Writing About the Shapes of Conflict: War and Technocracy in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

What are the shape(s) of warfare and conflict in the allegedly post-historical, post-human, technocratic age? In a world altered by the technocratic paradigm, has our realist optic, founded on a witnessing that focuses on the surface appearance of things and a rhetoric framed by neo-liberal epistemology and desires, blinded us to the current changeable nature(s) and layerings of war and conflict? War is either seen as an abnormal happening in a faraway country, often defined as a dispute and not a war, or else it alters from a spectacular coordination of brute violence to a socio-economic inducement of fear, panic, social mobilisation/dispersion, and control in the particles of everyday life. During long periods of slow conflict nations leak away, people become metronomes, cultures are sapped of resilience, languages evaporate, existences are rendered irrelevant. How does writing bear witness to this spectrum of violence and reveal the technocratic paradigm underlying the sutures?