Becoming War

The War on Terrorism

2011-11-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

If the two month commitment to peaceful and restrained occupation begins to breakdown don't forget who made violence against the elderly, war veterans, students, unions, children, the homeless, intellectuals, and just about every walk of life a national policy. People are fighting for nothing short of the right to live. Their homes have been seized, their futures consumed by debt, their retirements evaporated after decades of hard work and the leaders who speak in their name offer only insulting condolences or degrading vitriol. As such this is not a struggle for flat screen TVs or the American dream.
It is for many the demand not to be made expendable, not to be forgotten and abandoned. The stakes are life and death so do not be surprised if police brutality, sonic blasts, and chemical weapons only escalate the conflict. The United State is being confronted by two kinds of coordinated action. The policy of using pain, intimidation, and spectacular demonstrations of force to achieve policy is called terrorism. The collective demand by people not to be silenced or ignored by their government is called democracy. When things turn really ugly please don't forget who the real terrorists are.

Differences Matter.

2011-10-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

I also want to thank Krishna for starting this discussion.
As for Obama I understand there to be 3 argument so far in favor of voting for a third party.

1. There is no real difference between the candidates (Dator’s position) and that what difference does exist will be nulified in the next term by a president free of the fear of re-election. The powerful variant of this is that while some differences do exist from the perspective of those outside the United States in particular those on the receiving end of U.S. military actions things have gotten worse (Krishna)

2. That voting against Obama will teach the democrats a lesson not to ignore its leftist constituency.

3. We should punish Obama because there were opportunities for progressive action that Obama past up at little or no cost to him politically.

The original article posted by Krishna makes a strong case that Obama has in fact made things worse for civil liberties in America than Bush. The article argues first that Obama agreed to not prosecute members of the Bush administration for violations of human rights. This is not a very persuasive argument for making things worse. The making things worse part of the argument hinges on the claim that had Obama lost the election the horror of John McCain would have coalesced an unbeatable Civil Liberties movement that would have closed Guantanamo, repealed the Patriot Act, and put personal freedoms back on the political agenda. First the majority of Americans before and after the 2008 election support the use of torture against terrorists (70 percent if you ask Gallup but if you doubt their sampling methods the absolute lack of public outcry ought to mostly back of their numbers). The idea that this lack of popular activism is because people are afraid to criticize a black president on civil rights is laughable. If anything is apparent in the current political climate no one left or right is afraid to criticize Barak Obama. The Obama honeymoon from left criticism lasted about 60 days into the first election when he floundered on the reform of Guantanamo.

It is also not true that things have gotten worse under Obama. Obama is pathetic and gutless when it comes to fighting the Republicans on National Security and hawkish when it comes to U.S. military intervention. However Guantanamo is basically frozen. We are not sending more people there. This may seem like small potatoes but remember for all of McCain’s blustering on torture he watered down (no pun intended) his position to the point that he is was only against torture as a ‘policy’. McCain did not support prosecution of torturers, he did not oppose outsourcing the torture i.e. extraordinary rendition, giving people so that our allies such as Saudi Arabia can do the torturing. (Hard to say that there are things worse than water boarding but if there are the Saudi’s are sure to use those methods of pain). Unlike McCain Obama has closed many of the prisons and sent civilian reviewers to increase the pressure on the military to release prisoners.

This article also leaves out that Bush cut 100 percent of the budget for Civil Rights at the Justice Department. 100 percent of the budget was shifted to the defense of small business and religious persecution which as instructed by Bush ought to focus on Christians discriminated against for praying in schools. The Civil Rights division of the Justice Department was immediately reinstated after the 2008 election.

Obama also renewed the efforts of the FBI and Justice Department to investigate and monitor hate groups such as the KKK. Under the Bush administration both division were instructed that the number one domestic threat were environmental terrorists. Obama ended the policy of sending government agents to pose as activists to keep tabs on organizations like Environmental Defense League and the National Campaign to End the Death Penalty. The end of domestic monitoring of progressive social movements alone is a reason to prefer the Obama administration.

Lets add to this the return of funding and enforcement power to the EPA something else gutted by Bush, the end of health insurance discrimination for pre-existing conditions, and an executive order ending drug raids in California, and most importantly drastically reduced the number of ICE raids undertaken by the INS.

As for Obama’s impact on the rest of the world. This is also where I am most disappointed. That being said Obama has continued to fight Republicans and Democrats to zero-out the number of troops in Iraq and is withdrawing from Afghanistan. Lets remember what McCain supported. McCain wanted 5 permanent military bases in Iraq, he supported starting a war with Iran, bombing North Korea, and a ruthless surge in Afghanistan that relied less on Afghanistan cooperation and more on the demonstration of military force. Included in this was stepping up the bombing of civilian poppy farmers to ‘strangle’ the financial support of AQ. Obama ended ariel bombing and spraying of poppy farms. McCain also unequivocally supports the use of drones. Also any increase in drone use from Bush to Obama, again while disappointing, is not a policy change but the fact that technology has vastly improved and the size of the drone fleet has more than tripled. This would have occurred as much or more under McCain. One can only imagine (or whatever the active verb version of nightmare is) all of these scenarios under the leadership of Sarah Palin.

What about a second term. Then things get really interesting. A second term will be characterized by frequent assassinations and the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. A mixed bag for sure. However lets look at the possibilities under a Republican president. Not a single Republican supports an alternative energy or Climate initiative. The Republican party is still chomping at the bit to attack Iran. Perry would like to invade Mexico so that U.S. troops can be directly involved in the now almost civil war going on between the cartels (one of those cartels being the Mexican government). Mitt Romney has crusaded against the START treaty and would have the opportunity to reverse the progress made towards nuclear arms reductions. Also this is not a hypothetical improvement. Republicans are in support of nuclear modernization and the restarting of tritium production which means that Uranium mining and milling on native lands and the eventual testing of new nuclear devices on those lands will begin again as the Republican are also opposed to the ban on nuclear testing. Republicans would also like to 're-surge' Iraq. Republicans are in favor of a new SOFA agreement with Kuwait as a base of operations and a dramatic increase in troops. Although Republicans disagree on this finally number it ranges from 10,000 to 30,000 troops.

All of the Republicans have promised to crack down on illegal immigration. This makes a huge difference for the daily lives of the people that do the majority of U.S. agricultural work (amongst other things). It means harassment at the border and at their workplaces but it also means increased power of coyotes to extort, rape, and murder laborers that have to resort to increasingly dangerous measure to get passed border patrol or fences. It also means strengthening the INS and Border Patrol. These agencies are their own special form of governmentality. If you think Guantanamo is the top of the prison reform agenda you have never been to one of the hundreds of immigration detention facilities in America. Immigrants under Bush (much less under Obama) were denied lawyers, appeals, and basic human rights. Under Bush the increase in the numbers of children put in such conditions sky rocketed.

As for as Obama's neoliberal tendencies, these are undeniable but not nearly as destructive as the Republican alternative. Obama has proposed and will likely win deep cuts to U.S. farm subsidies a favorite pork barrel of Republicans and many Democrats. U.S. farm subsidies have devastated the global food market and are responsible for agriculture sector collapse and starvation through out Mexico and South America as well as Southern and West Africa. Farm subsidies have also been devastating for the U.S. environment as they have paid for agribusiness to pollute and subject illegal immigrants to horrifying toxic environments of disease spreading shit lagoons and dangerous pesticides directly subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. Obama has also negotiated and used trade agreements differently. Obama pushed for Labor representatives and Environmental representative at CAFTA negotiations and was the first President to file a trade dispute on behalf of worker treatment as in the case of Guatemala. It is not 'fair trade' but it is a long way from the Bush CAFTA agenda which contained no worker standards or environmental concerns. Obama has also pushed through two huge debt forgiveness plans for Haiti and Egypt both of which were called 'moral hazards' by Republican opponents.

I would add to this that Obama budget deal has put the Republicans in devils gambit between making deep cuts to programs such as Defense or raising taxes. The tax agenda generally disappointing to those of us that want major changes has stopped an onslaught of Republican austerity measures. The stimulus package had a lot of problems but it created almost 3 million jobs. Neoliberal? Yes. However Obama believes in Keyesian economics and puts it to use even if he squanders billions on corporate bailouts. The Republican alternative would have been all bail outs no jobs.

I think that answers the first argument.

As of the second argument that we should teach Democrats a lesson.

Truman overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh creating a precedent for violent covert and overt regime change by the United States.

The Kennedy administration nearly invented nation building and gave birth to the developmentalist foreign policy that was seized and militarized by neoconservatives under the Bush administration.

Johnson vastly expanded the war in Vietnam and began the massive bombing campaign of Cambodia that the Cambodians are still struggling to clean up.

Carter actively supported the Shah also was no opponent of international neoliberalism.

Clinton established a sanction regime that killed more civilians in Iraq than all of the military occupations under both Bush’s and Obama combined. He also sabotaged any international effort to respond to the Rwandan genocide, destroyed the welfare system, and reinstated the federal death penalty not mention with the Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty act instituting all of the infrastructure that made the Patriot act possible. Clinton also vastly expanded the Reagan missile diplomacy of the 80s. If you want to look for the predecessor to the Bush Drone program research funding for automated warfare was vastly expanded under Clinton and in the mean time Clinton used cruise missiles to do what drones were not yet capable of.

All of these Democratic presidents were committed to what we now call neoliberalism or third way economics. They were free trade, international development champions, and oversaw and encouraged some of the most dangerous military advances on the planet.
So I am not sure what the prospects are of getting a ‘better’ Democratic president are.
Unless you go back to FDR (who was no friend to the Global South) every Democrat since Truman has watered down or dismantled social programs and expanded U.S. imperial capability and intervention. This strengthen’s Krishna’s argument in some ways that the status quo is too awful to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans but I think on average Obama has done better than the Democratic average even if he has been vastly disappointing in comparison to what he promised. It is also demonstrates that 'teaching the Democrats a lesson' is unlikely to do much. What is the better Democratic candidate that is likely secure a nomination. All of the criticisms made by Krishna and Dator are as true or more true of Hilary Clinton.

The third argument that we should punish Obama is to me just a variant of the second argument. The exception being I am sure while initially disappointed Obama would find the time off much more rewarding than the fight he will face against Tea Party Republicans for four years. However this is the most important difference for me. The radical wing of the Republican party is increasingly well organized and already well armed. The fever pitch of their hatred and their glee for the suffering of others is likely to produce a legislative agenda that gives the backlash against Reconstruction a run for its money. The Tea Party wants more war, more guns, more executions, no social safety net, more prisons, harsher punishment for non-violent and violent crimes, legalized discrimination against immigrants and religious minorities, an end to abortion, a number of terrifying amendments to the constitution, more protection for corporations as legal individuals, less privacy for actual individuals, and a total disregard for the suffering of people abroad not to mention a near hostility towards the natural environment. Romney will complain about the more extreme of these proposals, then spin his opposition as being principled but not sufficient to justify a veto. The worst of these Obama without worry of reelection will veto, veto, veto. He will also use the bully pulpit to speak out against such measures. That is a real difference for people everywhere.

The final argument in favor of Obama is what I would like to call the flinch factor. If real change from below emerges anywhere in the world Obama will flinch before he crushes it. I think this played a significant part in the MENA uprisings. They were, for me, less about the authoritarians that they overthrew and more about a refusal and revision of the global system underwritten by U.S. intervention, security assistance, and security guarantees. I am not claiming that these uprising were inspired by Obama but that after Obama's Cairo speech apologizing for the U.S. overthrow of Iran and pledging to become committed to self determination that many more people were hopeful about the U.S. simple remaining silent or less proactive than they have been in the past. In the case of Egypt I do not think this can be underestimated. Without that shift in the ethos of the United States (if we want to engage in counter-factuals) I can imagine McCain calling the uprisings Islamic, the Western Media buying and supporting that description, and the U.S. directly assisting and even intervening on behalf of Mubarak and Gaddafi. McCain was until after his defeat a vocal defender of both when negotiating arms deals and played a significant role in propping up Musharraf among many other unforgivable dictators. I think this is also true at home. Under a Republican administration activist in the U.S. will feel less safe and will be less safe. Under Bush militias like the Oath Keepers and Hutaree Militia became military powers that could compete in the global arena. Bush would have already sent in National Guard to break up the Wall Street protest. Under Romney the same would occur. Obama's silence is much valued at a time when the Tea Party says they want to water the ground of liberty with the blood of liberals.

Becoming War: Steps to an Ecology of Global Security

2011-02-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

This is the video abstract of my dissertation. While the paper version of my dissertation does not yet support video. I will be posting chapters here that will embed the video footage that has been collected as part of the dissertation research. This is a montage of some of that footage.

Jairus Grove's Prospectus

2010-07-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

How War Exceeds the State: Insurgencies, Cities, and the Materiality of Violence

Introduction:
What follows is a description of the centrality of warfare’s place in global security. It is not the case that I think that is inevitably the case or has always been the case but that war is a persistent and serious challenge to global order. This is a relatively undisputed fact amongst those often described as Realists and and yet is dismissed as fatalistic and outmoded by those of the Liberal IR persuasion and the growing class of of Kantian inspired international legal activists. I think that each of these divergent approaches for predicting the future of warfare is greatly hindered by tendencies of state or institutional centrism, overly simplistic historicisms, and an unhelpful anthropocentrism in defining what is considered war and who or what causes or starts wars.
However this is not a dissertation about the causes of war, the why of war as it were. It is rather an attempt to look somewhere between the how and the what of warfare, particularly modern warfare. The central concern being how combat is mobilized and who or what can mobilize it. This of course raises the question of what combat is and what exactly ought to count as mobilization. It is the latter point that will likely be the more controversial of the claims. Mobilization would seem to suggest a mobilizer, or an agent of mobilization. However it is the contention of this dissertation that such an agent is often lacking or insufficient to explain combat, as in the case of non-state organizations such as al-Qaeda where the leadership is pluralized and therefore proceeds by agents. Diverging from the debate over agent or agents, mobilization may be even more dispersed to the point of no longer being usefully described as either agent or agents.
I argue that the mobilization of combat--warfare—can at times be so dispersed as to demonstrate that agents are better described as material contexts or assemblages of material contexts and a myriad of differing agents at varying levels of efficacy such as in the case of urban ghettos and other complex assemblages such as crowds that are not reducible to the mere addition of their parts much less the sum of the rational individual decisions of each crowd member.
I am not attempting to jettison earlier explanations that rely on the state or defined interest groups for explaining the emergence of combat. The value of this dissertation’s approach is not to discount or dismiss the state as outmoded or as a mythical construct as earlier transnational and postmodern approaches have often done. Quite the contrary, the goal is to show that the state, and I think from its beginnings, has been in a competitive struggle with other forms of organization and self-organization.
For the purposes of this study the focus is on the particular competition over the organization and monopoly of force or violence. To put this another way, if the mobilization of warfare is seen as a collective action problem this dissertation demonstrates that the state while having great success in overcoming collective action barriers has never had a monopoly on warfare, and is increasingly losing its comparative advantage over other less centralized or less institutionalized forms. Therefore theorist of international relations, and security studies more broadly, that proceed on the belief that international politics can be analyzed as an anarchy of units defined as political entities with a territorial monopoly over legitimate force—the standard Weberian definition—are leaving out the myriad of forces that complicate and at times even drive global conflict.
To add depth and dimension to these complexities requires the investigation of how warfare exceeds state control and also how else and from where else warfare can emerge. In this picture of global politics the state is not left behind as outmoded or anachronistic as many globalization theorist declared it in the wake of the Cold War. The state has to be brought back in but back in context. If International Relations theory once thought of the globe as a kind desert landscape populated by a single homogenous species of war wielding states competing for advantage, balance or sometimes cooperation (depending on your theoretical leanings), the picture developed here is a richer ecosystem. States are thrown into a veritable rainforest of other species. Some relatively similar to states such as terrorist organizations with institutionalized goals and human leadership. Others have more alien and less analogous features such as mobs, uprisings, and insurgent assemblages whose organization or control is less directed or thought out but yet sustainable and sometimes more destructive and competitively superior to the state form.
The mystery or puzzle is what holds these collectivities together. Like a colony of bacteria in the human gut or the complex dynamics of urban life that can only be understood in their emergent whole rather than their constituent parts, the collectivities analyzed in this dissertation require theorizing and conceptualizing action that is constituent but leaderless, goal oriented but not conscious, collective but not regimented. Previous theories of institutions such as states, firms, international organization, or social movements provide tools but are insufficient to describe what holds these collectivities together much less adequately describe their behavior or impact on global security. To begin this task we have to dive back into the material context or primordial goo from which states emerged and look at the other, often incipient, mobilizing forces of combat. In so doing providing more tools for understanding why parsimonious theories of state to state behavior describe so little of contemporary global conflict.

Section 1: Traditions of Materialism in International Relations

Chapter 1: Real Materialism
Analyzing the micropolitical or sub-state and supra-state or global context of conflict is not new. A strand of this kind of materialist thinking runs from Thucydides to Hans Morgenthau and beyond. However it has been at best an undercurrent of International Relations thinking and with the behavioral revolution’s drive to structural reductionism has been, in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, reduced to almost a trickle. This first chapter focuses on Hans Morgenthau and E.H. Carr materialist explanations of the recurrence of war and national competition while flushing out a deep ambivalence in both scholars for the increasingly formative role of technological and material change; a nascent theory of complexity. In both thinkers is a rich theory of the empirical world driving change and behavior but a lingering commitment to ahistorical or cyclical view of human nature even as they were writing about dramatic, system altering changes, such as airpower and nuclear weapons. Ultimately, Morgenthau and Carr have useful critiques of earlier forms of idealism and understands the role of technology and natural material conditions play in altering the constraints or possibilities of politics but are both trapped in an unhelpful paradox where they assert that war and national interest do not change and asserts that human nature, the origin of national interest and war, is a result of a changing technological and natural context. However what is useful and lost in later theories of neorealism is Morgenthau and Carr’s insistence that the empirical ought to drive thought rather than the expectation that “reality change to fit the model.” For Morgenthau this results in a sustained engagement with Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of 19th century scientific rationality in the book Scientific Man Versus Power Politics. Carr took his cues on non-linearity and complex materialism from the writings of Henri Poincare. I read Whitehead’s concepts of reason and becoming and Poincare writings on complexity and self-organization back into the Morgenthau and Carr’s limited materialism to show how their chastened views of natural history results in the fatalism of war and hierarchy but could be opened up to include the efficacy of the world’s material becoming to make a richer mode of analysis possible.

Chapter 2: Cybermaterialism
Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing scholars such as Karl Deutsch and Hayward Alker began to investigate and apply the then underdeveloped and untested concepts of cybernetics to explain global change as well as propose new means for engineering global order. The central assumption of Deutsch’s book The Nerves of Government is that humans, their behavior and habits, are fundamentally plastic. There was no theory of transcendental human nature, we are our brains and our brains can change. Despite this interest in a very rich understanding of the mutability of the materiality of human beings Deutch and Alker were both relatively indifferent to the materiality of the rest of the world much less the second-order dimensions or ecological dimensions of the larger system. The emphasis was on humans in their relationship to information and the resulting behavioral modifications that could be made or as Deutsch thought had to be made to escape nuclear Armageddon. Hacking the human species and re-engineering or ‘steering’ human civilization was his way out of the security dilemma of Political Realism. However, in all of their talk of feedback loops and control mechanisms very little attention was played to the feedback of non-human factors or the material contexts those plastic humans lived in. Where as cybermaterialism’s view of history is less cyclical than early strands of real materialism—in part because assumption about the universality or stability of human nature are jettisoned—there is little attention to what factors, both material constraints and possibilities, may have produced the recurrence of violence and war. The failure of this approach left only the mathematics and quantitative measurements of cybernetics in the case of Deutsch’s pursuit of behavioralism and in the case of Alker lead to a focus entirely on language and the development and integration of postmodern discourse analysis into his theories of international change. I take from this a useful understanding of power as steering that sees the world as alterable and the concept of control that understands patterns of behavior as not being the result of individual rational decisions but of broader more dispersed logics or protocols of behavior that emerge through complex and large scale interaction. However what is still lacking is an engine for the becoming or unfolding of the world that is not reducible to human ideas. The world is left behind and the relations that change that world are left untheorized. Deutsch and Alker’s unhelpful anthropocentrism ignores many of the feedbacks involved in global politics and retains a transcendental position from which Deutsch can code and quantify politics and Alker can more interestingly, but still insufficiently, investigate discursively constituted ontologies of security and war.

Chapter 3: Ecological Materialism
I see this strand of materialism as a synthesis of earlier description of the formative materiality of the world and the plasticity of cybermaterialism. The position is captured succinctly by philosopher and biologist William Wimsatt who provides some of the conceptual language for integrating complexity theory and materialism in this chapter:
“[We Live in] variegated ecologies of reality supporting and increasingly bent to our science and technology, but we are embodied socialized beings; evolved and developing in a world conditioned by our sociality and technology… embedded in a larger supporting complex that is both of the world and self-continuing in the world.” (Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings)
To develop this concept of embedded or what I call ecological materialism I draw on three I.R. theorists Daniel Deudney, James Rosenau, and T.F. Homer-Dixon and from theorists Manuel DeLanda , Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, and William Wimsatt. This section develops the main thrust of the concepts necessary for the following three chapters. Using Deudney’s security materialist account of violence interdependence and Rosenau’s application of complexity theory to global change I explain why states are increasingly unable to either guarantee security territorially or effectively compete with other combat mobilizing forces abroad. Additionally I draw on Deudney and DeLanda in particular to explain how technological and ecological changes alter the conditions of both macro and microscale violence. The philosophers are brought in to support and illustrate the position that materialism is neither deterministic nor constructed. The point is to develop a theory of becoming and complexity that accounts both for humans agency and their environment without falling prey either to the anthropocentrism and discursive focus of constructivism nor the fatalism and determinism of classical Realism.
The main problematic to be developed and explained is the difference between power as the ability to wield force and power as the ability to control outcomes or patterns. This requires explaining why control as consistency of outcome or consistency of organization does not require a controller. The slogan of theorists Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker “no one controls networks, but networks are controlled” raises the question of how control exists after decentralization or without hierarchy. I also unpack the terms network, assemblage, emergence, and non-linear change to explain how the violence capacity of non-state forms is mobilized and executed as well as why seemingly local incidence of combat increasingly have global effects.

Section 2: Crowds, Cities, and Assemblages.
This section applies the theoretical work of section 1 to the two concrete examples crowds and cities and then concludes with a final chapter further illustrating the conceptual usefulness of assemblages and resonance machines or agents embedded and in a co-constitutive relay with their material context rather than the simple theory of networks that attempts to just theorize the collective capacity of connected individual agents.

Chapter 1: Crowds
This chapter starts with the popular uprising in Spain against Napoleon to illustrate the power of emergent insurgencies in the context of the beginning of modern state warfare, meaning nationalist warfare. The chapter subsequently reviews the early theories of crowds including Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, and Elias Cannetti and then delves into contemporary scientific work on uprisings and riot ‘intelligence’ inspired by Deleuze and Guattarie’s concept of swarming. The ultimately goal is to conclude that seemingly disorganized groups have real effects upon the security environment and are not adequately described by either rational choice theory, collective action theory (Mancur Olson), nor contemporary theories of terrorist networks that conflate uprisings with coordinated attacks as in the case of the U.S. Counter-Insurgency Field Manual and the failed efforts of the U.S. Air Force and Army to develop ‘Effects Based Operations’ that rely on network targeting and behavioral modification through strategic bombing and other forms of often highly lethal coercion or intimidation.

Chapter 2: The City
This chapter investigates the role spatial relations play in both undermining the state’s control as well as enabling forms such as crowds and riots that would not otherwise be possible or likely in other spatial arrangements such as agrarian or suburban life. After a brief history of the city as a form of social control or social organization I shift to a focus on the Ghetto or the super-dense urban environment. Drawing on evidence from the drug war in New York City, the drug conflict and increasingly warlike behavior of the Brazilian Favelas and Baghdad’s persistently violent enclaves such as Sadr City I argue against what I call the creator myth. This is the false presumption that the creator of a thing is the master of that thing. While cities are human built and often even state built they take on a life of their own. They may not have agency but they have efficacy, real effects that are not controlled by architects, city planners, or those that maintain the city such as the police or other state officials.
Cities change and degrade to create new ways of living or environments for conflict and they concentrate or alter human behavior or relations in ways that are beyond the intended purposes of their original design. Some ghettos emerge haphazardly as a result of marginalization as in the case of Brazil. Others are built for centralized control as in the case of the projects in the United States. Or further still result from racialization and perceptions of difference as in the case of the Shiite enclave Sadr City. Cities also intensify or amplify that perception of difference as in the case of all three. However in all cases the ‘built’ properties have effects that complicated state control and enable or even create often deadly and highly destructive mobilizations of violence. These examples further demonstrate the central thesis that materiality alters calculations of power. Being superior at the application of force can become a liability in such an environment. Power is shown to be more obviously about control and the consistency of mobilization than about how many pounds of explosives or bullets you can deliver.

Chapter 3: From Networks to Assemblages
This chapter begins with a critique of network theory as it has been espoused by Marc Sageman and others as a quantitative means for analyzing terrorism and insurgency. What I hope to make clear is that Graph Theory, the mathematical approach to studying networks that is used to develop Sageman et all’s coding and quantitative study of terrorism, over privileges nodes or individuals in the determination of a network identity rather than taking into account qualitatively different kinds of edges or connections between nodes/individuals. The relative indifference to the edges or connection, i.e. the context or the materiality of the connection, misses the variable intensity of latent or incipient connections of, for instances, nationalism or religion that may become more pronounced as the result of a foreign invasion or collateral damage. The materiality of edges may also effect what emerges as in the case of hand held communication devices or in the case of IEDs where economic networks have resulted in the dumping of surplus goods. Seemingly harmless and outdated technologies such as old weapons and garage door openers accumulating in sufficient quantities in 3rd world countries produced a new weapon that caught the most advanced military in the world off guard. These changes in intensity or changes in context can transform or activate even create a new network (what I would call an assemblage) that may previously have only existed in its most rudimentary form. Suddenly familial connections or neighborhood affiliation can become the bonds of insurgent solidarity. A peaceful civilian can suddenly become an effective combatant as the result of rage or simply fear as a result of an unexpected armored division attempting to squeeze through a crowded alleyway. Or the attempt to dump cheap outdated munitions and the promotion of telecommunications world wide can resonate in a new way to develop a new form of warfare. Therefore it is important to understand that the connection feedback and can even alter the identity or content of the node or individual.
In this last section I draw on William Connolly concept of resonance to describe how these shifts can and do occur as well as the similar account of change described by David Kilcullen’s concept the ‘Accidental Guerilla’. The point is to show how uprisings, insurgencies, and even military defeats and technological innovations can occur as the result of unplanned, emergent collectivities, that are embedded in the world but not obviously identifiable as institutions, either state or non-state.

Jairus Victor Grove's CV

2010-07-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

Jairus Victor Grove

2827 N. Calvert
Apt. 3

Baltimore, MD 21218

T 443 9096091

jgrove1@jhu.edu

http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com

Education
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University 2005 to  Present. Double Major: International Relations; Political Theory.

Dissertation: Becoming War: Steps to An Ecology of Global Security. Defense Date, May 2011. Committee: William Connolly, Siba Grovogui, Jane Bennett, Daniel Deudney.

B.A. with University Honors, University of Texas at Austin, Bachelor of Liberal Arts from the History Honors Program, December 2000.
Senior Thesis: The Terror Network or How They Built an Enemy: A Critique of The Reagan Administration’s Policy on International Terrorism.

Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism (SWOTT), University of Oklahoma, Summer 2008.

Selected Publications
“New Materialism,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2011.

“Xenophobia,” Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Blackwell, forthcoming 2011.

"Must We Persist to Continue? Critical Responsiveness Beyond the Limits of the Human Species," in Democracy and Pluralism, Editor Allen Finlayson, Routledge, October 2009. http://tinyurl.com/yljuz6p

“The Effects of Geoengineering on Global Order.” Co-Written with Dr. Daniel Deudney, Submitted. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1490795

“New Wars, New Warriors.” The Contemporary Condition, March 16, 2010. http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/search/label/Jairus%20Victor%20Grove

"Dialogue About Evolving Approaches to Debate", in Privacy Protection Policy: Nowhere to Hide? Wake Forest University Press, 2000.

“McCain’s Broken Promises” October 10, 2008, Huffington Post. http://tinyurl.com/ykrtem7

“The Wars History Left Behind,” September 5, 2004, In The Fray. http://inthefray.org/content/view/688/39

“Heroic Ethics: The Tragedy of Ralph Ellison’s America,” May 16, 2004, In The Fray. http://inthefray.org/content/view/430/37/

Teaching
Instructor, “Terrorism, Insurgency, and the Globalization of Violence” (Senior Seminar), Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Spring 2010.

Teaching Assistant, “Global Security Politics” (Lower Division), Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Led class and gave lectures periodically, discussion section, graded papers and exams, Spring 2006.

Teaching Assistant, “Norms of Force in International Law” (Lower Division), Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Led class and gave lectures periodically, discussion section, graded papers and exams, Fall 2005.

Co-Taught with Daniel Deudney, “Global Security Politics” (Upper Division), Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Led class and lectures, discussion section, graded papers and exams, Fall 2005.

Co-Taught with Daniel Deudney, “American Grand Strategy and the War on Terrorism” (Upper Division), Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Led class and gave lectures periodically, discussion section, graded papers and exams, Fall 2005.

Instructor, “CMS 210 Forensics Workshop” (Lower Division), Communication Studies Department. Designed curriculum and assignments as well as lecturing, teaching, and grading, Spring 2005.

Instructor, “CMS 210 Forensics Workshop” (Lower Division), Communication Studies Department. Designed curriculum and assignments as well as lecturing, teaching, and grading, Fall 2004.

Research
Research Assistant, Prof. Daniel Deudney, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 2005-2006, 2008-2009.

Research Assistant, Prof. Siba Grovogui, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 2007-2010.

Research Assistant, Prof. Lori Leonard, Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 2007-2008.

Selected Conference Presentation and Participation
Paper, International Studies Association, Montreal, “iWar and the Terrain of Modern Combat, March 2011.

Paper, The Political Life of Things, British Imperial War Museum, London, “Improvised Explosive Devices and the New Ecology of War,” December 2010.

Paper, International Studies Association, “From Power To Control: The Real Existence of Networks and the Need For Ambient Security,” February 2010.

Paper, American Political Science Association, "Geoengineering and World Order: Past and Future," September 2009.

Paper, Western Political Science Association, Vancouver, B.C., “The War/Politics  Dilemma: Control Systems and the Urbanization of Warfare in Rio and Sadr City,” March 2009.

Paper, International Studies Association, New York, "Becoming War: Affective Machines and the Biopolitical Aesthetics of Mass Slaughter," February 2009.

Paper, Johns Hopkins Political Science Graduate Student Colloquium, “Becoming War,” May 2008.

Paper, International Studies Association, San Francisco, "Schmitt's Sovereign 'Exception', The American Constitution, and Presidential Nuclear Power," Spring 2008.

Paper, Becoming Plural: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly: Hosted by: The Department of Politics and International Relations, Swansea University, United Kingdom, "Must We Persist to Continue: Animals, Robots, and Freaks," May 11, 2007.

Paper, Johns Hopkins Political Science Graduate Student Colloquium, "Sovereign Hospitality: The Ghettos and Gated Communities of the Cosmopolitan Order," October 6, 2006.

Paper, Global States Conference, U.C. Irvine, “Close Only Counts in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Nearness and Intimacy in the Metaphysics of Cosmopolitan Thought,” May 5, 2006.

Respondent, Johns Hopkins Political Science Graduate Student Colloquium, Bhrigupati Sing, "Preliminary Work for a Future Morality: Spiritual and Political Exercises in Gandhi, Thoreau and Nietzsche," Fall 2008.

Respondent, Johns Hopkins Political Science Graduate Student Colloquium Daniel Levine "‘Shall on make a whore of our sister?’ Genesis 34 as a 'Melian' Parable for Critical IR Theory,” Spring 2008.

Respondent, Discussant, Johns Hopkins Political Science Graduate Student Colloquium Simon Glezos, “The Acceleration of Inertia: Towards a Political Economy of Speed,” Fall 2007.

Current Employment
Harvard University
Debate Coach, 2005 to present.

Johns Hopkins University
Coordinator, International Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University, 2008 to 2009.

Selected Previous Employment
University of Texas at Austin
Director of Programs, University of Texas National Summer Institute in Forensics, 2001 to 2009.

Obama For America
Field Organizer, Florida (Supervisor, Matt Devine) 2008.

Chicago Board of Education, Office Of High School Development
 Director of the Chicago Urban Debate League, 2002 to 2003. The Chicago Debate  Project is an educational initiative that develops and supports debate teams in inner-city public high schools focusing on at risk students. Oversaw 33 high schools, 62 teachers, and approximately 500 high school students.

Midwest Center for Justice, Chicago, IL.
International Political Consultant, April 2002 to January 2003. The Midwest Center for Justice is a private firm exclusively representing death row inmates on their state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus appeals. Drafted International Petition for cases that had claims under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to increase pressure from the European Union and international human rights organizations. The work ended because the clients were removed from the Illinois death row.

Professional Service
Co-Editor, The Contemporary Condition, www.contemporarycondition.blogspot.com

Reviewer, Borderlands, 2010 to present.

Co-Organizer, “New Materialisms”, Conference, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, April 13-14, 2010.

Reviewer, Review of International Political Economy, 2009.

Listserv Moderator, Department of Political Science, 2005 to Present.

Chair, Johns Hopkins Political Science Graduate Student Colloquium, 2007 to 2008.

Awards
Nicole Suveges Fellowship in International Relations, 2010 to 2011.

Johns Hopkins University Deans Teaching Fellowship, 2008 to 2010.

Johns Hopkins University Graduate Student Paper of the Year, 2006 to 2007.

Johns Hopkins University International Relations Fellow, Fall 2005 to Spring 2008.

Coached the 2002 and 2003 National Debate Champions. 2nd Speaker National Debate Tournament and Semi-Finalist, 2000. 2nd Speaker CEDA National Championship, 2000.

Foreign Language Skills
Spanish: Verbal, written, and reading proficiency.

German: Reading competency.

References
Jane Bennett, Chair, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University,  Baltimore, MD, 21218, (410) 516-5230, janebennett@jhu.edu

Terrell Carver, Professor, Department of Politics, University of Bristol, 10 Priory Road,
Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TU, (0117) 928 8826, t.carver@bristol.ac.uk

William E. Connolly, Professor, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, (410) 516-7535, pluma@jhu.edu

Daniel Deudney, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, (410) 516-7538, ddeudney@jhu.edu

Siba N. Grovogui, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, (410) 516-7539, sibagro@jhu.edu

Dallas Perkins, Director of Debate Harvard University, 324 Franklin ST, Cambridge, MA 02139, (617) 306-4514, dperkins@fas.harvard.edu

2009-11-10T11:19:00.001-08:00

Speechless.

Who Fights In Afghanistan When We Leave?

2009-10-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon a little book today. It was, in fact, its shape and color that attracted me to it. I was in a used book store and it was a tiny, hardback, Everyman edition from the late 1940's, no more than half an inch thick. The title was small and faded and too hard to read against its navy blue binding so I picked it up and examined it more closely. It was Hiroshima by John Hersey. It sounded familiar. I think I may have read it as part of a class on the Cold War I took as an undergraduate but I cannot be sure. It was, if only as an object, interesting enough to buy and take home.

I had no recollection of what it was. I assumed it was an account of the first atom bomb. It was. But the first few pages were something different. The book begins with an account of the morning proceeding the bomb. I study and teach about war so I have read the papers and documents surrounding the Manhattan Project. I know the details of the blast, the kilotonage, the side bets between the scientists regarding the risk of igniting the earth's atmosphere. I didn't know that for weeks every conventional B-29 attack on Japan had flown by Hiroshima on the way to its target elsewhere. That night after night the inhabitants of Hiroshima had listened to air raid sirens wondering if the B-29 was just passing through or if this time it was their turn to be fire bombed. According to the author, the anxiety was unbearable. Hiroshima was as of yet untouched and people assumed with each siren their time must have come or worse yet that the Americans were saving something special for them.

Of course we were. The bomb was dropped, 140,000 people were killed, and the world changed forever. Although what struck me about these few introductory pages was that the dropping of the bomb was not in anyway the worst part, it was in some perverse sense a relief. As many people disagree about the reason the bomb was dropped as whether it needed to be dropped, but for the next few paragraphs that is not what concerns me. It is the interminable panic, the slow, seemingly endless terror, a sick feeling in the gut, that at any moment the sky could fall and there is nothing you, as a singular person, could do about it, that makes me sad for our world. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, nothing you do, nothing that you are will change the fact that in an instant you can be reduced to little more than a few teeth or other grizzly remain to be cataloged or counted in some post-mortem ledger.

This, of course, has nothing to do with the atom bomb per se. Airpower, cruise missiles, the "Prompt Global Strike" initiative, can all accomplish this task without a nuclear warhead. What keeps me up at night is not the magnitude of the weapons but the event without warning that strikes like a lightening bolt. More to the point it is the inequality and the regularity of the inequality with which these weapons strike such that only a few populations in the world truly live with the daily dread that they or their loved ones could be next.

I don't believe for one second that this is the tragic inevitability of war. Nor do I believe that this is just some flaw in the mortal condition. Death from above is different than someone kicking in your door or invading your city. There is no countermeasure, no response, no resistance, no possibility for combat. If the bomb arrives there is only what I imagine is a few seconds of shock, sadness and then maybe even relief that you do not have to bear another day of waiting to be visited by the bomb.

This is all a long of way of saying that, for me, the debate over continuing the war in Afghanistan elides a question much more troubling that is not even being asked on the major news networks, much less openly by the Obama administration: Will we continue to send drones to shoot 'Hellfire' missiles into villages between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Will more or less troops even have any bearing on the decision to increasingly automate the war? Is it possible that troop reductions will lead to an increasing reliance on this prosthetic means of warfare?

For all of the changes in strategy, diplomatic posture, and real commitments to a better world in both word and deed by the Obama administration, the first drone attack took place January 23rd 2009, just a few days after Obama was inaugurated. I remember because I had just returned from the Obama Campaign's Staff Party when I read the news update on my computer. Even then in the haze of one of the best nights of my life the news made me sad. So much had changed and yet this continued unabated, seemingly without pause. Since then the attacks have become more regular. In fact the administration has already authorized and ordered more Predator attacks than the Bush administration did the previous year.

I have no idea what a drone sounds like. I imagine it to be like a remote control airplane. Something high-pitched, like an airplane but shriller. What I do know is that every child in the territory of Waziristan must talk about it constantly. In an area of the world in which indoor plumbing and consistent electricity would be 'the future' the boogeyman is not a vampire or some disfigured monster as it was for me growing up in the Texas suburbs. It is a polished, faceless, white UFO armed to kill and operated by remote or automated control.

I am sure, in fact I know, that the statistical success of these weapons is unimpeachable. If the question is do they work than the answer is yes. If by work you mean they, in the words of the Revolution in Military Affairs, 'hit to kill'. I can't argue with the numbers.

However I can't help wondering what the world will be like in ten or twenty years, not just in Waziristan, but in every country we deploy these weapons, if the United States of America becomes synonymous with this faceless, bringer of death. It will not be those maimed or killed that all Americans will have to answer to but the millions that couldn't sleep, that woke up drenched in sweat, or simply wanted to die because they could not stand the waiting. What must it be like to start every day wondering if you are next. If the plane you hear in the distance, the buzz you thought you heard, the unholy dread of a sudden stillness, the oppressive weight of silence, is the arrival of precision American engineering.

War is hell. This is slow sadistic torture. Every flash in the sky, the low hum of an engine, the constant sense of unease, all of it is a waiting game that would make me wish for hell's certainty and finality. This cannot be the best we can do.

Conclusion: Becoming Otherwise than War

2008-03-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

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Chapter 5: Taming the Unknown

2008-03-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Preface: What I mean by Becoming War and Becoming Otherwise than War

2008-03-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Introduction: Discussion of Methodology and What Not

2008-03-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

“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.