Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:17:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: geopolitics article part 2 - war on terror?


Waging war on a noun11
      
      As one might expect from such a discourse, the core concepts are self-contradictory and disastrously vague. “War on terrorism” is a good example, because terrorism is basically war conducted by asymmetrically situated agents; a “war on terrorism” is then remarkably close to a “war on war”. (It is perhaps indicative that it is often abbreviated as “war on terror”: the focus of war is not a real enemy but a pervasive emotional state). The concept of terrorism is aptly described by Hardt and Negri as ‘a crude conceptual and terminological reduction which is rooted in a police mentality’12.  The “war on terrorism” is built around a classic example of Schmittian “decision”: the division of the world into “us and them”, friend and enemy, one might say, master-signifier and repressed Real. IN this way, the centralised assemblage of American global power reasserts the reactive construction of symbolic and territorial space – the one that on 911 was symbolically lost for a while –
 around its own master-signifier. However, the very demand for such an assertion demonstrates that the master-signifier does not in fact quilt the field, that it is undermined by rhizomatic flows, which exceed its controls.
      A recent analysis by the Midnight Notes collective demonstrates the continuity of the goals of the Iraq war with the extension of a world system as conceived by authors such as Wallerstein and Frank.  The idea of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) falling into the hands of terrorists provides a basis for treating with suspicion any instances of “development” which are not controlled either by western powers or multinational corporations, since industrial facilities could in theory be used to produce WMD’s.  In addition, the invasion of Iraq served US goals to neutralise the power of OPEC and normalise the position of oil as a commodity extracted through exploitative relations between North and South.  Referring to US policy, the authors note:
This argument means that the US government has taken on the role of overseeing and vetoing all forms of industrial development throughout the world in perpetuum. Autonomous industrial development not controlled by an approved MNC by any government is out of order. Hence this "war on terrorism" doctrine becomes a basis for the military control of the economic development policies of any government on the planet. . . What is at stake is the shape of planetary industrial development for decades to come. The combination of the restoration of oil-driven accumulation with the imposition of the Bush doctrine on global industrial development ensures that the "suburban-petroleum" mode of life we are living in the U.S. (and increasingly in WesternEurope) will lead to endless war.13
While the goals of the war are in continuity with older aims, the approach taken in this war is of more recent vintage.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan largely follow the model of non-war outlined in Baudrillard’s analysis of the first Gulf War. Rather than being collisions of two powers located symmetrically within a single discourse, they involve the feints and counterfeints of two sides seperated by radical discursive difference. America and its allies were in both cases attempting to impose a discourse of control embodying a logic of deterrence. This is a logic where everything is already decided and where overwhelming force is the guarantor of ultimate meaning. Their opponents, however, adopted tactics which involved anything but direct confrontation; in this way, they slipped away from the logic of deterrence, the war is over, yet still American troops were being killed. Baudrillard argues, because media images are now the continuation of war by other means. War, the most
 concentrated form of violence, has become cinematographic and televisual, just like the mechanically produced image.

The true belligerents are those who thrive on the ideology of the truth of this war, despite the fact that the war itself exerts its ravages on another level, through faking, through hyper reality, the simulacrum, through all these strategies of psychological deterrence that make play with facts and images, with the precession of the virtual over the real, virtual time over real time, and the inexorable confusion between the two14.
Deleuze and Guattari make a similar point, while insisting that the “total peace” of deterrence through non-war, ‘the peace of Terror or Survival’, is every bit as barbaric and authoritarian as the wars it replaces.  ‘Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still.  The war machine has taken control of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are no more than objects or means adapted to that machine’15.  The war machine, taking global order as its aim, comes to reign over the axiomatics of the world system, so that ‘the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had failed’, in constructing the world as a single deterritorialising-reterritorialising space16.
      In conjunction, the systems of control erected in Iraq and Afghanistan involve an uneasy tension between arborescent and rhizomatic structures which attest to severe weaknesses in American control. In both areas, local control is largely held by rulers who are sometimes termed “warlords”, “tribal chiefs” and “local dignitaries” in official discourse. Such rulers are ambiguous figures, because they represent American imperialism only by locating themselves in fragmentary local discourses. Both their control and their loyalty are frequently doubtful. Meanwhile, American troops have established symbolic control by occupying key urban centres and economic resources such as oilfields. This symbolic control reasserts the primacy of the American master-signifier, but even then it is ambiguous: witness the haste with which American flags were removed from Iraqi monuments after being raised by the invading forces in Iraq. It is an open secret that American control in Afghanistan does
 not extend beyond the borders of Kabul, and that the Taleban are still in control of large areas of the countryside.  A similar situation is now coming into being in Iraq, with entire cities such as Fallujah and Najaf established as no-go areas for American troops.  In other words, American occupation perpetuates the situation of indeterminacy: America’ s opponents may not (yet) be able to expel its forces militarily, but by maintaining the situation of uncertainty, they prevent American “victory” and the re-establishment of hegemony and of stable subsumption.  Rather, one sees American forces bogged down in situations which confirm Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s analysis, as Bruce Hoffman makes clear.
The Iraqi insurgency today appears to have no clear leader (or leadership), no ambition to seize and actually hold territory (except ephemerally, as in the recent cases of Fallujah and Najaf), no unifying ideology, and, most important, no identifiable organization. Rather, what we find in Iraq is the closest manifestation yet of "netwar," a concept defined in 1992 by the RAND analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt as unconventional warfare involving flat, segmented networks instead of the pyramidal hierarchies and command-and-control systems (no matter how primitive) that have governed traditional insurgent organizations.17 
In the context of the growing reliance of US power, and of resistance to US power, on local ethnic and religious allegiances, it is crucial to recall Partha Chatterjee’s remarks on the discursive exclusions constructed by the imposition of nationalism and development discourse in India (the Indian variety of the process of hegemony and subsumption discussed above). According to Chatterjee, the construction of the nation occurred alongside the emergence of various “others”, which in various ways exceeded national identity and could not be subsumed into it. Identities constructed around class, caste, ethnicity, gender, local identities, and so on, became the focus of loyalties, which could not be controlled by the official system. Ethnic affiliation provides a sense of security in a divided society, reciprocal help, and protection against neglect of one’s interests by strangers. As Horowitz argues,
Because ethnicity tops cultural and symbolic issues- basic notions of identity and the self, of individual and group worth and entitlement- the conflicts it generates are intrinsically less amenable to compromise than those revolving around material issues….In deeply divided societies ethnicity- in contrast to other lines of cleavage, such as class or occupation- appear permanent and all encompassing, predetermining who will be granted and denied access to power and resources.18 
Some interesting questions then inevitably should be asked. As Vievienne Jabri discusses in her work Discourses on Violence these involve the processes which constitute the individual identity, how does identity come to be framed in exclusionist terms and how does the inclusion-exclusion dichotomy result in the emergence of and support for violent human conflict19.  Ali Khan similarly argues that the construction of exclusionary walls and boundaries satisfies a long-standing, apparently primordial human inclination to maintain self-identity by continually creating an “other”20.  Deleuze and Guattari would challenge the primordiality of such forms of discourse, but their pervasiveness today is undeniable.  The world system has become increasingly dependent on loyalties based on identities and boundaries, in order to construct patronage networks and thereby exercise control.  In contexts such as Afghanistan and Iraq, such networks are the only means whereby arborescent structures can
 be erected atop a diffusion of rhizomatic forces. Such themes are also pervasive in making “global war” a possibility.  The discourse of war aims at the construction of a mythology based on inclusion and exclusion. This categorisation sharply contrasts the insider from the outsider/s who are the “others” or the deserving enemy.
      The discourse of the construction of unity through identity and sameness has dangers for those who resist the world system.  To be a dissenting voice is to be an outsider, who is often branded as a traitor to the cause and therefore, deserving of sacrifice at the mythical altar of solidarity. What would previously have been blurred social boundaries become sharpened primarily through a discursive focus upon features both symbolic and material, which divide communities to the extent that the desire for destruction of the enemy is perceived to be the only legitimate or honorable course to follow.
      

		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.

--- StripMime Warning --  MIME attachments removed --- 
This message may have contained attachments which were removed.

Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list.

--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- 
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---