War Machine Research Articles

Religion without Content in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

Religion and science, war and peace, love and hate, chance and determinacy – these are a few of the many topics Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Vol. 1, 1931 / Vol. 2 Part 1, 1933)1 – an unfinished philosophic and poetic masterpiece spanning more than one thousand pages – addresses, as it communicates the narrator’s efforts to think more precisely and more accurately about elemental aspects of the human experience. In his monumental tome, Robert Musil presents numerous figures who espouse a broad range of ideas proliferating within the society of “Kakanien”, representative of the Habsburg Empire in 1913/1914. Musil’s fictional rendition of this milieu focuses particularly on the intellectual mood pulsating throughout Austro-Hungarian society during the twelve months preceding the outbreak of World War One; the novel’s first paragraph ends with the following statement: “Es war ein schöner Augusttag des Jahres 1913” (9). In July of the following year, mayhem breaks out. What were people thinking before the violence erupted? What influential ideas were proliferating and, indeed, may have been adopted prior to the catastrophe known as the Great War? Meticulously and perspicaciously, Musil textually articulates – and experiments with – those concepts permeating throughout the pre-war Austro-Hungarian empire, in order to investigate which of them may have been fallaciously used and, consequently, led to the ensuing disaster. Simultaneously, through his narration, he offers an aesthetic framework for considering the possibilities of more refined thinking, which, if embraced and actualized, may have brought about a more intellectually consistent society that would have been able to stave off the horrific crisis that occurred. Contextually, it is important to keep in mind that he writes about 1913/1914 from the perspective of 1931/1933: the “Weimarer Republik” and the “Erste Republik Österreich” are both on the verge of dissolution; fascism in Germany and Austria is on the rise; and the “Militarisierung Deutschlands” is readily evident.2 Musil is keenly aware of the similarity in circumstances. For this reason, he projects the failures apparent in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s back onto 1913/1914, when the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Empire could not provide a counterforce to the developing war machine.3 Writing in the shadow of a past war and with the looming sense of imminent danger, Musil generates impassioned essays,4 endeavoring to think in an informed, dynamic, and new manner about the situation in which he finds himself, hoping that his exploration of ideas will actualize the dissemination of peace.5

When the war machine produces its enemies: making sense of the Afghan situation through British airpower

ABSTRACTHow is the protracted and non-decisive Afghan conflict understood by the British military personnel in charge of air support? Based on a study of autobiographical sources and relying on Bruno Latour’s anthropological work, this article argues that personnel produce a specific self-justificatory culture based on what can be achieved by the technologies (ammunition, weapons, aircraft) used. This article highlights how technologies become an ‘actant’, influencing the way air personnel elaborate representations of their role and their enemies. More specifically, this analysis underlines how airpower technologies contribute to the framing of Others as depoliticized enemies (i.e. targets) to be destroyed by machines. Machines and weapons are not neutral instruments but rather devices that participate in the normalization of the use of force.

Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat

Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat

The War Machine as Chronotope: Temporality in Child-Soldier Fiction

This essay considers the child-soldier figure in contemporary African fiction as a vehicle for a critique of modernity as a particular time consciousness and of its attendant geopolitics. In the work of novelists Ahmadou Kourouma, Chris Abani, Abdourahman Waberi, and others, experiments in narrative temporality and an explicit negation of the temporality of Bildung represent the vexed relationship to futurity in those regions of the global South most disadvantaged by the long history of their entanglement with modernity. Yet, in these works, this turning away from the temporality of modernity instantiated in the Bildungsroman is not about turning away from futurity itself. Instead, the child-soldier figure yokes together a critical attention to the historical impediments to African futures with an insistence on the possibility of alternative futures.

Typewriting as War Machine: Robert Duncan between Self- and Anti-Publishing

Even if publishing one’s poetic works with New Directions, James Laughlin’s New-York-based publishing house, is still seen by many in the experimental poetry world as the ultimate accolade, underground alternatives turn out to have been even more appealing to a marginal figure like the Bay Area poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988). A quick glance at the author’s bibliography unravels striking shifts in his publishing policy. Before and between his major New Direction volumes, the poet produced a whole series of small, hardly circulated chapbooks. These small publications not only reflect his commitment to the small press scene, but also convey a forceful point about the writer’s autonomy from the empire of publishing.

Terror, Territoriality, Temporality: Hypermedia Events in the Age of Islamic State

Considering the group that calls itself Islamic State (IS) as a “war machine,” an ever-shifting combination of humans and technology, this article articulates, from a Deleuzian perspective, terror, territoriality, and temporality as constitutive of events. It explores terrorism as a hypermedia event that resists conceptual containment in Dayan and Katz’s three categories of “contest,” “conquest,” or “coronation.” It builds on work that recognizes the globality of media events. The article uses the rise of IS to explore events as a peculiar articulation of space and time, and draws on the global “network-archive” that IS created (its digital footprint), the referentiality of which means that we experience IS depredations as one continuous “global event chain.” In this analysis, media events are a productive force that articulates territoriality and temporality through affect.

“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression inCoriolanus

“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression in<i>Coriolanus</i>

Only Cyborgs and Cockroaches

In 2013 a cyborg-cockroach which was advertised as “RoboRoach, the world's first commercially available cyborg” appeared at the market. RoboRoach is a live cockroach whose moves can be remotely controlled via a smartphone app, thanks to the electronic device that has been surgically applied to its body. It was promoted as a “science kit” for children. Two years later cyborg cockroach gained a completely new role. Teams of researchers, engineers and entomologists form renowned universities have been testing their possibilities to access areas that are difficult for humans to reach such as earthquake sites or nuclear disaster zones. From the smart toy, cyborg-cockroaches advanced to the rescue squads that could, for instance, be navigated to record and find human life in disaster zones. However, we can easily imagine, I will argue here, that the next (if not already present) iteration of the cyborg-cockroach will be for military purposes abused in the war machine, as well as another symptom of the mode of governmentality that Gilles Deleuze has defined as “the society of control”.Relating to the question of “turning animal” the above mentioned example offers the opportunity to investigate the unstable relations and problematic distinctions between humans, animals and machines, through the concept of cyborg. Here, I would like to introduce a decolonial perspective as well as the topic of necropolitics, into post-humanist debate, in order to question who has the position (the privilege?) to proclaim “the human” as obsolete and what is the politics that is revealed in such a theoretical and practical move. Who can turn the cockroach into remotely controlled cyborg and what does this “turning into” mean for humans and non humans alike?

DIGITAL AESTHETIC WAR MACHINES IN SOCIETIES OF CONTROL: PERRIN AND CLUZAUD’S OCEANS (2009)

This article begins by reflecting on what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define as aesthetic nomadic war machines, how these war machines relate to the Bergsonian concept of duration, and how they operate to counter State apparatus thought. Examples provided, drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, include the minor literature of Franz Kafka, the intensity art of Francis Bacon, the becoming-animal music of Olivier Messiaen, and what Deleuze identified as modern political cinema – exemplified in the films of Jean Rouch among others. Also thematised is Deleuze’s theorisation of film, particularly its transgressive potential, in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Focus then shifts to discussion of the further development of scholarship on these ideas, particularly taking into account the rise of digital technologies alongside what Deleuze termed societies of control. Central to such scholarship is contention surrounding whether or not digital media are capable of communicating duration and countering State apparatus thought in a manner akin to their analogue predecessors, in a way that makes the creation of digital war machines possible. After touching on this debate and taking a standpoint in relation to it, the article then moves on to consider Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s film Oceans (2009) as a digital aesthetic war machine.

War machines par excellence: the discrepancy between threat and control in the weaponisation of infectious agents

ABSTRACTAccounts of security threats and deadly potentials of biological weapons abound while examples of biological weapons in use are rare. Why has a weapon with such great potentials been used so little? Explanations that hinge on technical capabilities, deterrence or diplomatic disarmament successes are insufficient as answers to this question – something else is going on. This article extends Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a war machine to explain the discrepancy between the threat of biological weapons and the ability to leverage that threat geopolitically. Microbes resist control and instrumentality despite the best efforts of synthetic biology and the biosecurity state, and this, the article argues, makes them a war machine par excellence. Taking pathogenic microbes seriously as a security threat while also taking seriously how they resist being weaponised according to state desires highlights the political leverage of non-human actors in international relations and maps an assemblage stretching from lab to battlefield that humans struggle to manage, much less control. Through its analysis, the article offers a generative amendment to conventional framings of biological warfare as both a conceptual and a security issue and offers a new perspective on entanglements of war and public health.

Lethal visions: the eye as function of the weapon

ABSTRACTIn measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a ‘logistics of perception’, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking) and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders is concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has however extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light itself through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation is to be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb.

As it is, and: Capitulation

As it is, and: Capitulation Jen Hofer (bio) As it is As it is for all humans, she said, and it was undeniably true, many other humans interacted with them. The inky sky swells to incorporate us, accommodating even our most baroque market forces. The concave sky recedes, diminishing returns, staunch support via tourniquet and assembly line. As if, she claimed, totally within reason, they became infected with something that quietly added genetic material to all parts of their body as it slowly mutated all of their cells into some other shape. Suspension of disbelief. Bridges, rails, birds, trees damaged by natural forces. The story we were about to relate when something else happened. Suspension of belief. Floating colonies, lost hives, transcontinental cargo systems, connective tissues ripped from their anchoring bone or stone. The comment we failed to make while we had the chance. The moment, as moments will, passed. They recognized, she in turn noted, and rightfully so, the specificity of their thoughts and this helped them to understand that their thoughts were of this time, this moment. And how in the history of the human, they were short-term and historically and politically specific thoughts. Pretty was as pretty did, we might have said under other circumstances. But circumstances were what they were so instead we bombed the fuck out of them. When they wrote, she wrote [End Page 163] with incontrovertible accuracy, they wrote as war machine. When they wrote, they wrote as ideological state apparatus. When they wrote, they wrote as military-industrial complex. The list went on and on. Something else might include raindrops falling up in a flurrying motion, an abandoned radio station, the fact that most things are by the side of the road already or end up there, falling in love or falling out of love, interacting with humans in a crisp or cloudy or pollinated way, interacting with humans in a business sort of way with specific interactive intent that may or may not be satisfied, interacting with humans in an animal way which, it can be definitively argued, is a human way. Because what they really wanted, she indicated with utterly justified zeal, was constantly to be saying they were complicit with all sorts of things, even things that happened without their consent but happened nonetheless and continued to happen also without their consent. Something else might include the tone of voice one minimum wage worker uses to address another, the posture a person assumes as they step up to the counter, the exact change deposited in a machine dispensing plastic cards used only once to transit the city at medium-high speeds, the misplaced apostrophe that makes us possess when we want to contract and vice versa, the store called “little finger” selling something indiscernible to an undesiring clientele. Something else might include insects having multiple legs, waving and quavery, pests against the passiflora vine polka dotted yet not pleasing, rather alarming, a claim to be poison- free which points to poisons nearly everywhere else. Something else might be ubiquitously available for free, but we just don’t see it. Something else yet again might comprise an inverted pyramid scheme, a spilled funnel, a tunnel which dead ends into a small house on the site of a former mine, a non-dynamic field of statistical observation punctuated by the unlikely sizzling sound of crickets on a heavily trafficked avenue, actuated by a false-bottomed beginning with its lid propped open. They wrote for themselves, she pointed out quite correctly, because they wrote to figure out things that they could not figure out otherwise, things they could not figure out just by thinking. They needed writing. They needed [End Page 164] poetry because it reshaped their mind, because it resorted things in different, sometimes beautiful, sometimes troubling patterns. They especially needed poetry to think with others. But is not need relative? There are lots of reasons this might not matter. The shift in tone or timbre of the air as it sweeps up our skirt in late-summer tangles, the not-blue of blueberries, the not-blue of blood, an illness with sudden onset and no cure, an illness with...

Os Brasis na Histoire des Deux Indes do abade Raynal

Resumo Este artigo compara e analisa a parte sobre o Brasil na Histoire philosophique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, de Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, nas edições de 1770, 1774 e 1780. Pretende-se confrontar as ideias difundidas pela historiografia corrente sobre esta que foi a obra setecentista mais lida à época, com os juízos que, nas suas várias edições, vão surgindo acerca da América portuguesa. Para efeito, recortou-se alguns temas: primeiramente, os habitantes e os povoadores desse Novo Mundo, isto é, ameríndios, depois, negros e portugueses criolos - colonos nascidos no Brasil de ascendência portuguesa -, e, por fim, a administração, destacando-se o período pombalino e o Diretório dos Índios. Contra as opiniões mais difundidas, que apresentam a obra como uma "máquina de guerra" disparada contra a opressão e o colonialismo, o discurso de Raynal, particularmente na última edição (1780), menos coerente mas com uma maior riqueza de informações e novos juízos de valor, revela-se surpreendentemente benevolente em relação ao Brasil colonial. Ao contrário dos repetidos lugares comuns, os tópicos da miscigenação dos colonos, da libertação dos índios e da alforria dos escravos, explicação para a ausência de revoltas, antecipam os temas do luso-tropicalismo freyriano.

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Women and the “War Machine” in the Desert Romances of E. M. Hull and Rosita Forbes

ABSTRACTE. M. Hull's bestseller The Sheik (1919) became a transatlantic phenomenon in 1921, but as its retiring author was to admit, it was written simply to relieve tension while she waited at home with her husband away contributing to the war effort. This article considers the desert romance in light of nomadic theory as a response to the First World War that engages with the glorification of the Middle East campaigns and manipulates the figure of the nomad, popularized by T. E. Lawrence's part in the Arab revolt, to articulate women's heightened sense of estrangement from the nation and their hopes to become active agents in rebuilding British national identity in the post-war era.

Game embrace siegecraft in "protect the walls!"

Demonstrated during the Digital Heritage Expo in Granada, Protect the Walls! is an educational project that deals with the technology and tactics of siege of the 4th century BC. It was conceived as a serious game in order to facilitate enjoyment by younger persons, while maintaining its scientific validity and historical reliability. It is a multi-sensory stereoscopic experience aimed at transmitting cultural content not in a descriptive manner but looking for emotional involvement by the public. During the game experience, the user gets to know the ancient war machines and the strategies of attack and defense in a siege, the architectural characteristics of the towers and the city walls of Paestum (once called Poseidonia). The dramatic storytelling of Protect the Walls! is also developed through a short but spectacular introductory movie, completely realized in CG. The game runs in a VR environment and requires gesture based interaction to be played.

Yuma Totani. Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 274 pp. ISBN 9781107087620. $75.50.

[Extract] In her most recent book, Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions, Yuma Totani provides an impressive analysis of fourteen trials of senior Japanese military personnel prosecuted by the Allies in the aftermath of the Pacific War. These fourteen trials were part of a massive number of trials conducted by the Allies throughout the Asia-Pacific region from 1945-1952. Those who were convicted of war crimes received either a lengthy jail sentence, or were executed. Although not a stated objective, and perhaps more unwittingly conveyed by Totani, is the inescapable notion that the Pacific War was a collision of colonial interests between Japan and the Allies. Japan belligerently seized territory and resources from the Dutch, the US, the UK, the French, and the Australians to feed its massive war machine in northern China. This rapacious conquest caused a great deal of humiliation for the Allies whom themselves had been the colonial masters throughout the Asia-Pacific for many years. When it came time for the trials, no doubt this humiliation influenced the way the trials were conducted.

Memory Remains: Haunted by Home in Lebanese (Post)war Fiction

This article examines the dialectics of memory and oblivion in two Arabic novels deeply imbricated in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and its aftermath: Ghādah al-Sammān’s (b. 1942) wartime novel Kawābīs Bayrūt (Beirut Nightmares), first published in 1976; and Ilyās Khūrī’s (b. 1948) postwar novel Yālū (Yalo), first published in 2002. Characters in both novels sift through fragments of their wartime memories, selectively forgetting some and remembering others in order to craft particular textual narratives for themselves that impede, enable, critique, and/or complicate the possibility of their belonging to the postwar Lebanese nation. Ruins are strewn throughout the novels. Instead of embracing ruins as nostalgic markers as did the classical bards of Pre-Islamic Arabia, the narrator of Kawābīs Bayrūt conjures up their innovators, such as al-Mutanabbī and Abū Tammām, to whose introspective meditations on ruins al-Sammān adds her own textured rereading of ruination atop their visceral rejection of all things nostalgia-infused. As the protagonists are continually entangled in (and are produced by) the violence of the war machine, they persistently struggle to integrate into their respective realities, revealing the contradiction at the heart of so-called ‘national belonging.’

Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science

Through recourse to Gilles Deleuze’s short polemical essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and the accompanying interview (in Negotiations) on ‘Control and Becoming’, this article attempts to map out the conceptual contours of an artistic war machine (Deleuze’s ‘new weapons’) that might be pitched against control and also play a role in the more ethico-political function of the constitution of a people (or, what Deleuze calls subjectification). Along the way a series of other Deleuzian concepts are introduced and outlined – with an eye to their pertinence for art practice and, indeed, for any more general ‘thought’ against control. At stake here is the development of a concept of fictioning – the production of alternative narratives and image-worlds – and also the idea of art practice as a form of myth-science, exemplified by Burroughs’ cut-up method. It is argued that these aesthetic strategies might offer alternative models for a subjectivity that is increasingly standardized and hemmed in by neoliberalism.

Rabelais's Engins: War Machines, Analogy, and the Anxiety of Invention in the Quart Livre

This article explores the ways in which war machines are elaborated within Rabelais's narrative, and how they align with – or challenge – the moralising discourse surrounding technology in the mid-sixteenth century. Through close reading of the Gaster and Andouilles episodes, it argues that the ambiguity of the term engin, which is used to refer both to inventive ingenuity and its physical products, provides a rich seam in Rabelais's fourth book for the exploration of the boundary between nature and artifice. As such antitheses come under strain, so on the other hand do analogous pairings prove to reveal significant differences. Engins are caught up, in Rabelais's text, in a complex web of associations that includes poetic and technological invention, political leadership, religious worship, and, repeatedly, food. As this web of themes is mapped, it becomes apparent that tripe, in particular, plays a prominent role in mediating a series of symbolic relationships. From the stomach-god whose actions are described by the refrain ‘Et tout pour la trippe’, to the army of tripe sausages who worship a flying pig, the traditional epic association of battle and banquet is recast by Rabelais's own extraordinary engin.