War and the Body

Militarisation, Practice and Experience

Kevin McSorley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136173547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences.

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.

Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this book brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. It focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, the book promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body.

This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of war studies, security studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies, politics and IR in general.

1 War and the body

Kevin McSorley

Introduction

I don’t know if anyone really knows war until it lives inside of them … This is my country, the country of my parents, my family, my friends, my future. And the war has gotten into all of these. I know everyone has suffered a loss in this war: a family member killed, a loved one captured and never heard of again. But it goes much deeper than this, to the very heart of the country, to my very heart. When I walk on the road, I carry nervousness with me as a habit, as a way of being. When I hear a sharp noise, I do not stop and ask ‘what is that?’ like a normal person … This lives in me – it’s a part of my being, a constant companion

(young Mozambican woman, cited in Nordstrom 1998: 104)

This book places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war, giving embodiment and bodily issues an analytic recognition they have often been denied in the annals and ontology of conventional war scholarship. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, from the grieving relative to the exhausted aid worker, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human. The opening description of war provides one vivid illustration of how war ‘makes sense’ at a fundamentally embodied and affective level. For the young Mozambican narrator, war is an anticipatory nervousness that constantly ‘lives inside’ her, a somatic knowing that underpins her every thought and move. As Nordstrom (1998: 108) argues, something ‘far more complex, multifaceted and enduring than the formal boundaries of war demarcated in military cultures takes root in the quotidian life of a country at war’. It is this ontology of war that the scholarship in this book seeks to elucidate and explore – the countless affective, sensory and embodied ways through which war lives and breeds.¹

Shaw (2005: 40–1) argues that ‘the defect of most social theory of war and militarism is … that it has not considered war as practice, i.e. what people actually do in war’. This book aims to address that omission via an explicit focus upon the embodied practices, structures of feeling and lived experiences through which war and militarism take place. While this will include the examination of specific modes of embodying force and practices of ‘warfighting’, the analysis extends both temporally and spatially to consider the bodily preparations for, and the corporeal aftermaths of, war – both within militaries and beyond. Indeed, an analytic focus upon the body tends to render any clear demarcation of discrete war zones and times problematic,² emphasising instead the enactment and reproduction of war through affective dispositions, corporeal careers, embodied suffering and somatic memories that endure across time and space.³

Furthermore, it is not just the bodies of combatants and victims that are produced by and central to war, but the bodies of veterans, witnesses, pacifists, patriots and many others. Given the global nature of contemporary economic, migratory and media flows, few in today’s interconnected world remain completely isolated from war’s touch (Sylvester 2011). While in post-conscription Western states with increasingly professionalised and privatised militaries, there may be less direct disciplinary engagement with civilian bodies – leading some commentators to have proposed the existence of ‘post-military society’ (Shaw 1991) and ‘post-heroic warfare’ (Luttwak 1995) – many such states have been marked by a profound remilitarisation at a wider political and cultural level in recent decades, a mobilisation that has often been intensely embodied and emotional. Ó Tuathail (2003: 859), for example, describes the political channelling of ‘the affective tsunami unleashed by the terrorist attacks of 2001’. He argues that 9/11 was processed by many Americans in a fundamentally visceral manner, becoming a ‘somatic marker’ – effectively a ‘gut instinct’ shaping perception and judgement below the threshold of rational, deliberative discussion – that would subsequently be appropriated to legitimate the military invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Stahl (2010) relatedly understands the inculcation of contemporary consumers into the burgeoning interactive culture of ‘militainment’ in terms of affective and kinaesthetic entrainment, a seduction whose pleasures are ultimately felt at the expense of developing any other critical capacities to engage with matters of military might. It is through such mundane cultural practices that the legitimacy of having vast military force – what the anthropologist Catherine Lutz (2009) refers to as the ‘military normal’ – assumes an implicitness, becomes something not thought but routinely felt in everyday life. Such examples point to the need to think about the reproduction of war, and war readiness, in terms of a militarisation of sensation, affect and the body that operates over time and across multiple and broad constituencies.⁴

The remainder of this chapter will concentrate on exploring the relative neglect of embodiment in many conventional discussions of war and the increasingly problematic and paradoxical status of the body in recent Western wars.

The paradox of war and the body

For Elaine Scarry, the key paradox that constitutes the structure of war is that ‘while the central fact of war is injuring and the central goal of war is to out-injure the opponent, the fact of injuring tends to be absent from strategic and political descriptions of war’ (1985: 12). Although war is ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’ (p. 71), the conventions of strategic, military and political discussions of war are nonetheless often marked by a profound disavowal and transference of this embodied nature and the bodily mutilation at its heart. For Scarry then, the continuing domination of warfare ‘requires both the reciprocal infliction of massive injury and the eventual disowning of the injury so that its attributes can be transferred elsewhere, as they cannot be permitted to cling to the original site of the wound, the human body’ (p. 64). The idioms and metaphors of strategic thought, such as describing armies as a single combatant or machine, mean that real human injury becomes no longer recognisable or interpretable in such discussions.

As Scarry recognises, such abstraction may seem appropriate for a mode of strategic thinking whose key didactic goal is to propose universal, scientific laws of warfare which will inform how future wars can be waged to secure political advantage most effectively, a position traditionally associated with the founding figure of strategic thought, Carl von Clausewitz.⁵ Nonetheless, this instrumental common sense of strategic discourse – war as a form of policy-making – rules other concerns and ways of knowing out of court. Carol Cohn’s (1987) ethnographic study of nuclear defence strategists vividly illustrates the ways in which one such hermetically sealed, techno-strategic discourse – of ‘limited nuclear war’ – radically excludes the asking of certain questions and the expression of certain values. Claims to legitimacy within this rational world came from technical expertise and ‘the disciplined purging of emotional valences that might threaten objectivity’ (p. 717). For Cohn, it was ‘not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns … no one will claim that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand’ (pp. 711–12).⁶

For Martin Shaw (2003), although war may be conceived as strategy it is always experienced as slaughter: ‘War is both the rational, purposive activity that strategic thought guides and the necessarily unpredictable, uncontrollable, irrationally destructive clash of opposing wills that combatants and victims experience – and humanist critics emphasize’ (p. 271). However, it is not just that abstract strategic thinking does not tell us much about this embodied experience of slaughter that is central to war, but Shaw argues that it is also complicit, that in the twentieth century ‘strategy has come to contribute to slaughter on a scale unimaginable even in the bloody era on which Carl von Clausewitz reflected’ (p. 269). Following Bauman’s (1990) analysis of the dehumanising tendencies of modern thought and state power – particularly the atrophy of the moral imagination in bureaucratic systems – Shaw argues that modernity deeply reinforced the tendencies of ‘rational’ strategy to produce ‘irrational’ outcomes. Barbarity has been the outcome, rather than the antithesis of, strategic thinking and planning in modern war.

The fundamentally dual character of war was most salient in the tendency of the industrialised total wars of the twentieth century to become degenerate not only in their treatment of soldiers’ bodies as ‘cannon fodder’, as human materiel for the industrial war machine, but also in their increasing targeting and killing of civilians as well as enemy combatants (Shaw 2005). Total social mobilisation and total destruction were crucially linked in the industrialised mode of warfare, as the supply side and civilian morale became seen as legitimate targets, particularly for the strategic yet indiscriminate area bombing of airpower. Given the enormity of the death tolls even winning seemed scant redemption at times, the mechanised slaughter so barbarous as to challenge the very belief in the utility of war itself (Coker 2001; Kassimeris 2006). Such degeneracy continued in many of the wars of decolonisation during the post-Second World War decades. However, as these wars began to fail, and particularly when Western casualties began to seem disproportionate to their outcomes, public opinion in the West increasingly turned against them. Vietnam in particular marked a watershed in post-Second World War warfighting, the images of US soldiers in body bags and the burned, naked body of the young Vietnamese girl Pan Thj Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm bombing cementing a verdict of the war as illegitimate and inhumane. For Shaw (2005: 6), ‘the use of napalm … came to represent the inhumanity of airpower’. Napalm clung to the original site of the wound, the human body, burning beneath the skin, fatally undermining the war’s sense of morality and purpose.

The revolution in military affairs

The eventual response to the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ was the emergence of a new way of warfighting in the 1990s (Shaw 2005). At this time, analysis among the strategic community focused on what became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) – ‘the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems [that] combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict’ (Krepenevich 1994: 30). The RMA was to be a technologically determined revolution where the power of sophisticated information, communications and surveillance technology, the flexibility of network-centric approaches and the accuracy of ever more advanced weaponry would transform old military doctrines and practices, rescuing war from its previous degeneracy and re-legitimating it as a viable instrument of policy.

The 1991 Gulf War was to be a key proving ground for this model of warfare and its distinctive form of military media operations.⁷ Notoriously, the signature theme of much Western television reportage of the war was the replaying of pilots’ display-screen footage of the so-called ‘smart’ bombing technology. The dominant narrative framing such military-supplied imagery was a largely celebratory account of surgical strikes that accurately targeted and cleanly destroyed enemy locations, without obvious casualties. For Margot Norris, the effect of this militarisation of audience perception, a cultural enrolment into a spectacularly martial but highly sanitised point of view, was ‘to make Operation Desert Storm murderously destructive yet simultaneously corpseless’ (2000: 230). Exacerbated by the fact that no body counts were publicised by the US military, the dead and injured completely failed to become figures of phenomenology in the mediascape of the first Gulf War. Wounding and killing seemed hardly to exist in this abstract virtual register, where targeting grids and nebulous pixelated forms flared and vanished on pilots’ monitors and viewers’ television screens alike. For Norris, ‘the war passed through the public imagination and memory like a video phantom’ (p. 240), the almost total disappearance of victims’ bodies from such accounts ultimately signalling ‘the human body’s derealisation by technological media under military control at the end of the twentieth century’ (p. 231).

Such hi-tech convergence of the modes of representation and destruction was central to the emergence of what James Der Derian (2009) ironically named ‘virtuous war’: ‘Fought in the same manner as they are represented, by real-time surveillance and TV “live feeds”, virtuous wars promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars’ (p. xxxi). The increasingly symbiotic networks and mimetic discourses of military practice, media surveillance, computer simulation and global militainment had led to a situation whereby ‘virtuous war had taken on the properties of a game, with high production values, mythic narratives, easy victories and few bodies’ (p. 272). As Der Derian notes, behind all the technological wizardry, the brutal slaughter of enemy combatants through intensive and repetitive bombardment certainly did not disappear. However, the key strategic principle, and ideological motif, in the legitimation of this new way of war was precision. For Shaw (2005: 11), ‘precision subsumes the violence of war under its rational schema: it contains the bloody mess’. Precision aimed to uphold the spatial, temporal and embodied demarcations necessary for the continuation of war: between war zones and areas of peace, between ‘major combat’ operations and aftermath, and crucially between enemy combatant and protected civilian. Increasingly conducted under the intense multi-layered surveillance of global media, civil society and international law, Shaw argues that there were some genuine successes in recent Western wars in reducing civilian casualties through focused targeting policies and stricter rules of engagement.⁸ However, such reductions could never be complete. Human errors and targeting mistakes, attacks on ‘dual-use’ infrastructure, and the proximity of military and civilian installations in urban areas all inevitably put civilians in the firing line. The resultant massacres, such as the deaths of 400 Iraqi civilians in the Amiriyah shelter during the 1991 Gulf War, precipitated some of the most important challenges to narratives of surgical war.

For Shaw (2005), an even more important guiding principle of the new way of warfighting was the specific transfer of risk away from the body of the Western soldier. The wider social relations and institutional arrangements of military power changed radically in the final decades of the twentieth century in most Western nations. Militaries became much more capital rather than labour intensive and in particular, traditional forms of mass participation in war declined and much smaller, all-volunteer professionalised militaries developed. One consequence of this was that professional soldiers, going about war as their chosen business, demanded much better protection as a central condition of their occupational service, often supported by families and veterans campaigning for a greater duty of care. In the affluent West then, it had become impossible to treat Western soldiers’ bodies as standing reserve, as simple materiel, for the military machine. Troop casualties had to be minimised to within politically acceptable levels in order to maintain public support for war.⁹ While this often meant relying on others to take bodily risks on the ground such as local allies or private military contractors, most importantly it meant a heightened role for technology and specifically air power. The epitome of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 War and the body
• Part I: Militarising bodies
• Part II: Embodying war
• Part III: Corporeal aftermaths
• Conclusion
• Index