Paul Mann
Department of English
Pomona College
pmann@pomona.claremont.edu
Prediction (1994):
We are about to witness a rise of “war studies” in the humanities. On your next plane trip the person beside you dozing over a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War might not be a corporate CEO but a professor of philosophy. There will soon be whole conferences on warfare; more courses in liberal arts curricula on the theory and literature of warfare; special issues of journals on war studies published not by historians or social scientists but by literary critics; new studies of the culture of the Kriegsspiel; new readings of Homer, Kleist, Crane. Books of gender criticism on the subject of war are already appearing, and essays on Clausewitz are now liable to turn up in literary journals and books of critical theory.1 And we will hear more and more of the sort of moral outrage critics exercised during the Gulf War over the way the video-game imagery of computer simulations displaced grievous bodily harm.
Perhaps this imminent frenzy of production will open another front in the current campaign against the aesthetics of ideology. To the extent that modern warfare depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: “it is when a country has become to its citizens a fiction that wars begin.”2 If this is the case, if war arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to teach us to read war critically — and, along the way, to establish the moral and political gravity of their own work. What is at issue here, however, are not only analyses of war but also analogies of it. We will burrow into the archives of warfare because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of warfare. We will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. Gender critics already study war discourse in order both to attack its violent phallicism and to conceive gender struggle itself along strategic lines. We have theory wars, PC wars, linguistics wars, Gerald Graff’s culture wars, Avital Ronell appropriating the war on drugs for a theory of reading.3 Vast energies will be expended not only on the archives and rhetoric of warfare but on the warcraft of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the “violence” of the question, on the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” that, for Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.4
We will pursue the subject of warfare because we will increasingly see a relationship between our own activity and warfare. Let me articulate the law that governs this movement: Critical discourse always tends toward the eventual phenomenalization, as objects of study, of the devices that structure it. War becomes a field of critical study when critics come to believe, however obliquely, that criticism has always been a field of warfare. And warfare not only in the narrow terms of intellectual difference, but in the most material terms as well. If, for Clausewitz, war is an extension of policy, for Paul Virilio the reverse is true: politics and culture are, from the outset, extensions of warfare, of a logistical economy that encompasses and ultimately exhausts all of society. Standard critiques of the coordination of scientific research with the “military-industrial complex” are already being extended to include the ideological state apparatus; for Virilio, technology as such is a logistical invention and in one way or another always answers logistical demands, and the same point will be made about technologies of representation.5 The humanities are in a mood to see the complicity of what Enzensberger called the “consciousness industry” in the military-industrial-knowledge complex, to see themselves at one and the same time as ideological agents of the state’s “war machine” and as warriors against the state.6 I will have more to say about this contradiction.
To repeat: The object of criticism is always a symptom, if you will, of the structure of critical discourse itself, always a phenomenalization of the device. But this device tends to appear in a surrogate form, still dissimulated and displaced; it appears and does not appear, makes itself known in ways that further conceal its stakes. And it always appears too late, at the very moment it ceases to function: a kind of theory-death, a death that is not a termination but a particular sort of elaboration. Now, everywhere we look, critics will be casting off their clerical mantles and rhetorical labcoats for suits of discursive armor; the slightest critical aggression or ressentiment will be inflated with theoretical war-machines and territorial metaphorics.7 At the same time, the very rise of war discourse among us will signal the end of intellectual warfare for us, its general recuperation by the economics of intellectual production and exchange. It might therefore be delusional — even, as some would argue, obscene, given the horrible damage of real war — to think of this academic bickering as warfare, and yet it remains a trace of war, and perhaps the sign of a potential combat some critical force could still fight.
It would be a mistake to assume that this metamorphosis of discourse as war into discourse on war has occurred because criticism has become more political. On the contrary, criticism has never been more than a political effect — “policy” carried out, and in our case dissipated, by other means. The long process of seizing politics as the proper object of criticism is one more tardy phenomenalization of the device. What we witness — and what difference would it make even if I were right? — is not proof of the politicization of criticism but an after-image of its quite peripheral integration with forms of geopolitical conflict that are, in fact, already being dismantled and remodeled in war rooms, defense institutes, and multinational corporate headquarters. War talk, like politics talk, like ethics talk, like all critical talk, is nostalgic from the start. While we babble about territories and borders, really still caught up in nothing more than a habitual attachment to disciplinary “space” and anxious dreams of “agency,” the technocrats of warfare are developing strategies that no longer depend on any such topography, strategies far more sophisticated than anything we have imagined. And we congratulate ourselves for condemning them, and for our facile analogies between video games and smart bombs.
I would propose two distinct diagnoses of the rise of war talk. On one hand, war talk is merely another exercise in rhetorical inflation, intended to shore up the fading value of a dubious product, another symptom of the imaginary politics one witnesses everywhere in critical discourse, another appearance of a structural device at the very moment it ceases to operate. On the other hand, war talk might still indicate the possibility of actually becoming a war machine, of pursuing a military equivalent of thought beyond all these petty contentions, of realizing the truth of discourse as warfare and finally beginning to fight. It will be crucial here not to choose between these diagnoses. In the domain of criticism they function simultaneously, in a perpetual mutual interference; there is no hope of extricating one from the other, no hope of either becoming critical warriors or being relieved of the demand that we do so.
The real task of this prediction is thus not to make any claim on the future, but rather to pursue a sort of genealogy, in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense, in reverse: a projective genealogy, so to speak: an account not so much of the future as of the present, of the order of knowledge at this very moment. War here is a way to theorize discourse as collective behavior, to reconceive shifting positions, alliances, defenses, attacks, casualties and losses, logistical strengths and weaknesses, the friction and fog of discursive conflict. I will sketch out nine grounds of intellectual warfare: Logistics, Logomachia, Fortification, the Desert, the Screen, Number, High Ground, Chaos, and the Cemetery.8 These grounds are not exhaustive and do not constitute a singular field; they are not arranged in a logical sequence and do not amount to a single argument moving toward a single conclusion. War looks different from the vantage of each ground. During a given campaign an army or a writing might find itself, at different times, in different tactical situations and encounters, occupying several or all of these grounds, and deploying its forces in different arrangements. In this essay, the nine grounds do not amount to any telos, any whole, nor even an intellectual position, but in my movement among them I hope to indicate, in the most preliminary and doubtless futile manner, strategies for a critical writing that might actually learn from the war machines it studies.
I. Logistics:
It is commonplace to reduce intellectual production to economic terms. There is a vast, indeed a surplus critique of the commodification of thought, but critics are only just beginning to believe, as perhaps our travelling CEO has long believed, that there is some advantage in seeing their own business as warfare, and that it is possible to do so because culture, business, and defense are always to some degree integrated.9 Any executive who entertains the notion that he or she is a corporate warrior is no doubt engaged in a fantasy, but one should not be too quick to dismiss the utility of such fantasies, their ability to inspire performance. And perhaps we too should make a more rigorous accounting of our own investments in various critical ideologies, which so often presume to combat the institution while sustaining its discursive economy by the very means of our attacks. Everyone is aware that thought has been reified and transformed into a commodity, but that awareness has never inhibited production. The critique of the commodity produces perfectly marketable commodities. The half-conscious fantasies of the truth-warrior energize the intellectual economy quite as much as the samurai fantasies of the corporate factotum fuel the marketplace.
Virilio would argue that they are not fantasies at all; stripped of narcissistic ornament, we would still have to see ourselves as soldiers. Writing in the high years of the Cold War, Virilio developed a theory of “pure war,” global war so efficient it never needs to be fought, rather like William Burroughs’s notion that a functioning police state needs no police. What is most crucial for Virilio’s conception of the warfare state is his extreme emphasis on logistics. “Logistics is the beginning of the economy of war, which will become simple economy, to the point of replacing political economy” (PW 4). The invention of the city as such lies in logistical preparation for war. War is not an aberration, the negation of the truth of civilization, so much as its origin; or rather, civilization depends on an origin and order that forever threaten its destruction. And in a sense we have returned to this logistical origin:
If we can say that war was entirely strategic in past societies, we can now say that strategy is no more than logistics. In turn, logistics has become the whole of war; because in an age of deterrence, the production of arms is already war. . . . Deterrence is the development of an arms capacity that assures total peace. The fact of having increasingly sophisticated weaponry deters the enemy more and more. At that point, war is no longer in its execution, but in its preparation. The perpetuation of war is what I call Pure War, war which is acted out . . . in infinite preparation. [However,] this infinite preparation, the advent of logistics, also entails the non-development of society . . . , peace as war, as infinite preparation which exhausts and will eventually eliminate societies. The Total Peace of Deterrence is Total War pursued by other means. (PW 91-93, 139, 25)
One could argue that the stakes have changed: the Cold War is over and smaller wars are heating up; one could also argue that this is merely another case of total deterrence, and not yet achieved. In any event, to whatever degree a discrete militarization of the peacetime economy has occurred, in Virilio’s model this logistical “endocolonization” depends on the production of technical knowledge. Indeed technology has its very origin in logistical demands: technology arises from the need for weaponry, “from the arsenal and war economy” (24). But it is not a matter of armaments alone: “the war-machine is not only explosives, it’s also communications, vectorization. It’s essentially the speed of delivery. . . . It’s war operating in the sciences. It’s everything that is already perverting the field of knowledge from one end to the other; everything that is aligning the different branches of knowledge in a perspective of the end” (20). There is, here, no viable distinction between defense research and peacetime applications of science. Technology as such is a function of total logistics. Every form of knowledge supports the warfare state. Analogous if less exaggerated claims have been made by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in War and Anti-War, a lay account of the reliance of post-Cold War strategy on increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. It would seem that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Virilio’s global deterrence, which has resulted in drastic cutbacks in defense budgets and damage to the American economy as a whole, only exacerbates the logistical demand. Weapons now have to be smarter because we cannot afford so many of them; fighting forces now have to be more skilled, more mobile, and more cybernetically coordinated to deal with the realities of post-Cold War conflict. Tactical advantages are measured in technological terms rather than by sheer force of troop numbers. War, the Tofflers argue, is now about technical knowledge, increasingly fought by means of knowledge, and perhaps, in the future, over knowledge, over technological capabilities. “Cyberwar” is no longer science fiction: the acquisition, systematization, and deployment of technical knowledge have become the ground and stakes of bloody wars.10
As the economy in general and technological development in particular come to be seen in logistical terms, so the critical industry too will be taken as a logistical system, and war discourse as pure war carried out by other means. But it is all too easy to conflate military, technological, and intellectual production. It might be that the forces of deterrence or nuclear war really do extend into criticism, into the study of texts, into the colloquium and critical journal, but even if there is some economic coordination between them, it would be a mistake to elide their differences. There is no question that military success is increasingly determined by access to technical knowledge and that logistical development is a laboratory for new technologies, but to recognize this is not to prove that all fields of knowledge are connected to military research in the same ways. Such claims will certainly be made, with fantastic effects, just as the critical truisms that fictions are informed by political realities and that politics is dependent upon fictive forms are turned around, without careful examination of the reversability of these propositions, into the quite dubious but productive thesis that therefore criticism of these fictions constitutes political action. What pure war indicates, however, is that intellectual warfare is not oppositional: it is a form of systems-maintenance, and a feature of the status quo of capital.
Hence war discourse will cast intellectuals as agents of a general logistical economy and at the same time offer them an array of quite useful and quite delusional critical fantasies about their combat for and against the warfare state. But let me suggest another economics here, another fantasy, one not restricted to the familiar terms of use- and exchange-value for the military-industrial-knowledge complex, but based as it were on waste-value: a general economy, in Bataille’s sense: an economy like that of the sun, which gives life but is utterly indifferent to it, burns itself out as fast as it can, expends most of its energy into the void. Bataille’s image of war-economics is the ritual practice of the potlatch, a form of symbolic combat most likely associated with funerary observances, but which he sees as a solar means of purging the superabundance of natural and cultural energy. The purpose of art and thought is the purest expenditure, waste, dépense.11 Intellectual warfare can be seen in this light, as ritualized combat whose value is that it has no value: a means of squandering useless wealth. Intellectual production is the production of superfluities tricked out with beautiful illusory truths, and we meet to exchange ideas only in order to destroy thought itself with these ludicrous gifts.
II. Logomachia:
The quasi-conflictual structure of the colloquium; the nationalization of intellectual outlooks (e.g., French vs. Anglo-American feminism, English studies vs. German philology in the wake of the First World War); the “diversification” of disciplines carried out as the conquest and colonization of discrete areas of academic territory, and all the ensuing turf wars between departments, methodologies, etc.; rising concern about the invasive, “violent” force of interrogation and argument in even so innocuous an act as literary interpretation; all the petty jockeying for personal advantage that will pass for intellectual combat: these are horizonal phenomena, indications of more prevalent and insistent orders of conflict that structure intellectual work and, perhaps, work in general.
Beyond these familiar instances, imagine for a moment (it is a fable, not philosophy) that Hegel, or at least Kojève’s Hegel, was right: consciousness, history, civilization begin with combat: “man, to be really, truly ‘man,’ and to know that he is such, must . . . impose the idea he has of himself on beings other than himself,” in a fight to the death in which no one dies, and in which the stakes are only recognition, the establishment of a certain narcissistic regime, the invention of nothing more than the subject.12
Perhaps then the first violence is the formal and ideal reduction of the complexity of conflict to a dialectical system.
Let me modulate the fable a bit further:
When imposition is collective, the fight becomes battle.
When it is strategically directed, it becomes warfare.
When we fight to impose not our own idea but an idea that has been imposed upon us, and with which we identify so intensely it is as if the idea were our own, we become soldiers.
The soldier is essential to the dialectic: neither master nor quite simply slave but the device that mediates between them. The soldier is slave as hero, risking death in order to impose the master’s will on another slave. Perhaps intellectual soldiers too are not slaves who can comprehend their slavery and still revolt but hoplite phalanxes marshalled in order for the day of intellectual battle; Plato’s guardians in the chariot of reason, and a chariot is, after all, a military transport.
It is not even precisely that some specific other has imposed his idea on us: the master is always in part a figure out of our own imagination, out of our desire and fear, a stand-in for a “true” master we can never quite locate and who need not even really exist, and we confront “death” in his name, in various surrogate forms, so that we will never have to confront our death. Any veteran of combat could testify to the folly of this project, even though the veteran might only have shifted his or her own allegiance to another ideal.
The slave’s fear of death is thus overcome as a warrior fantasy, itself in the service of a master the slave has to some degree invented. For the intellectual warrior as well, fear of death — of not being recognized, and thus of not being — is not overcome but displaced, sublimated, pursued through a vast array of surrogates, including the sublime study of death. Intellectual warfare is not a culmination of the master-slave dialectic but its proxy, its aesthetic. The sentimental violence of dialectics.
Today almost everyone seems to believe that, at the end of this struggle, what we confront is not the triumph of absolute reason but the collapse of the entire project, the idea, the hope and dream of the absolute. I would argue that this theoretical collapse is the event-horizon, the phenomenal threshold, of intellectual warfare. The theoretical abandonment of the absolute is rarely accompanied by its disappearance: the absolute returns in a ghostly form, haunting precisely those discourses that claim to have left it behind, and that continue to orient themselves around its evacuation. Nevertheless, this half-waking from the half-dream of absolute reason returns us to a primal dialectical scene, to a war for recognition now without stakes. In the farcical relativism that results, dominance is ever more explicitly a matter not of truth but of force. And if we discover that we have never gone further, that force is all that ever mattered, can we say that the dialectic ever occurred at all?
This self-consuming conflict is visible from another perspective. If war, as an extension of logistical, tactical, and strategic knowledge, is an extension of thought, it also ruins thought. It exceeds every effort of dialectical containment. The same forces that drive military conflicts past the limits of rational control, in Clausewitz’s view, drive the idea of war past the limits of conception. As Daniel Pick observes,
For Clausewitz, war is always to be understood as subordinate to political will. That is an iron law. But it also slips out of control, threatening to become jubilantly and anarchically autonomous. It is willed, but all too prone to chance and accident. . . . The practice of war, Clausewitz contends, can be shown to undermine the consistency of thought and theory upon war. . . . [War is] an idea, an abstraction, a supposed structural necessity; but also . . . an impossible subject, the subversive force in the account that seeks to master it.13
The “friction” of war can never be reduced to a system. That is why Clausewitz distrusts theory, even as he engages in what would seem to be a theoretical exercise. According to Garry Wills, that is also why Clausewitz insists on the distinction between theory and Kritik, the broadest empirical assessment possible in any strategic or tactical situation, without reference to absolute laws of warfare that the realities of battle may well disprove, with disastrous results for those who adhere to them. It is not that Clausewitz refuses any generality — his dictum about war as politics is certainly theoretical, and rules of warfare are proposed everywhere in his text — rather that tactical and strategic considerations should never be determined by rules alone; rules need to be tested, and what is most important is close critical observation of the field of battle from the highest empirical ground available. But if Wills believes that the distinction between theory and Kritik resolves the problem of analyzing the friction of war, Pick is just as adamant that theory and Kritik themselves are at war in Clausewitz’s own analysis, in any consideration of warfare, and the notorious inconsistencies of On War reflect the truth of this conflict. Kritik is compromised by its own forms of friction. As Peter Paret observes, in published studies of war even the most factual descriptions of battle ought to be printed in a different colored ink to indicate the discrepancy between a battle and every account of it.14War is absolute force pushed past the limit of dialectical recuperation; it involves the theoretical experience of the destruction of theory, which cannot be alleviated by any resort to empiricism.
Jacqueline Rose makes a similar point in respect to Freud. As a fundamental instance of human aggression, war could be said to constitute a proper field for psychoanalytic investigation, an object of scientific knowledge. The problem is that
[if] Freud offers . . . an explanation of war, he does so by means of the death drive. But the death drive, and hence the truth of war, operates, it has so often been pointed out, as the speculative vanishing point of psychoanalytic theory, and even more boldly, of the whole of scientific thought.15
Hence war is not only an object of knowledge but its “crisis,” its proper logomachia, “the instability, the necessary failure, of knowledge as resolution that [Freud] places at the foundation, or limit, of all scientific thought.”16
War . . . operates in Freud’s discourse, and not only in that of Freud, as a limit to the possibility of absolute or total knowledge, at the same time as such absolute or total knowledge seems over and again to be offered as one cause — if not the cause — of war. . . . The end of war [is] the end of knowledge. (16-17)
What is most challenging about this formulation is that the destruction of knowledge, its vanishing point, is both its foundation and its limit, the condition of its existence even as it destroys it. The impossibility of knowledge becomes the very order of knowledge. This device too must eventually rise into discourse and manifest itself as a proxy object of inquiry.
III. Fortification:
Nothing is more important to the intellectual than a position. Even the fabled collapse of foundations has done little to change this: economically, discursively, this collapse turns out to be yet another position, something to believe in and hold true, the consolidation of “flows,” “drift,” etc., into the most familiar academic architecture. You must have a position, and if you do not, one will be assigned to you, or you will simply not exist. The homology of position as standpoint and position as job, budget line, FTE, is a matter of a great deal more than analogy or vulgar marxism. With a position, everything is possible. You are supported by a truth, a discipline, a methodology, a rhetorical style, a discursive form, a mode of production and exchange. You know where you stand, you recognize yourself by your position; you see yourself there because you see yourself seen there. Your position is your identity and value; it authorizes your work, circulates it, constitutes it as property, lends you the security of ownership. But at the same time nothing is possible with a position. To hold a position is to be held by it, to be caught up in its inertial and economic determinations, to be captured by an identity that you might not, finally, believe to be quite your own. Nothing could be more difficult than really, substantively, radically to change one’s mind, change the forms in which one works, risk everything by leaving behind a position on which, it seems, everything has come to rely.
The position is a fundamental form of civilization. Recall Virilio’s remark that the city itself originates in a position, a garrison, a defensive posture, a logistical form.17 To adopt the terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, the position is a “sedentary fortification” of “state armies”; it is entirely contained by the state apparatus.18 In academic criticism, the symbolic place of the state is occupied and held by the text or oeuvre, around which the defending force of commentaries is deployed; in a field such as English or Comparative Literature, the state or national form of the text is clearly and hence problematically manifested. The critic defends the text by the elaborate construction of interpretations around it; at the same time, in a kind of fractal homomorphism, the critic’s own position is defined and defended by the construction of the paper circle of his or her own works. The more forces occupy a position, the stronger it will be. The barrage of words projected from the most heavily fortified strongholds (currently: New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, certain orders of gender and race theory) can repel critiques by sheer force of numbers. Indeed, conflict between positions is itself one of the chief means by which they are defined. As Rose points out, for Freud war “not only threaten[s] civilization, it can also advance it. By tending towards the conglomeration of nations, it operates [not only] like death [but also] like the eros which strives to unify” (16). In intellectual warfare, the strategic form of this erotic unification is the discipline, in every sense of the word.19 Mechanisms of regimental identification are crucial here. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of esprit de corps to garrisoned forces. Healthy competition keeps troops battle-sharp and singles out the most effective officers, but such conflict must be contained and focused toward strategic goals.
If, on one hand, it is a mistake to refer to intellectual movements, since their force is always institutional, static, on the other hand it is the fixity of the intellectual position that proves to be illusory. A position must not only be held, but advanced. The surrounding territory must come under its influence and control. Furthermore, as Clausewitz indicates, defenses tend to become offensive. It is not simply that the best defense is a good offense; defenses, like attacks, exceed the limits of strategic reason. The escalating, offensive character of nuclear deterrence has long been noted. So also for the provocative force of the most striking cultural formations: defensive postures escalate beyond the power of whatever threat they face. More importantly, the position is never more than a temporary establishment: once consolidated, its termination is assured; the more force it generates, the more certain that its walls will be breached. That is Virilio’s brief against deterrence: it exhausts its own resources, it destroys the societies it defends. There is no indefensible position, and no position that can be defended for very long. At the moment a position is founded, its destruction has begun. Defections to other positions, other cities of words, are doubtless already under way.
The intellectual position is therefore not simply a ground, let alone a foundation, however attached to or identified with it its garrison becomes, even in the act of arguing that there is no foundation. On the contrary, the position turns out to be a point along a vector, a line of advance or retreat, a temporary encampment, a bivouac, of strategic or tactical importance alone, and supportable only by means of its relation to other positions, other forces, counterforces, and logistical agencies all along the line. There is no question that the strength of the sited force’s investment in its ground, however temporary, is crucial. But in the end every position will turn out to have been a relay-point or intersection, the temporary location of an intellectual army whose grounding is not to be measured by its “rightness” — the archaic notion of truth proven by combat may be said to survive only in the academy — but by its force and resistance in relation to other quantities of force, velocity, intensity, logistical power, tactical skill, etc., all of which will not only support but eventually help to detach that army from its ground. In psychoanalytic terms, it would be necessary to see the texts that a writer deploys around his or her position as defense mechanisms of another order, that is to say, as symptoms, but not only of an individual pathology: rather as encysted trouble-spots on the intersecting curves of discursive forces about which the intellectual is often barely, if at all, aware, and which no one — no chaos theorist of discursive physics — will ever be able to map.
The position is surrounded by a “border,” a “margin.” This circular, flat-earth topography mirrors larger discursive models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and antagonistic margins. It is little wonder that questions of colonialism have become so pressing: here too we encounter a phenomenalization of the discursive device. Modern critical production consistently sees itself as a matter of hegemonic centers (e.g., defenses of tradition) and marginal oppositions. But insofar as one wishes to retain this topography of margins and centers — and in the end there might not be much to recommend it — it might be better to see the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by which it establishes its line of defense. Military commanders might be unlikely to deploy their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in intellectual warfare the perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves in revolt against headquarters. This is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they are attacking the army for which they are in fact the advance guard. The contradiction does not dissolve their importance, it marks their precise task: the dialectical defense and advance of discursive boundaries. It might therefore indicate the fundamental instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly oppositional claims of marginal forces. That is why postcolonial criticism remains a colonial outpost of an older critical form.
Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus. Marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or women’s studies or queer theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. The fact that the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed and critics can still congratulate themselves on their “resistance.” But the contrary is clearly the case. The most profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., Romance Philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still possible; nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish only to insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance often serve as alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms.
IV. Desert:
The standpoint, identification with and defense of one’s own thought, the demand that one be on one’s own side, that one stand by one’s word, is so standard a feature of intellectual ethics and politics that it has been taken completely for granted. But the entrenched position is a vestige of archaic forms of warfare. The Tofflers argue that the Gulf War demonstrated the failure of entrenchment — Iraq’s older, industrial, sedentary strategy — against advanced military technologies of speed, stealth, and coordinated intelligence. “[T]he allied force was not a [conventional military] machine, but a system with far greater internal feedback, communication, and self-regulatory adjustment capability. It was . . . a ‘thinking system’” (80). For Napoleon as well, Virilio notes, “the capacity for war [was] the capacity for movement” (WC 10). In the same manner, those bound to intellectual positions remain blind to the tactical advantages of mobility and secrecy, and the new war studies will be used to suggest strategic figures outside the position’s fortified walls.
I will return to the precisely oxymoronic, self-canceling figure of secrecy in a later section. Here, I will proceed by suggesting that the new war studies should come to quite rigorous and unromantic terms with the nomadology of Deleuze and Guattari.20 In their work, the war machine is essentially exterior to the state, even if the state appropriates it. The problem is, therefore, how to pursue exteriority in disciplinary and epistemological structures that are themselves entirely defined by their institutional interiority. It will certainly not be through any of the current specular and spectacular modes of narcissistic identification with the “other.” One should treat every text that peddles its vicarious nomadism while elaborating the most conventional analyses with the greatest suspicion, and at the same time with some confidence, perhaps quite groundless, that an intellectual nomadology might still be carried out elsewhere.21 It is necessary to comprehend the force of extremely difficult ideas: the nomadic war-machine’s exteriority to the state and its precise relation to battle; the nomads’ territorial engagement with smooth space, without “striation,” interiority, or chrono-historical organization; their indifference to semiological systems and their particular epistemological orientations (ornament instead of sign, ballistics and metallurgical science, numbering, speed, etc.); the strange relation of A Thousand Plateaus to texts that would seem to treat the same matters in a more disciplinary way — its relation, for instance, to psychoanalysis and philosophy (and what is the strategic connection between this book and Deleuze’s extraordinary and in many ways quite scholarly treatments of the history of philosophy?); indeed, the very ontology of the nomadic idea itself: all of these must be explored in considerable detail, without ever descending to any merely exegetical commentary, and without reducing what is at stake in this book to an intellectual position. Deleuze and Guattari challenge us to rethink our whole relation to books and to writing, to the very order of our thought — a task in which they themselves often fail. One must begin by reading them at a loss, but a loss that is not only the result of their work’s difficulty, which careful analysis would eventually overcome; rather, a loss that reaches down into our deepest epistemological attachments. It will be necessary, for instance, to reconceive the very notion of intellectual rigor (the order of argument, demonstration, proof) and communicative clarity: not to abandon them for the sake of some impressionistic indulgence, but to relocate them outside the striated space of the state apparatus that has always provided their structure. One might find oneself, for instance, no longer putting forth positions, outlining, defending, and identifying oneself with them: one might find oneself engaged in an even more severe, more rigorous discipline of affirming ideas without attaching oneself to them, making them appear (as Baudrillard suggested in another context) only so as to make them disappear.22 One might find oneself developing a logic that is no longer striated and arborescent (a trunk and its branches) but smooth, rhizomatic, turbulent, fractal, self-interfering, labyrinthine, subterranean. I am fully aware of how treacherous, how complex and self-contradictory a gesture it is even to refer to these ideas in such a form and such a forum as this one, how properly absurd it would be to pursue writing, to pursue knowledge itself, in the following manner:
The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine . . . consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another. . . . The nomadic trajectory . . . distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. . . . [S]edentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. . . . [T]he nomad is on the contrary he who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge. (TP 363, 380-81)
How shall we read this passage, which so clearly bears on the organization of thought itself, even in respect to the question of the historical, empirical factuality of its account? How shall we read work that conceives nomadism in a way that has nothing to do with the standard distinction between stasis and movement, that never defines nomadism simply as movement opposed to sedentary positions? Can we ourselves move and distribute our thought across a deterritorialized discursive field, now conceived as smooth space, living off it without attachment to or support of any state form? And how can one write nomadically, since Deleuze and Guattari consign writing to the state apparatus?23What then is writing to them? One’s very attempt to appropriate nomadology in a critical essay serves as another instance of the state’s never quite successful appropriation of the war machine, and of the never fully addressed logistical-economic order of one’s own thought.
Let me advance here — as a preliminary gesture toward work being carried out elsewhere and precisely in other forms, and perhaps only in order to help put an end to the delusional use of such terms as nomadology, deterritorialization, and the rhizome in almost every academic forum that tries to employ them — a tactical figure that has nothing to do with sedentary and fortified positions: the assemblage. I am concerned here with the “numerical” organization of intellectual work.24 Such work is of course highly institutional, hierarchical, regimental: intellectuals labor as individuals but their individualism is for the most part the atomic form of social and discursive systems entirely reliant on this atomization. The assemblage represents a mode of intellectual organization quite distinct from the pyramid scheme of individual in the service of discipline (whatever its ideological orientation) in the service of institution, etc., under which the professional intellectual currently labors. The notion of the assemblage can be traced, along one of its lines, to the nomad on horseback. The constellation “man-horse-stirrup” is a primary instance of an assemblage: a technological extension that transforms the subject it would seem to have served, installing the subject in another sort of instrumental relation and, in effect, in another ontology. “[T]here are no more subjects but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages.”25 Even so subjectivist a notion as desire is transformed here: assemblages are “passional, they are compositions of desire,” but desire “has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, engineered desire” (TP 398). What is at issue is the projective movement of desire, its ballistic force out of anything like a subject-position into something more like a “relay” on an extensive line of flight across smooth, nomadic space. “The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model of the monument. An ambulent people of relayers, rather than a model society” (377). We are confronted with a different order of logistics itself: in a sense, the importance of lines of communication overtakes the importance of the strategic positions they were once thought only to support. There is clearly room here for a certain kind of analysis of cybernetic developments in critical exchange, although here too one must avoid indulging in any romance of technological transformation. If the assemblage of writer-software-network offers nomadic possibilities, no one would deny that the state has already recuperated this technology (the Internet is the home shopping network of the knowledge industries). That is why it is crucial to focus not only on the technological assemblage, but on its mode of circulation: the network’s accessibility for packs and bands that in their assembling do not serve institutional interests, whatever their day-jobs and unavoidable investments. Clearly the role of the hacker is suggestive here, not because of the quite trivial outlaw romance of hacking, nor because of any particular damage hackers might manage to inflict on this or that data base, but because of the form and force of the relay itself. Imagine banding together with others in temporary, mission-oriented, extra-institutional units, with specific, limited, tactical and strategic goals. Not the death or transcendence of the subject (not any metaphysics at all); not a post-bourgeois utopia of drifts; surely not the establishment of any new isms; rather the transitory platooning of specific on-line skills and thought-weapons in mobile strike forces in the net. Perhaps the resurgent interest in the Situationist International will be less valuable for its polemics against the “spectacle,” which only serve an already over-represented critique of representation, than for the organizational models offered by its particular forms of intellectual labor: the Situationist council as a nomadic war machine. The practice of such organization would affect the forms of thought itself. Assemblages will serve as the auto-erosive becoming-machine of what was never exactly the intellectual “subject.” The transformation might already be occurring, on-line, even as the network surrenders to the apparatus of the newly transformed state.
The task is to develop a war machine “that does not have war as its object.” It is a persistent theme for Deleuze and Guattari: the war machine only takes military conflict as its primary object when it is appropriated by the state; nomadology indicates other directions and ends. Reducing the war machine to warfare: in the realm of intellectual warfare, that would involve reducing it to conflicting binaries, to dialectics. If warfare as such indicates the most reduced dialectical forms of positionality and negation (no use imagining oneself “beyond dialectics,” since the beyond still drags the dialectic along with it), even the state army’s distribution of its forces might already suggest a more nomadic form of organization: deployed like a herd across a whole field, communicating rhizomatically, etc.26 Witness then this strange twist on Clausewitz:
the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems of great importance. . . . The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary, but that of a war machine which does not have war as its object, and which only entertains a potential or supplementary relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the nomos. . . . The other pole seem[s] to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war, but the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States. (420, 422)
It is crucial to note that Deleuze and Guattari are not critics, of Clausewitz or anything else. For all its talk of “against the state,” very little about their work has to do with critical dialectics. They are committed rather to a certain affirmation, generated perhaps most of all out of their nomadic encounters with Nietzsche’s thought. In that sense, a proper approach to their work will never take the form of elaborating critical objections to it, even when they would seem to be warranted. Nonetheless, I would argue that the greatest obstacle to deploying nomadology in a smooth space outside the state lies in the fact that nomadology, or something like it, might also represent the current form of the state’s own development. Sedentary armies are being defeated and replaced by nomadic strategies still directed toward warfare, in the service of deterritorializing states.27If the end of global deterrence has hardly resulted in anything resembling a more pacific internationalism, but rather in a more ferocious and, it is often claimed, atavistic nationalism — represented in western eyes, as usual, by Africa (e.g., Rwanda) and the Balkans — at the same time we are also witnessing a reorganization of the state apparatus through the movement of multinational capital, information technologies, and high-tech international military interventions, as in Somalia and the Gulf. It is tempting, for some, to see these changes as signs of a shift from an old world order to a newer, braver one, but one ought to see them instead as the most complex of knots. The Bosnian conflict represents at one and the same time an especially vicious nationalism and the resurgence of nomadic war machines; the allied forces of the Gulf War represent interests at one and the same time external to the state and entirely in its employ; multinational capital represents at one and the same time a nomadic form of deterritorialization and the state’s attempt to survive what it believes to be its imminent demise. In the light of these events intellectual warfare confronts the complexities of its own appropriations and lines of flight. It also confronts massive proof of its utter triviality.
V. Screen:
Much of what we will be given to read in the new war studies will be rehearsals of older critiques of representation, heated by a certain love-hate toward cyber-technology; critiques of aestheticized violence as violence against real suffering, with the critic posing heroically beside the figure of the real. This moral reconnaissance of video games and smart bombs will be accompanied by historicist accounts of the spectacular aspects of warfare, perhaps along the lines of Virilio’s War and Cinema, in which, it is argued, “war is cinema and cinema is war,” a “deadly harmony . . . always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon” (26, 69). This facile but suggestive conflation of military and cinematic epistemologies into a single logistical project will also lend itself to the familiar critique of the phallic violence of the cinematic “gaze.” The limit of these reflections is liable to be the logic of the “simulacrum,” greatly reduced from its development in either Baudrillard or Deleuze. Let me suggest that the problem before us is not, however, only the spectacularly telegenic appearance of the Gulf War but the fact that these critical reflections on spectacular screens are produced on the spectacular screens of critics’ computers. It will be necessary to investigate the cybernetic and epistemological apparatus of critical debates in the light of developments in military technology and the conduct of actual warfare, but it will be some time before the extraordinarily complex ways in which their integration occurs can be adequately described, and one should avoid collapsing differences between these networks. They are not to be mapped onto each other in any sort of simple homology; the means by which intellectual “cyberwar” serves the state remain, to some degree, obscure. I would hope that enough thinkers soon become sufficiently bored with the standard critical tropes about military simulation to move on to a more incisive critique of the connections between our software and the military’s.
For the moment, this one observation: simulation means that intellectual warfare is always fought on other grounds. It is precisely the sort of virtual war it condemns. It is not a pure extension of politics but a form of ritual warfare, a phenomenon of the ritual dimension of politics and of the political deployment of ritual. War games of every kind present us with modes of simulation, of surrogation, that should not be addressed solely by reference to some terrible, displaced reality that criticism can or cannot locate behind the veil of the video image.28 What we witness is rather the oblique necessity of virtual violence itself, of surrogate conflicts even in the very critique of surrogacy: the necessary satisfaction of a demand for warfare that war alone cannot fully satisfy.
So perhaps we still face nothing more than a Mirror: All discursive warfare is autoaggressive. We sacrifice ourselves in the name of an ego-ideal and become the enemy that we behold.
VI. Number:
If discursive combat is decided by might more than by right, we should allow for the remote possibility that intellectual warfare can be quantified, measured, calculated, perhaps with the sorts of empirical tools that have been developed in recent years by such social scientists as J. David Singer, K.N. Waltz, and Magnus Midlarsky, in their studies of international conflict.29 Given the friction and fog of war and the difficulties it poses for any sort of analysis, however, it might also be advisable to entertain the folly of empirical, systems-oriented research in this area. The contradiction is vital: intellectual warfare is just as quantifiable as any form of military engagement, which is to say, absolutely and hardly at all.
In the critical discourse of war, number operates exactly as Kant predicted in the analytic of the sublime. The determination of quantity is overwhelmed by a Clausewitzian escalation of force past its measurable limit, which is then taken as its true destination. The mathematical sublime is the suppressed dream of every empirical study of warfare.
Hence the intellectual war machine will pursue the potential of number in Deleuze’s sense as well, no longer a quantity in the striated space of the state, the university, the discipline, but a determining movement or speed through smooth, nomadic space (TP 381); a mode of transit rather than a measured sum. Deleuze’s “numbering number” could be said to begin at the point where the mathematical sublime leaves number behind for x, for the infinite; number then rediscovers itself outside striated space, no longer the perpetual trace of the imminent loss of numerical representation, but a singular space in which one actually moves — a space still entirely outside the current occasion.
VII. High Ground:
Is this what Pierre Bezukov hoped to observe when he climbed a fortified hill to gaze down on the Battle of Borodino? Kant: “War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a measure a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude.”30 Perhaps that is what Tolstoy would have us believe Pierre did see: all the sublimely ennobling horrors of war. But let us imagine that he also witnessed the sublime from another perspective, that he saw the flatness of the abyss, a flat figure of lofty visions of bottomless depths.
In Daniel Pick’s account of the war machine, two contending forces are in play: the increasing technical efficiency and rationalization of warfare, and an insistent figuration of war as a destructive energy that surpasses every effort of rational control. Warfare “assumes a momentum of its own which is difficult, even impossible to stop. . . . Battle is now nothing more than the autonomy . . . of the war machine,” the “unstoppable engine of war” (11). It is as if this machine obeyed the familiar logic of the Frankenstein mythos, in which the most rationalized human technology must eventually reveal its madness and destroy everything, including its creator. War too is reason’s war against itself: “nothing less than a catastrophic eclipse of sense, a bestial and mechanical descent into anarchy” (20). No Kritik can ever master it; one can never rise to the exact height above battle, high enough to see but not so high that one loses its detail, because the exact height doesn’t exist; it is an ideal standpoint. In respect to war, thought always shoots past its mark. That is why there is a war in On War. “Questions of friction, illness, madness, morals, fear and anarchy continuously need to be mastered by [Clausewitz], converted back into manageable currency which enables decision-making. He presides over and marshalls his thoughts, like a general seeking to retain control over potentially wayward troops” (40); and, as every reader of Clausewitz, including Clausewitz himself, knows full well, the war in On War gets out of hand. That is part of the attraction of the new war studies: even as warfare becomes a function of knowledge production it reveals itself as the transgressed limit of knowledge, as the very agent of its destruction. The thought of war is the sublimely desirable experience of thought’s abyss.
War is sublime.31 The theory-war in Clausewitz’s text, the war between knowledge and everything proper to it that surpasses and destroys it, signals the way war takes its place beside tragedy as a sublime for philosophy, theory, and critical studies. The sublime of war study is one of theory’s recuperated figures of its own imaginary abyss, an abyss in which it seeks its deepest reflection. Whatever the truth of war, what we witness here first of all is thought’s fascination with an imaginary and quite compelling depth projected out of an obscure “drive” for its own “death.” If the self-destruction of the family in classical tragedy is an interior form of this paper abyss, the contemplation of warfare serves as one of its public forms, as the sublime for a political criticism, already scaled down from the recent, imaginary apocalypses of nuclear criticism.32 “The issue,” Rose writes,
seems to be not so much what might be the truth of war, but the relationship of war to the category of truth. . . . Friction, dissolution, fluidity . . . surface in defiance of a resistant totalization. . . . In Clausewitz’s text, war seems to figure as the violent repressed of its own rationalization. It becomes, so to speak, the unconscious of itself . . . an intruder or foreign body that fastens and destroys. It is the perfect image of the alien-ness that Freud places at the heart of human subjectivity, the alien-ness whose denial or projection leads us into war. In Clausewitz’s text, the theorization of war seems finally to be taken over by its object. The attempt to theorize or master war, to subordinate it to absolute knowledge, becomes a way of perpetuating or repeating war itself. (23-24)
Under the aegis of a critique of war technology, critical discourse becomes a machine that both rationalizes the contests of thought and surpasses rational control. The end of this conflict, of intellectual warfare as such, is a terminal image of reason’s self-destruction, of the Endlightenment, an ideal we will fight to the deathto fall short of. Hard critical knowledge will no more lead us past this end than knowledge of war leads humanity past armed conflict.
VIII. Chaos:
Consider what Clausewitz calls the fog of war — its untheorizable turmoil, error, accidents, chance, the sheer disorientation of combat terror. The fog of war is quite literally noise, war’s resistance to language, to objectification, to the code: both its problematic and its seductiveness, the limit of its intelligibility and the depth of its sublimity.
There are two approaches to this fog. One can try to burn it off with the bright intensity of analysis, as if it were only a surface effect, even though everything would lead one to believe that fog is an irreducible element of war, something that must be taken into account, that cannot simply be withdrawn. Then perhaps one ought instead to attempt to map this fog, not in order to eliminate it but to put it to use. The fog of war might be more than an enemy of reason: it might be a tactical advantage.
But how to map the fog of war? I anticipate an increase in references to chaos theory, discourse analyses deploying language like the following:
military interest in turbulent phenomena revolves around the question of its negative effects in the performance of weapons systems or the effects of air drag on projectiles or water drag on submarines. But for our purposes, we want an image not of the external effects of turbulent flows, but of their internal structure. We are not concerned here with the destructive effects that a hurricane, for instance, may produce, but with the intricate patterns of eddies and vortices that define its inner structure. . . . In order to better understand turbulence, we must first rid ourselves of the idea that turbulent behavior represents a form of chaos.
For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise. Today we know that this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization.33
It remains to be seen whether and to what extent the turbulence of intellectual warfare obeys the theoretical laws of chaos. Perhaps it will become possible to map the way epistemic breakthroughs stabilize themselves as singularities and fractal “eddies within eddies” (De Landa), increasingly dense, detailed, and localized skirmishes in entropic disciplinary subfields. I imagine that the effect would be at one and the same time to deepen the breakthrough, by intensifying subconflictual areas within the field, and to dissipate it. Again: resistance, subversion, opposition, etc., stabilize quite as much as they destabilize. The deepening specificity of gender criticism, for instance, might represent the regulation of gender conflict as much as its disruptive potential: its increasing density becomes the paradoxical mark of its dissipating force. It is just as likely, however, that attempts to apply chaos physics within analyses of discursive warfare will constitute nothing more than another set of tropes, another pipe dream of a scientific humanities, another mathematical sublime: the same contradictory desire for the rational conquest of phenomena that seem to escape reason and the autodestruction of reason in the process that one finds in Clausewitz.
Even if fog cannot be reduced to a science without being caught up in the mechanics of critical sublimity, one might still pursue its tactical uses. There is no question that the military is committed to deploying the fog of war. The importance of disinformation, propaganda, jamming, covert operations, “PsyOps,” and so on increases as warfare becomes more dependent on technical and tactical knowledge. As the power of reconnaissance and surveillance grows, so does the tactical importance of stealth technology. Virilio remarks that, in the hunt, the speed of perception annuls the distance between the hunter and the quarry. Survival depends on distance: “once you can see the target, you can destroy it” (WC 19, 4). Thus, from now on, “power is in disappearance: under the sea with nuclear submarines, in the air with U2s, spyplanes, or still higher with satellites and the space shuttle” (PW 146). “If what is perceived is already lost, it becomes necessary to invest in concealment what used to be invested in simple exploitation of one’s available forces — hence the spontaneous generation of new Stealth weapons. . . . The inversion of the deterrence principle is quite clear: unlike weapons which have to be publicized if they are to have a real deterrence effect, Stealth equipment can only function if its existence is clouded with uncertainty” (WC 4). For Virilio, stealth is not a matter of radar-immune bombers alone: it involves a vast “aesthetics of disappearance” that reaches an order of perfection in state terrorism:
Until the Second World War — until the concentration camps — societies were societies of incarceration, of imprisonment in the Foucauldian sense. The great transparency of the world, whether through satellites or simply tourists, brought about an overexposure of these places to observation, to the press and public opinion which now ban concentration camps. You can’t isolate anything in this world of ubiquity and instantaneousness. Even if some camps still exist, this overexposure of the world led to the need to surpass enclosure and imprisonment. This required another kind of repression, which is disappearance. . . . Bodies must disappear. People don’t exist. There is a big fortune in this technology because it’s so similar to what happened in the history of war. In war, we’ve seen how important disappearance, camouflage, dissimulation are — every war is a war of cunning.34
The methods of strategic disappearance developed by terrorist states are the most insidious form of secrecy. That is why Virilio, the anti-technologist, believes that the technology of secrecy must be exposed. Every order of stealth weaponry is purely and simply a threat. The aesthetics of disappearance must be reappeared. For Virilio, as well as for the reconnaissance cameras whose history he records, success depends on the logistics of perception, on closing the distance between the critic and his quarry. But what if critics are not only hunters; what if they are the quarry as well?
Michel de Certeau points out that, for Clausewitz, the distinction between strategy and tactics is determined not only by scales of conflict (war vs. battle) but by relative magnitudes of power. Strategy is for the strong, and it is deployed in known, visible, mapped spaces; tactics is “an art of the weak,” of those who must operate inside territory controlled by a greater power; it takes place on the ground of the “other,” inside alien space.35 It must therefore deploy deception in the face of a power “bound by its very visibility.” De Certeau suggests that even in cases where the weak force has already been sighted, it might use deception to great advantage. This is another lesson from Clausewitz: “trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a ‘last resort’: The weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist, the more the strategist will be able to use deception.” In the “practice of daily life,” in spaces of signification, in the contests of critical argument, such a tactics of the weak would also apply:
Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power. From this point of view, the dialectic of a tactic may be illuminated by the ancient art of sophistic. As the author of a great “strategic” system, Aristotle was also very interested in the procedures of this enemy which perverted, as he saw it, the order of truth. He quotes a formula of this protean, quick, and surprising adversary that, by making explicit the basis of sophistic, can also serve finally to define a tactic as I understand it here: it is a matter, Corax said, of “making the worse argument seem the better.” In its paradoxical concision, this formula delineates the relationship of forces that is the starting point for an intellectual creativity that is subtle, tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property. (38)
And yet it is rare that any of this ever occurs to critics, who seem to believe that “subversion” consists of vicarious identification with subversives, and of telling everything one knows to one’s enemies.
It is nonetheless already the case that, in critical discourse, behind all the humanistic myths of communication, understanding, and interpretive fidelity, one finds the tactical value of misinterpretations. In an argument it is often crucial for combatants not to know their enemy, to project instead a paper figure, a distortion, against which they can conceive and reinforce their own positions. Intelligence, here, is not only knowledge of one’s enemies but the tactical lies one tells about them, even to oneself. This is so regular a phenomenon of discursive conflict that it cannot be dismissed as an aberration that might be remedied through better communication, better listening skills, more disinterested criticism. One identifies one’s own signal in part by jamming everyone else’s, setting it off from the noise one generates around it. There is, in other words, already plenty of fog in discursive warfare, and yet we tend to remain passive in the face of it, and for the most part completely and uncritically committed to exposing ourselves to attack. Imagine what might be possible for a writing that is not insistently positional, not devoted to shoring itself up, to fixing itself in place, to laying out all its plans under the eyes of its opponents. Nothing, after all, has been more fatal for the avant-gardes than the form of the manifesto. If only surrealism had been more willing to lie, to dissimulate, to abandon the petty narcissism of the position and the desire to explain itself to anyone who would listen, and instead explored the potential offered it by the model of the secret society it also hoped to be. Intellectual warfare must therefore investigate the tactical advantages of deception and clandestinity over the habitual, quasi-ethical demands of clarity and forthrightness, let alone the narcissistic demands of self-promotion and mental exhibitionism, from however fortified a position. If to be seen by the enemy is to be destroyed, then intellectual warfare must pursue its own stealth technology. Self-styled intellectual warriors will explore computer networks not only as more rapid means of communication and publishing but as means for circumventing publication, as semi-clandestine lines of circulation, encoded correspondence, and semiotic speed. There will be no entirely secure secrecy, just as there are no impregnable positions — that too is Virilio’s argument — but a shrouded nomadism is already spreading in and around major discursive conflicts. There are many more than nine grounds, but the rest are secret.
IX. Cemetery:
When the notion that knowledge is not only power but a mode of warfare has gained sufficient currency, criticism will take it upon itself to develop the strategic implications of thought, and to combat the coordination of the “knowledge industries” with the military-industrial complex. Here, however, on this final ground, already razed by the self-consuming turbulence of battle, the project of war study is neither to serve the state nor to oppose it, but rather to trivialize the very idea of war, as we trivialize everything we take up as sublime.
Even as it imposes itself with unprecedented force, intellectual warfare is already dead. It is death carried out by other means. Do not mistake this claim. It has nothing to do with saying that war talk will stop; on the contrary, we will be subjected to it as never before precisely because it is dead. Let me repeat this essay’s fundamental law: The object of criticism is always a phenomenalization of some systemic device of discourse, and it always appears in a surrogate form at the very moment it is no longer functional. The task in respect to the knowledge and critique of war is thus not developmental but simulacral, a term whose own recent fate attests to its truth. Everything that Baudrillard’s theory of simulation was about happened to the theory itself: the sublime disappearance of its own referent through its obscene overexposure, its precipitous reduction to a mere bit of intellectual currency that quickly expended all its value and force. But what if that is the task of intellectual warfare as well: not to advance and defend the new truths of war but to ruin them in the very act of construing them, to level whatever criticism has assigned to itself of war’s sublimity, to recast it in the proxy forms of mental war toys and pitch them about in mock combats, in ritual battles for possession of the dead, waged in the name of the dead and on dead ground, and most of all to cast their shades across the future.
We — and who really is speaking here? is it the dead themselves? — we come to fight discourse’s war against itself. We are soldiers of an intellectual “suicide state” that practices the politics of its own disappearance (PW 90). War for us is no longer an idea, a historical object, or even a sublime image: all these are only symptoms of an autoaggressive drive, a rage for self-destruction, a turbulent movement that distributes and evacuates every image and idea. We are like Kleist’s Kolhaas or Penthesilea, in a question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: “Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to become a double suicide machine?”36 It is certainly one task of A Thousand Plateaus to avoid reducing its field to such alternatives, such ethico-political choices — to project and affirm different possibilities. But here, at this moment and on this ground, imagine Kolhaas on the scaffold, reading the future of the state in a text that he always carried close to his heart but never before considered, and swallowing it without uttering its truth at the very instant he expires.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering Wartalk (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993); Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993); Garry Wills, “Critical Inquiry in Clausewitz,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., The Politics of Interpretation, special issue of Critical Inquiry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982, 1983) 159-80; Mette Hjort, The Strategy of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).
2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985); cited in John Muse, “War on War,” War After War, ed. Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992) 55.
3. Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993); Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992); Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992).
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter S. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) 46. See also Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes,” in War After War 47-51. On war as a metaphor for argument, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1980).
5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986); Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).
6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).
7. One example of ressentiment calling itself war: Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).
8. The figure of the nine grounds is taken from Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) 88-105. This is not a scholarly edition, but precisely the sort of volume one might pick up in an airport, one of a series of “spiritual” handbooks including Buddhist and Taoist texts and works by Thomas Merton, Marcus Aurelius, and Rilke. Sun Tzu’s own grounds are, of course, quite different; it would be interesting to develop the grounds he stipulates as grounds for intellectual war as well.
9. The question of degree is crucial. If certain orders of humanistic discourse tend to suppress the strategic aspects of cultural exchange, the new war discourse will exaggerate them.
10. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1993). On the figure of “cyberwar,” see James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1992).
11. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy: Vol. I (Consumption); Vols. II (The History of Eroticism) and III (Sovereignty), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988, 1991); “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 116-29.
12. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969) 11.
13. Daniel Pick, The War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 7-8.
14. Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 85.
15. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? — Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 18. Rose’s chief text from Freud is “Why War?” (1932) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholgical Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955) 22: 195-215.
16. In Zizek’s vigorous defense, Hegel has already accounted for this crisis, and attempts to reduce the dialectic merely to its most formal and totalizing elements misconceive, among other things, the perpetual surplus of negation. See Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992); For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991); and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology Durham: Duke UP, 1993).
17. See also John Keegan’s account of fortification in The History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) 139-52.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume II, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 389-90.
19. One must, of course, refer here to Foucault’s vast elaboration of this term in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977); Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); and other works.
20. See A Thousand Plateaus, especially Plateau 12: “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine,” 351-423. For Deleuze’s most relevant preliminary explorations of nomad thought, see Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990).
21. There are several instance of the former in a recent issue of Yale French Studies; nomadology there is rarely more than an interpretive prosthesis for sedentary academics. See Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, eds., Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, spec. issue of Yale French Studies 82:1 (1993).
22. Jean Baudrillard and Sylve`re Lotringer, Forget Foucault, trans. Philip Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987) 127-28.
23. I have already suggested that the very procedures of this essay constitute, at least for me, an exploration, quite preliminary and by no means successful, of the mode of nomadic thought itself. A ground is not a sort of geo-narcissistic foundation, a stand that is more plausible the more solid and immovable one can make it, but a strategic field across whose surface one moves and deploys one’s forces for the duration of a particular tactical encounter, in a manner that uses and may even defend the ground but does not finally attach itself to it. At all points, one must take into account the multiplicity of grounds and the fact that the field or ground itself changes given the forces in conflict upon it. This would seem to resemble Wills’s version of Clausewitzian Kritik, put into motion; insofar as that is the case, one cannot be too attached to the idea of nomadism either: as I argue at various points (grounds 2 and 7), the chaos of conflict itself militates against the full clarification of any tactic, and one must avoid the facile opposition of theory and Kritik (i.e., practice). And one must also avoid becoming too attached to Deleuze and Guattari, or to “Nomadology,” or to any body of thought, lest one turn one’s own work into sedentary commentary on a position.
24. For the Deleuze-Guattari treatment of nomadic numbering, see A Thousand Plateaus 387-94.
25. Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 93.
26. On the figure of the rhizome, see the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus 3-25.
27. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 11 ff.
28. It is by no means in order to defend Baudrillard’s position that one notes how, in this context, critics who dismiss the notion of simulation in the name of some political or historical reality are themselves caught up in the very same “precession of simulacra.” Baudrillard: “the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it marks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 11. For Baudrillard’s notion of strategy, see Fatal Strategies, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.D.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).
29. See, for instance, Magnus I. Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989).
30. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 112-13.
31. We might also call war the sublime of the state. As Pick remarks, in Clausewitz, “friction occurs within war, rather than in the nature of the relation of war to politics,” but “a more radical interrogation of war is also implied; we glimpse a war machine which threatens the political state with something madder, more disabling and disruptive than the dominant formulation of On War suggests” (32-33). War is the state’s own limit text, its proper transgression of itself, its essential and constitutive surplus, its seductive symptom of the death drive.
32. See Klein, Richard, ed., Nuclear Criticism, spec. issue of Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984).
33. The first passage is from De Landa, 14-15; the second is cited by De Landa (15) and is taken from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984) 141. See also James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).
34. Pure War 88-89. See also Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
35. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 37.
36. A Thousand Plateaus 356. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O– and Other Stories, trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (London: Penguin Books, 1978).
