Not Gaza; Narratives of Security; Fragilities
Greetings, Romans:
I am not going to write about Gaza, not now, at least not directly. Others will, perhaps because they know. But I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.
Irish anthropologist Mark Maguire and I have been struggling for some years with how polities may imagine the shape of violence to come, and hence how they (we) construct security regimes. What stories do we tell ourselves, not least so that we may budget state funds to address what we believe to be needful?
In response to Gaza’s horrors, David Pan, the editor of Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary yesterday posted a brief reflection, Israel, Hamas, and the Techniques of War. In doing so, he reposted my presentation of Maguire & Westbrook, Anticipation, Social Theory, and the Stories We Tell, from the Telos Spring ’23 Conference, “Forms of War.” (The paper itself is not yet published, so watch this space.)
Our stories are vague, shifting, may well be the wrong stories. Violence is very hard to imagine. I do not mean that it is hard to imagine violence in general, as horror, or in the particular, as specific agonies that occurred in this or that place. Even the lucky, if they are educated, know a little history, and we all have Halloween, scary movies, and nightmares. But such things are only occasionally violence for us. In the light of day, we understand that the bloodshed we distantly know rarely disturbs our expectations for the orderly progression of our lives. But what of terrorist violence: surprise, m----f-----r! Or a land war, in Europe, with tanks? Or paragliders over the wall, maybe heading to a music festival? Of the violence to come? What do we imagine? What can we, from here, conceive? At what point are we just scaring ourselves?
Even the actual violence of the past, richly documented, can be opaque. I recently attended the National Security Seminar at the US Army War College. We visited nearby Gettysburg, on what the USAWC calls a “staff ride,” a day long teaching session. Our guide was the larger than life Doug Doud, USMC FA-18 pilot, leader of the strategy seminar, and Gettysburg historian – he actually lives in a house on the battlefield. Doug gave perhaps the most impressive teaching performance I have ever seen – an eight hour walking mélange of not just tactics, strategy, antecedents and consequence, but also leadership under uncertainty, politics, psychology, ethics, and, ultimately, spirituality, the Seele (soul, essence) of the matter. What would have to be believed, by how many, for this to have happened? What do we believe? You can get some sense at USAWC Gettysburg Staff Ride.
As a child of the Vietnam era, with memory refreshed by Afghanistan, I found Gettysburg almost incomprehensible. That one would try to draw an army into the open, walk or run up to them, and kill them at close range, all the while taking horrendous casualties, in order to take possession of some now sacred field, is almost unimaginable. Literally: hard to think, staring at those impossibly broad fields and pastures, that hordes of farm boys and shopkeepers so confronted one another. For days. By the end of the war, with Sherman’s March to the Sea, the imagination of warfare that made Gettysburg necessary would be well-nigh over. Violence changed. Pickett’s charge was not just the end of so many young lives, but the end of a set of ideas about the conduct and nature of war, though “idea” is too weak a word to convey such a powerful reality. Hummingbirds at Dusk The past is a far country. For that matter, at this level of pressure, our workaday ideas melt, and the present is pretty strange, too.
Mark and I struggle with the political significances and especially bureaucratic articulations of violences in Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
Anticipation, Social Theory, and the Stories We Tell is not my best performance. I will spare you the reasons, but I was more than a little jaded, weary, indeed sad. I say “um” too much, hopefully indicating thought but maybe just buying time. Everyone is a critic, and the fact that the critics are right doesn’t make anything better on my end. But the thinking, or at least the effort to think, is good, well, honest. I can say that much.
Chin up, gentle reader.
— David A. Westbrook
Everyone is a critic, and the fact that the critics are right doesn’t make anything better on my end. But the thinking, or at least the effort to think, is good, well, honest.