jurisdiction when it is part of us rather than exterior or external to us.
To understand the possibility of becoming war is to understand the process of becoming something else. Once we externalize or banish war to the place of evil or outside we lose our grasp on its most vital, generative lifeline: ourselves. Affirming war as being human, all to human brings into focus the subtle changes in ourselves that bring us to the moment between war and otherwise than war. In this moment—returned to us by a kind of attunement—we find the other practices, bodily dispositions, emotions: grief rather than rage, compassion rather than revenge, determination rather than resignation. For some the presence of the otherwise will only give contrast to the power of hate or rage to overcome other impulses, but in others it may result in other directions, new questions, alternatives to the dissatisfaction or burn out from following rage, hate, and revenge for too long.
Desperation may not always lead to the same result if returned to a fork in the stream of becoming rather than the inevitable requirements of the stultified responses of bombing, killing, starving, incarcerating, deterring, sanctioning, hating. New machines can be released into an assemblage, new cutting edges, new transfigurations and modifications—metamorphosis. Something imperceptible to the liberal normative eye that sees war as contrary to human nature and imperceptible to the Realist eye that sees war as the tragic inevitability of human nature.
Each is a commitment to the human as being not becoming. Each fails to see the possibilities contained in a body that evolves and its creative potential to continue evolving. This is how we should read Nietzsche’s aphorism that to deny war is to deny biology, to deny evolution. It is not as Fascists and those that dismiss Nietzsche as Fascist (these two schools of thinkers being in total agreement. It is telling that Richard Wolin and Adolf Hitler read Nietzsche the same way, badly, idiotically, violently) would read this aphorism that war is necessary and inevitable, but that war is the result of subtle, contingent, not inevitable, selections. When one gives up on the culture/nature divide, as Jane Bennett, Alfred North Whitehead, William E. Connolly, Henri Bergson Brian Goodwin and others have (list grows longer each day), one sees the practices that give rise to the development of tendencies such as war. And one also sees the subtle possibilities of selecting other tendencies, other practices, and other dispositions.
Evolution is not determinist. It is the condition and insistence of constant modification and change. Each modification confronting the possibility of multiple directions, trajectories, lines of flight, new practices, and experiments. Like all experiments from winged reptiles to speech, some will fall flat on their face and others will produce sonnets. But at each moment of modification time forks, slows to a near halt, like a drip of water just before it separates from its source. In complexity theory such a moment is called a bifurcation. Delanda explains:
Futhermore, even if we are destined to follow the attractors guiding our dynamical behavior, there are also bifurcations, critical points at which we may be able to change our destiny (that is modify our long-term tendencies). And because minuscule fluctuations in the environment in which bifurcations occur may decide the exact nature of the resulting attractors, on can hardly conclude that all actions we undertake—as individuals or collectively—are irrelevant in the face of these deterministic forces. Bifurcations may not be a “guarantee of freedom,” but they certainly do provide a means of experimenting with—and perhaps even modifying—our destines.
For those attuned to such possibilities—the succession of moments passing from one alteration to the next—the inevitability of the next moment cascades into a multitude of other possibilities. The Israeli soldiers who suddenly cant pull the trigger; the flinch of a silo Captain when confronted by an incoming nuclear missile saving the world from a nuclear war almost started by an unusually rapid weather balloon rocket launched in Finland; Republican Governor George Ryan’s sudden and unprecedented conviction of mercy and another justice; the inexplicable generosity of an Algerian Jew that returned the hatred and exclusion of anti-Semitism with the impossible generosity and affirmation of deconstruction rather than the self-destructive drive of Zionism; love amongst state enemies; the impossible gesture of the ANC refusing to expel the Afrikaners that once tortured and murdered them; most recently career military officer William “Fox” Fallon who sacrificed his prestigious position as head of Central Command because he would not go along with the plan to attack Iran. The miracle need not be transcendent—from outside the world, from a god—the incipient chaos of possibilities contained in every moment of becoming is my belief in immanent miracles or unpredictable moments of bifurcation.
These moments of possibility are obscured by the towering authority of normative theories of war and peace as well as by Realist theories of each. Experiments, practices, new media, drugs, social arrangements, habits, irrationalities, bizarre affinities, creativities that attend to these fleeting punctuations in historical movement allow us to become otherwise than what is expected, planned, prudent, pragmatic, realistic or ordained. In short when Paul Patton attempts to excise war from the war machine he impoverishes even denies Deleuze and Guattari’s appreciation of war as a bodily, material, assemblage altering process of becoming. The liberal desire to expel war repeats the Kantian extirpation that renders us just as helpless, disconnected, irresponsible for our biological heritage of becoming war as do those theories that insist on its metaphysical inevitability.
War is human. Not in our nature or contrary to our nature it is simply the “so far” of human evolution, thus it is not inherent or anomalous it is merely the condition of possibility for the next move—co-extensive with other minor becomings not yet fully emerged, still emerging or incipient. That the list of miracles seems paltry in comparison to the list of horrors need not be discouraging. In each case the miracle of becoming otherwise than anticipated was seemingly undeterred by the quantity of data to the contrary.
In this new era where the threat or prosecution of war defines the supposed precondition for democratic politics the concept of war cannot be left under the exclusive dominion of the war planners. War must be our (those who care for the world) heritage. After all, as Foucault has taught us the modern war is fought at the level of the population , in its name, by its people, for its values, without which it would be little more than empty demands from a few men wearing funny hats. Weapons production, economic mobilization, the production of food and ideas, are the products of national even trans-national assemblages. The war machine is certainly not the only machine of change and the metamorphosis machine may be a machine to come, but the war machine deserves its name. In war we find every possibility of human behavior and activity from violence to non-violence, hatred, indifference, kindness, compassion, control, killing, saving, resistance, cowardice, courage, valor, cruelty. And the roving war machine even when almost captured by the state apparatus makes possible something else, something contrary to the states will to order.
The result of this is not as I have stated the classical realist position that man is fallen and thus war is inevitable, quiet the opposite. The jurisdiction of political theory merely changes; zooms out and focus back in on other areas. The point is that the problem of war is bio-cultural in a way that requires that we intervene at the levels of perception and bodily practice, affect and attachment rather than simply pursuing the legal agreements that bring wars to a supposed end or worse yet hope to regulate and limit their excesses. How can peacekeeping or the cruelty of economic sanctions proceed so violently and maintain the glimmer of hope that their efforts will result in the cessation of what they propagate?
One could simply say that this is nothing more than the tired adage that “violence begets violence”. My reply is that it is only a tired adage because it has not been taken seriously enough to test. Tired because many of its adherents have not gone the next step—because opposing violence is not nearly enough—to interrogate the attachment to violence, its fulfilling reward. Nietzsche more than most began this work. After all where would war be without ressentiment? Thus, the affirmation of life must not detest the bodies of war disgusting as they maybe to our liberal pacific eyes, ears, and noses. The bodies must be affirmed so that they can be examined closer than at arms length. Human nature must not be either pacific or warlike for becoming to be affirmative it is the trajectory of both that attest to the possibility of bodies to evolve otherwise.
To this end, ethics will be defined as the means to intervene in that vital becoming, not too steer its course as if captains of our destiny, but instead as attempts to drag our feet in the water in hopes of going productively off course. It requires only a little drag, a slight dynamic difference for an object in motion to change its coarse. One discovers with a cursory investigation of aerodynamics and friction generally that as the speed of an object increases the effect of slighter and slighter variations in drag are magnified. The slight movement of a rudder or flap on a plan can cause it to loop or spin out of control given the right speed. Slight changes in shape can slow down or speed a vehicle up without ever altering the mass of the vehicle. Affirmation in the face of inevitability or providence is the drag I have in mind.
I take this to be in contact with Deleuze’s insistence that the task at hand is to restore belief in this world. But the ‘moral of the story’ is not a simple assertion of affirmation; it cannot be a universal or new oppositional logic where by one either affirms or resents the world. One cannot either reject or accept the current tendencies of becoming war. And yet it is part of the world, and thus something that cannot be resented and is yet so hard to affirm. To this end there must be a style of affirmation, or an ethics of affirmation, which is what I have in mind for particular refrains of war and politics, after all 'things can be held together' in many ways. As Deleuze says of moralities of the ass and the ox “they have a terrifying taste of responsibility, as though on could affirm only by expiating, as though it were necessary to pass through the misfortune of rift and division in order to be able to say yes.” It is surely not the case, given the complexity and interpenetrating nature of becoming war, that the practice of affirmation I have in mind could be called autonomous or even responsible in the liberal sense, but how we prepare ourselves for moments of bifurcation matters. Attunement or care for the world can alter the affective dispositions or primed response toward less hateful or resentful responses to dynamism and unexpected change.
This is what William Connolly introduces to us in his reading of Deleuze & Guatarri , a sense of texture and malleability that says to go slowly, generously and experimentally, but not without care and attention, an attunement, for what passes. The addition of care cannot but conflict at some point with many readings of becoming, but it should not be read as reticence or as opposed to becoming. The development of an ethos of affirmation is not a call to 'slow down' or its opposite the insistence on revolution. Instead an understanding war as emergent or as a field of immanent relation requires experiments that provoke people’s bodies to betray them. This should be the goal of all new political strategies! Such experiments are vital to the question of becoming war as we increasingly find ourselves resonating with different phylum of the war machine.
By way of affirmation I propose a few of the experiments that were used to produce this proposal.
Experiments:
1. Read the names of those who have died and how, bring them up in conversation, speak of them as you would your friends and loved ones. Attempt to read ten pages of the dead’s names to give yourself a sense of the numbers. Attempt to return scale to the dead’s magnitude.
2. Listen to the recordings from the night of shock and awe in Baghdad while looking at pictures of your hometown or a familiar place.
3. Stop watching American news for one week read only Iraqi blogs and watch only Al-Jeezera see what happens.
4. Read only African newspapers for a week see how it changes your view of events.
5. Ignore all news for one week, come back see what happens.
6. Pay attention to your defenses against caring, watch for cynicism.
7. Find the films and music that provide temporary relief. Which movies or songs and which parts, what techniques alter your mood or outlook.
8. Make uncomfortable connections. Make eye contact with homeless people. Ask some ones name, shake a hand.
9. Forgive someone who is unforgivable pay attention to the difficulty or the impossibility then try harder.
10. How are you preparing or mobilizing for war? How much fuel do you use, what kind of fuel do you buy? Take seriously the question of whether an Iraqi life is more important to you than being able to drive your car.
11. What are you able to kill and why?
With all of these experiments be attentive to your reactions then proceed or exceed your intentional actions. Find what resonates.
No comments:
Post a Comment