Memories of My Green Machine
War has its own logic.
—J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors
Memory: “The insights of one hour are blotted out by the events of the next, and few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men at war.”1
My Green Machine 1: Unarmored but armed, woodland camo with olive drab liner, Charlie 6, a standard-issue M998 HMMWV. I drove it through traffic-choked, smoky Baghdad streets at the head of the convoy, waiting for the blacktop to explode in shrapnel and fire, watching overpasses for ambushes and rooftops for snipers, watching hadjis for sudden swerves. I gripped the wheel and tapped the gas, weaving unstopping through crowded intersections, feeling tires grip the road and weight shift from right to left. Every morning I opened the hood and lovingly ran hands along belts, rubbed oil between fingers, traced lineaments and undercarriage with tender eyes.
Posthumanism: Something has happened to “Man.” Whether understood as “the subject,” as “the human,” as “Modern Man,” or “Western White Male Hegemonic Identity Discourses,” the problem of “Man” has been brought to a new pitch by various thinkers, more recent than Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx, and the political question of our anthro-ontology has been raised to the status of imminent dilemma. We are, we’re told, postmodern cyborgs engaged in apocalyptic biopolitics: “For millennia,” writes Foucault, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with an additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”2 Auschwitz, according to Agamben, has confronted us with the “metaphysical task par excellence,” the “‘politicization’ of bare life.”3 We are decentered, fragmented, fluid, part thing and part animal, primitive and modern at once: “Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’”—and we should add here “The Object,” “The Parliament of Things,” “Commodity Life,” and even “Technological Man”—“there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living . . . a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death.”4 We are, we are told, posthuman.
All this seems more or less taken for granted, as if in the realm of ideas the forces arrayed against anthrocarniphallogocentrism themselves formed a theoretical hegemony unwilling to confront the conditions of its possibility. Critics have come out to give the critics a good critique. Neil Badmington argues that posthumanism is not quite ready for prime time: “Posthumanism . . . needs theory, needs theorizing, needs above all to reconsider the untimely celebration of the absolute end of ‘Man.’”5 Daniel T. O’Hara asserts that posthumanist theorists have misread their Foucault, ditching his nihilistic Nietzschean-Heideggerian baggage in order to put him to work toward “liberal or social democratic” progressivism in the service of “all kinds of self-revising subjectivities,” and argues that many of posthumanism’s “prophetic discourses” are in fact not posthuman at all, but very much within a deeply humanistic Romanticism.6 And Derrida, true to form, questions whether we have even begun to question the questions behind our question: “It is thus not a matter of opposing another discourse on the same ‘things’ to the enormous multiplicity of traditional discourses on man, animal, plant, or stone, but of ceaselessly analyzing the whole conceptual machinery, and its interestedness, which has allowed us to speak of the ‘subject’ up to now.”7
Yet something has happened. I would hazard, in fact, that it happened some time ago. On the “crisis of representation,” Bernd Hüppauf writes: “The experience of the dissolution of subjectivity and its traditional patterns of orientation and values, the transformation of modes of perception, and the destruction of vast areas of landscape and experience of time and space have become constitutive elements of modern consciousness . . . It seemed impossible to restore the human face after it had been mutilated in the outburst of destruction after 1914.”8 Rather than maybe washing away on some beach in the future, then, perhaps the human has already passed—blown to pieces almost a century ago in a dismal and muddy gray trench.9
My Green Machine 2: Clearly technology has something to do with this. We didn’t transform ex nihilo, nor were we shaped from within by some transcendental Idea. What marks modernity (and any prefix positing subsequent epochs) is the change in how we interact with our world: namely, our technology. Yet we must remember that “Technology is . . . no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up for us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.”10 What is the truth of technology? For Marx, it shows us the objectified social relations between humans, the way that we produce ourselves.11 For Heidegger, it is an enframing that separates man from his essence.12 For me, in this investigation and intervention, technology is the war machine—both the quasi-subjects who wield it and the quasi-objects who compose it. For the posthuman soldier, “Technology is our uniform.”13
War: Beyond the gate, the roads were already thick with traffic and smog. The chaos out there, the crazy fucking hadji writing, lawless traffic, hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death all pressed like a hot wind, and as I stood smoking, waiting for the mission to start, I was suddenly filled with a deep sense of strength and power, of fortitude and righteous fury. I was overtaken by a sudden joy at being a soldier, feeling the charge in my fingertips and neck, so unbelievably just and good to have my rifle in my hands, ten pounds of killer steel, resplendent in the promise of three-round burst. Those fuckers out there, the victims, the insurgents and snipers and fedayeen, the hadjis in their man-dresses and turbans and rags—it might be their land and their city but I was a walking death star. We had full-auto SAWs and two .50 cals, whose rounds could blow chunks out of concrete. We had grenades and rifles and more ammo than we knew what to do with. We had knives and ceramic armored plates and steely, murderous hearts. We had handheld satellite-linked computers and ciphered radios and behind us the whole heaving Empire. We were storm troopers, force made flesh, gods in metal. I ran my palm over the blued metal receiver of my rifle, wanting death to flow from my eyes like magic. This is what I was born to do, I thought, the apotheosis of life itself, the glory and the power.
Route Map: Our mission is to explore phenomenologically and theoretically the fraught and complex question of the cyborg animal man, the posthuman, through what seems to be the most intense enactment of this all-too-contemporary crisis: modern industrial war. Donna Haraway called modern war “a cyborg orgy,” and Alphonso Lingis recently argued that in our “postindustrial social economy,” the soldier has become “the sole genuine hero, an individual integrally subordinated to order and utility, but at the same time superhuman in the savage and exuberant release of excess energies against a demonic enemy.”14 Both of these contemporary thinkers echo the thoughts of an earlier writer best known for his memoir of World War I: Ernst Jünger. Russell Berman writes in his preface to Jünger’s On Pain that “Jünger’s speculation on the intrusive expansion of technology into the realm of the body clearly anticipates the extensive recent discussion of the blurring between humans and machines.”15 Furthermore, Wolf Kittler suggests “that what Jünger calls ‘organic construction’ comes uncannily close to the man-machine symbiosis which is the basic assumption of cybernetics, the science that studies Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . . .”16 As Jünger himself noted in 1934, “The growing objectification of the individual and its formations seen today is not new.”17
New or not, our story happens in the present, even if the first “posthumans” were born almost a century past. Our hero is the cyborg soldier. Our setting is Baghdad, Iraq. Our subject is the experience of men at war.
WARNO: First, war is normal. As the anthropologist Paul Richards notes in his study of contemporary war, we must take as our starting point “an assumption that may at first seem paradoxical—that to understand war we must first deny it special status. War, like peace, is organized by social agents.”18 In her brief but important book on photography and war, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag critiques our contemporary “conviction that war is an aberration . . . That peace is the norm.” She asserts rather that throughout history, “War has been the norm and peace the exception.”19 According to the bioarchaeologist Phillip Walker, “As far as we know, there are no forms of social organization, modes of production, or environmental settings that remain free from interpersonal violence for long.”20 We must begin by taking war as something as essential to humans as any other social activity found in our long historical and prehistorical record. The first clear evidence of mass human violence is almost ten thousand years old; the first evidence of the end of war has yet to be seen.21
It is also important to resist interpretations of the experience of war that rely too heavily on narratives of trauma and recovery. Much contemporary discussion of war seems to focus on its traumatic aspects, but in many ways this serves only to pathologize and obscure the subject. As Allen Feldman has pointed out, “trauma” itself is a political, historical, and aesthetic concept that often serves to “archaize violence, commodify the past, isolate the ‘traumatized’ from peer communities, and promote short-term cathartic-empathic identification,” and it also risks inducing the “repression of memory” and “compulsive repetition.”22 Relying too heavily on a hermeneutics of trauma not only marginalizes a central human experience and runs the risks Feldman points out, but also betrays the evidence of history. Yuval Noah Harari has worked to historicize the “disillusionment narrative” so central to our understanding of war since 1914 by comparing it with earlier memoirs: “As the case of Renaissance military memoirists clearly indicates, there can be warriors and warrior castes that are intimately familiar with war and all its horrors, yet see it as an acceptable and even a desirable vocation. It all depends on people’s worldview—not on war’s ‘true face.’”23 Glenn Gray puts the problem succinctly: “There are soldiers in the Anglo-Saxon world and perhaps many more in Teutonic and Slavic lands . . . for whom death is a fulfillment. Unless we try to understand the motivation for this kind of soldier, we can make no claim to grasping the full nature of Homo furens.”24
Normalizing war doesn’t solve all our problems, however, because for most Westerners, war is something they’ve never seen or heard or felt except through a screen. As Sontag puts it:
“We”—this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put time under fire . . . stubbornly feels. And they are right.25
Journalists, anthropologists, and participant-observers like myself must face what Ivana Maček identifies as “one of the major methodological problems of the anthropology of war, namely, how to communicate experiences of war, or how to express the existential threat and pain . . .”26 We must work toward understanding war in all its complexity, and we must meet this complexity with all our resources. “This demands a constant sociocultural-emotional engagement from everyone in contact with a war,” writes Maček. “The process calls upon all our creativity to find new ways of understanding each other, new ways of communicating the most important aspects of our experiences.”27
War has its own logic, a logos we must be willing to hear, a logos characterized by, among other things, fragmentation and transformation.
Shark Attack: A trailerful of nervous boys sweating under the weight of bags of gear, we flinch in the glare of the opened door and under the howls of sergeants wobble into light—”Doubletime, private!”—two minutes to heave to the drill pad while the sergeants circle and close like sharks—“Too slow! You’re dead, private. You’re dead now!”—the rims of their smokeybears plunge into your face like the razored halos of red devils, their voices hard and loud, and when you flinch, move, stumble, mutter, blink—Wham!—there’s a fucker screaming in your eyeball like you just raped his mom, and thus our first lesson: movement under fire. In just a handful of the longest hours of my life, mostly spent in pain, we began the sixty-three-day transformation from dirtbags into soldiers. From a gaggle of individuals each doing his own thing, from a motley blend of black, white, brown, Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, city, and country, we’d learn to think, move, and speak as a unit—and by the time we would finally cross the stage in our graduation ceremony, we would have learned to believe deeply in our mechanization. Humming in our sense of accomplishment, each of us tin soldiers would know we’d done something bold and honorable to be stamped and molded so fiercely, to be made into tools of the big green machine.28
Homo furens: There are many transformations in war. One comes before, transforming a man into a soldier; another comes after, turning a killer back into a citizen. One, on the field of battle, changes a soldier into a fighter: “The soldier who has yielded himself to the fortunes of war . . . is no longer what he was. He becomes in some sense a fighter, whether he wills it or not . . . He must surrender in a measure to the will of others and to superior force. In a real sense he becomes a fighting man, a Homo furens.”29 Another change, into what Jonathan Shay calls the berserk state, turns men into irrational beasts and invincible gods, strewing red-eyed carnage.30 As Jünger describes it, “The fighter, who sees a bloody mist in front of his eyes as he attacks, doesn’t want prisoners; he wants to kill.”31 Transformation is the key to unlocking the enigma of war. Hiding in occupied France in 1940, Simone Weil wrote this in her brilliant study of our oldest war story:
Herein lies the last secret of war, a secret revealed by the Iliad in its similes, which liken the warriors either to fire, flood, wind, wild beasts, or God knows what blind cause of disaster, or else to frightened animals, trees, water, sand, to anything in nature that is set in motion by the violence of external forces . . . The art of war is simply the art of producing such transformations, and its equipment, its processes, even the casualties it inflicts on the enemy, are only means directed toward this end—its true object is the warrior’s soul.32
Dogs of War: At first, Basic Training is like living in a kennel. It’s like living in a kennel and knowing it, being conscious of descending to the level of brute animal being—higher brain functions like imagination, thought, empathy, and analysis all shut down. The most you can handle is taking a thirty-inch step, putting one foot in front of the other, moving your feet the way you’re supposed to, and you’re fucking that up too and they’re on you and guess what, you’re doing pushups again. You cannot succeed. You cannot escape. You cannot be free from the noise and hate and constant surveillance. Punished as a group for individual infractions, you learn to watch the others and bully them just like the drill sergeants do—at first to keep your ass from having to push, then later just because you can, because after getting shit on all day, it feels good to fuck with somebody smaller than you. A rough and ready hierarchy forms: the toughest, meanest, and quickest at the top, the weak, compassionate, and slow bullied by all.
Animal Man: “It is a general principle . . . ,” wrote Freud in his celebrated debate with Einstein on the question of war, “that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men have no business to exclude themselves.”33 What would it mean to consider man an animal, and to ask if the roots of war lie in our animal being?34 The primatologist and anthropologist Richard Wrangham has considered this question by looking at the way chimpanzees, unprovoked, form raiding parties to attack and kill outnumbered male chimpanzees in other troops. He presents a convincing adaptive explanation for why chimpanzees engage in lethal group raids, his “imbalance-of-power hypothesis,” which explains that unprovoked, calculated aggression has been selected for as a trait conducive to both individual and group reproductive success.35 Wrangham uses the imbalance-of-power hypothesis to back up the “chimpanzee violence hypothesis,” which “proposes that human warfare is built on pre-human tendencies.”36
“A combination of three points . . .” Wrangham writes, “suggests that selection has favored unprovoked intergroup violence in human males: the prevalence of human war raiding, the similarities of chimpanzee and human lethal raiding, and the ability of the imbalance-of-power hypothesis to explain the mammalian distribution of lethal violence.”37 His conclusion implies that violence, both individual and organized, is as much a biological part of human life as are sex and eating, that aggression and the drive for dominance are neither vestigial atavisms nor social maladaptations but rather species traits, and that we have little reason to hope that our long history of war and murder might someday come to end.38
In fact, what seems to have occurred is not an abatement of violence but its intensification and increase through industrialization, from the meat-grinding cannons, Maxims, and wire of World War I to the apocalyptic annihilation held in reserve in ballistic-missile subs currently prowling lightless depths under Arctic ice. The technological revolution of mass industrialization changed warfare as radically as it has the rest of the world, and it was in the trenches of World War I that this change was seen in its most intense, dramatic, and horrific form. “Under the conditions of technological warfare,” writes Hüppauf, “the destructive elements of modernity were condensed to the extreme and forcefully imprinted on the modern mind.”39
Steel Helmet: “He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as the denizen of a new and far harsher world . . . The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us . . . Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that you need for fighting.”40
Warrior Ethos: What kind of man is needed for fighting? An animal become a machine. How do we create such a thing? Through training, institutionalization, the bureaucratization and mechanization of warfare, the objectification of man and his indoctrination through pain: “One immediately notices by every kind of rigorous training how the imposition of firm and impersonal rules and regulations is reflected in the hardening of the face.”41 This is a physical, mental, and even narrative process. It is also a moral process: “The vast and distant military and civilian structure that provides a modern soldier with his orders, arms, ammunition, food, water, information, training, and fire support is ultimately a moral structure, a fiduciary, a trustee holding the life and safety of that soldier.”42 It is, finally, a process that the soldier must learn to accept, internalize, and even come to love. “In highly mechanized armies,” writes Gray, “many a soldier gains a certain fulfillment in serving the machine with which he is entrusted.”43 The soldier learns, in training and in battle, to objectify the world, himself, and others. He learns to repeat after the drill sergeants: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” He learns “to serve a different deity,” a deity concerned “with death and not life, destruction and not construction.”44 He learns to love war, to take pleasure in it, to “delight in destruction,” and to master pain.45 He learns the love of discipline and violence.
Master of Discipline: His name was Drill Sergeant Krugman. He was a sniper in the light infantry in Alaska, and we hated him with fierce, fierce ardor. He was the ultimate authoritarian, and I still think back fondly sometimes to our first day there, his big black boots shining in my face as he walked up and down the line, the burn in my arms and chest and hips, the puddle of sweat on the floor under my chin. “Down,” he said, and we lowered ourselves to the level of his rippled boot soles. “Up,” he said, and we pushed up past the toe gleaming like a Vulcan mirror, past the ankle where the boot narrowed and up the leather along the leg where it widened, the laces taut and strong, the hide smooth, to the top of the boot where the snugly bloused trousers slid into the leather like a hand inside a glove. “Three-five, Drill Sergeant,” we gasped, weak and broken. We did not deserve his love. “Down,” he said, and down we went. He smoked us all day long.
The Art of Pain: “Tell me your relation to pain,” writes Jünger, “and I will tell you who you are!”46 Indeed, not only are we “who we are” in our relation to pain, but in our history and knowledge of it; we are who we are in our scars. “The constitution of memory through coercion and the spectacle of pain is the constitution of the political subject . . .” writes Feldman. “For Nietzsche, as later for Foucault, the body marked by discipline and punition serves as an exemplary site for the coming together of political forces and constitutes a formation of domination, a place where power is ordered and a topos where that ordering attains a certain visibility . . .”47
If, as Elaine Scarry asserts, “War is relentless for taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body,” then learning the art of war is learning the art of pain.48 According to Jünger,
The heroic and cultic world presents an entirely different relation to pain than does the world of sensitivity. While in the latter . . . it is a matter of marginalizing pain and sheltering life from it, in the former the point is to integrate pain and organize life in such a way that one is always armed against it . . . Indeed, discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly-ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike-heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel. In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that at any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling. The central question concerning the rank of values can be answered by determining to what extent the body can be treated as an object.49
The soldier is formed not only in the mastery of pain, but also in the training to cause it. As Scarry points out, “In battle . . . the soldier’s primary goal . . . is the injuring of enemy soldiers . . .”50 The soldier must learn how to use force, which, according to Weil, is “that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”51 The way a soldier exercises force and makes corpses is not with his bare hands, but through tools, weapons, the objects that constitute the technology of war. Violence, as Hannah Arendt points out, “is distinguished by its instrumental character.”52 The soldier identifies himself with his technology, his rifle, his body armor, his tank or Humvee, because it is his uniform, while at the same time the material world around him comes to life because now it has the power to kill him, whether through an IED buried under a pile of street trash, “hostile territory,” the unseen fire of a sniper, or the potential failure of his own equipment.53 Meanwhile, he comes to see the enemy as a target, a corpse, something less than human.
Fucking Hadjis: We held them all at gunpoint, making them sit with their hands on their heads. “Don’t fucking look at me,” we shouted. “Eyes on the ground!” Our work crew had turned into our prisoners, because one of them had tried to steal some 9mm rounds from the ammo depot where they worked. “Fucking hadjis,” someone muttered, as we waited for orders from higher. Eventually the lieutenant picked five: the thief, his brother, the leader of the work crew, one guy who’d had nothing to do with it but had been angry and disobedient, and another guy who might’ve known the thief somehow. We zip-stripped their thumbs and put sandbags on their heads and threw them in the back of a truck. We took them back to Battalion, where they were interrogated, then we took them to the MP station. The lieutenant had me help him fill out the paperwork: name, address, next of kin, offense. He had their names scribbled on a notepad, nearly everything else was left blank. The MPs started processing them, shoving each one up against the fence and twisting his arms behind him: “Spread your fucking legs! Don’t fucking look at me! You fucking looking at me?”
By the time the Abu Ghraib photos came out, most of us hated the Iraqis so much, we didn’t really care. Command came down with platitudes about unacceptable behavior, but the rest of us knew the score. They were the enemy, all of them, the whole fucking country, maybe even the kids. “You know what?” one of our sergeants told us. “Fuck ’em.”
The Face of the Enemy: “Since humans relate to each other through social cues, rendering the enemy without (and outwith) society is an essential aspect of setting up a target to be hit,” writes Paul Richards.54 Dehumanizing the enemy is such a common feature of war, in fact, that we can almost take it for granted.55 The enemy is not always defined as subhuman, especially not among professional soldiers who feel they are fighting other professional soldiers, but all too often the image of the enemy’s subhuman status is a central feature of modern war.56 This may have something to do with race, as suggested by Gray, and no doubt the worst acts of dehumanization—both physically and symbolically—occur in colonial or imperial wars. Yet this might also have to do with mass mobilization and the need for propaganda. Shay frames the problem thus:
To our modern mind the enemy is detestable—by definition. “Well, he’s the enemy, ain’t he?” said one veteran. “You couldn’t kill them if you thought he was just like you.” This apparently self-evident truth—that men cannot kill an enemy understood to be honorable and like oneself—is something this veteran learned as part of his culture . . . Vietnam-era military training reflexively imparted the image of a demonized adversary . . .57
As Shay points out quite clearly in his discussion of trauma, dehumanizing the enemy has a real effect on the soldier, making his own objectification darker, meaner, and potentially more destructive. As Gray describes his own experience, “It is not the suffering and dying that sickens [the warrior] so much as it is the brutalization of the emotions and the corruption of the heart which prolonged fighting brings.”58
My Weapon: I watched the man come into my sights, right where I had him set up. Another time, I jammed the rifle stock into my shoulder and aimed at the driver behind the windshield. Another time, all I had to do was chamber a round, pulling back the charging handle with a click and riding it forward, and I got my message across. My big black gun was power incarnate: M16A2 5.56mm rifle with 40mm M203 grenade launcher, well-oiled and fastidiously clean. I took her with me everywhere. I cradled her in my arms and nightly rubbed her down and reached to touch her in my sleep. 11.79 pounds with a thirty-round; I was naked without her. I went home on leave in the middle of my tour, and the whole two weeks I kept coming to with a shock because when I reached for her, she wasn’t there. With my rifle I was a soldier: I could kill, I wielded force, I held power. The Iraqis we moved among were something less, something less potent, something I could push around. Without my rifle I was nothing, a target, merely passive. My rifle gave me my world.
The Worldhood of the Rifle: “Possessions are for the combat soldier his only assurance of protection against a threatening world,” writes Gray. “He cares for them, often with more attention than he pays to his own body.”59 A soldier’s things, from Achilles’s shield to the gear in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, are more than mere tools, more even than just fetishes.60 They are world-forming, in a Heideggerian sense, and world-destroying, as in Scarry’s analysis.61 The rifle reveals a world.62
In Being and Time, Heidegger puts forward a description of the way we encounter “entities in the world” such that they are world-disclosing. “Taken strictly,” he writes, “there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is.”63 He explores this phenomenology from the specific utility of any piece of equipment to the environment toward which and in which said equipment exists.
In roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some definite direction. A covered railway platform takes account of bad weather; an installation for public lighting takes account of darkness, or rather of specific changes in the presence or absence of daylight—the “position of the sun.” In a clock, account is taken of some definite constellation in the world-system . . . When we make use of clock-equipment, which is proximally and inconspicuously ready-to-hand, the environing Nature is ready-to-hand along with it.64
Mutatis mutandis, a rifle comes along with a world of conflict and an enemy to be destroyed.
Normally, according to Heidegger, “Things” are phenomenologically ready-to-hand in their daily instrumentality, but they become world-disclosing (or present-to-hand) in their “conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy,” that is, as obstacles, failures, and absences.65 When we encounter the obstacle, failure, or absence of an object, we encounter as if newly seen the “toward-this” toward which the object is directed, “and along with it everything connected with the work—the whole ‘workshop’—as that wherein concern always dwells.”66 This newly-revealed context announces itself as the world.
But in war there is something else: the presence of death and the death-dealing, death-defying, and “civilization-destroying” utility of arms and armor opens the possibility of a greater awareness of the “world” as it is disclosed through the world-destroying character of the equipment involved.67 The soldier’s rifle, that is, is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand at once; the soldier moves in an enchanted world of magical objects, where any common “Thing” has the power to kill, and where the human is always reducible and being reduced to the status of a mere “Thing,” an “object,” a target, a tool, or a corpse. “So, too, the ordinary soldier . . . dwells every day in the midst of determinate wounds and indeterminate meaning.”68 In this liminal world of life and death, where every subject is an object and every object a death-dealing subject, a refined and vivid fetishism is more than an atavistic reflex of the narrative animal. The dangerous, heterogeneous relationships between things and Being, between object, animal, and man, the “multiplicity of organizations among realms,” form the essence of the cyborg soldier’s experience of war. As Gray wrote in 1959, “Those thinkers who believe that a new type of man is bound to emerge as a product of our technological development might well study in detail over the last century the varying relation of men to their weapons of war.”69
Storm of Steel: “The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that had not only opened the red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them.”70
Thinking War: The “posthuman” transformation is apocalyptic, emancipatory, dehumanizing, profound. The effect of modern industrial warfare on the soldiers in World War I has been noted, but its effect on thought is widespread, complex, and yet to be made fully clear. Through the deadly heterogeneity of war, our narratives of selfhood are fragmented and reformed in strange, precarious, and threatening ways. One possibility is the creative metamorphosis of individuals within ever-renewing social-cybernetic networks of increasing richness and potential; another possibility is the increasing alienation, atomization, and commodification of the destabilized subject; yet a third possibility, embraced by Heidegger and Jünger, is totalitarianism. There may be others, more or less nihilistic.
Jünger’s embrace of the world of the cyborg soldier raises important questions about the future of that world. According to Hüppauf, “Jünger’s claim in 1963 that many of his observations are no longer surprising or provocative, but have become part of everyday experience, seems justified.”71 One of the most disturbing potential aspects of the posthuman, when taken in its full destructive and creative potential, is that as it manifests itself in death and war making (and the Schumpeterian “creative destruction” of global capital), it constricts the range of human possibility to a narrower and narrower horizon. Paraphrasing Jünger, Kittler writes: “The gestalt of the worker [read: warrior] stalls, brings to a standstill in the sense of challenging, provoking, defying, and hunting down any being in the world—including that eminent being-there, ‘Da-sein,’ which man is.”72 This happens not only in the biopolitics of concentration camps and nuclear missiles, but in the very experience of war itself. The horizon of being contracts and intensifies: time shrinks from days to hours to minutes, space transforms into an ominous world of fetishes and threats, and other people divide into allies and enemies. Thought gives way to matter: in the phenomenological ethos of war, “Thinking tends to become not only painful but more and more unnecessary.”73 When posthumanism goes to war, the war is total. Simone Weil writes:
Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.74
After-Action Report: The line of the horizon rose and bulged in weird and jagged shapes, framed by drifts and columns of smoke. A great turquoise egg, split as if by a giant, loomed in the distance among the buildings, towers, stacks, minarets, and palaces. Crossed by highways thick with cars, bunched in dense collections of hovels and alleys, scarred by megalomania, occupation, shock and awe, the city met us every day with the same cratered face, verging between a sneer and a smile.
Until I got used to the idea of my own death, until I got used to the randomness of things, I saw wires in every trash bag. Watching my speed, watching the traffic around us, watching for the next exit, watching our escorts, I also watched the trash along the streets, the everywhere garbage and corpses of goats and chunks of concrete and abandoned tires, the filth that could kill me.
The city’s skin: trash and sand and smoke, hiding instant death. Up close, far away. War is no place for imagination. Coming up over the river, the apocalyptic panorama fading into the desert, swinging off the exit back into the mess, crammed junctions, bodies pressed wall-to-wall, narrowed sky and muezzin windows. The sun, the shade, blurs of brown and passing colors, little boys in lavender pants and huddled packs of wives in black burkas.
I already feel like a cliché. My memory feels false: checkpoints, translators, freestyle, friendly fire. But there was nothing false about it then, the flood of light and the fear of death. The truth is, I never got used to it.
The city pulsed around us, a big heart beating traffic and smoke. We were only little things, action figures in the field of play, army guys moved around, scattered by fire, piled up, and boxed away. [2010]