Watching War New Edition

By Jan Mieszkowski

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8239-5

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………..ixAcknowledgments………………………………..xiIntroduction: Watching War………………………1§ 1 How to Tell a War Story…………………30§ 2 The Witness Under Fire………………….64§ 3 Looking at the Dead…………………….96§ 4 Visions of Total War……………………144Conclusion: Old Wars, New Wars…………………..173Notes…………………………………………195Index…………………………………………239

Chapter One

How to Tell a War Story

Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

The central tenet of the Napoleonic ideology of warfare is that the course of world history is shaped by titanic one- day clashes of men under arms. The decisions made by generals at key moments in these engagements are thought to impact the fates of nations for generations to come. To fully appreciate the implications and the abiding influence of this doctrine, it is important to understand that it emerged as a reaction against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of the battlefield that had in turn sought to reject earlier military thinking. More than a century before Waterloo, Thomas Hobbes opened the Leviathan with the assertion of a sharp distinction between combat and the semblance of a commitment to pursue it, declaring that war consisted “not of Battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battle is sufficiently known…. [T]he nature of War consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…. All other time is Peace.” For Hobbes, war was both a series of violent conflicts and a condition of hostility in which no shots need be fired. What we today refer to as the spectacle of war is therefore not principally a matter of landscapes covered in clashing armies or the fireworks of aerial bombardments. To wage war, we must demonstrate a capacity for self- expression; we must be able to make our readiness to fight apparent to the enemy. Hobbes’s warring posture aims to manifest something metaphysical—a will—as something physical that is accessible to the senses.

Since our relationship to any alleged intention to fight—even when it is our own—is highly mediated, Hobbes’s distinction between war and battle creates a realm ripe for duplicity. If war is the ultimate example of a sequence of events with consequences, it is equally a field of simulation since any war is permanently under suspicion of being a phony war, emerging only in virtue of an opposition between an act and the announcement of an alleged plan to act. War is as much a matter of signifying performances—declarations and threats, feints and bluffs—as of hand-to-hand combat. Pretense and facades are as central to its arsenal as cannonballs and bullets.

The lasting influence of Hobbes’s doctrine is manifest in the work of Paul Virilio, a contemporary theorist who has extensively explored the logic of battlefield spectatorship. Best known for his lapidary formulation “war is cinema, and cinema is war,” Virilio characterizes combat as a struggle to see, which means not just seeing the enemy before the enemy sees and targets us but also being seen in such a way as to demoralize and intimidate our opponent, perhaps eliminating the very need to come to blows. In these Hobbesian terms, to wage war is to direct a show; it means managing appearances, in particular one’s own, as much as slaying foes—hence, it is an aesthetic, as well as a physical, moral, or economic struggle.

Virilio sometimes gives the impression that the forces of self-expression peculiar to warfare are more easily governed than is actually the case. Designed to regulate semantic missives, as well as material projectiles, military ventures unfold as projects in which the ability to dissimulate the difference between a real intention to attack and an imitation thereof is as important as the deployment of troops and munitions. Still, we should not assume that warring parties are ever in complete control of their presentations, whether they regard them as sincere articulations of their inner feelings or as pure fakery. On the one hand, the deception at work in military posturing may be a form of self-deception—nowhere is self-awareness a more precarious state of mind than when commanding officers, governments, or people consider trading death blows with a foe. On the other hand, even the most heartfelt performances of intent may not succeed in realizing their illocutionary or perlocutionary goals. If the physical violence of warfare tends to outstrip the aims of its purveyors, this is equally the case in the signifying realm. Fighting a war means engaging in a struggle to make one’s threats meaningful and convincing to oneself, as well as to one’s enemy, and it is a struggle that no warring force can ever bring to a close. Much of the instability and inherent unpredictability of military campaigns, which never seem to follow the script, stems from the fact that no party ever masters this particular facet of combat.

The argument for the inherently self-expressive nature of the military program comes close to conceiving of war as a self-validating, almost completely self-contained process. In his 1985 Simulation and Simulacra Jean Baudrillard proposed that contemporary warfare had lost its antagonistic core. Although it still boasted bloody engagements in which tens of thousands of people were injured and killed, it no longer took place in the name of anything external to the destructive process, whether a noble ideal or a crass grab for power. In short, war had become war for war’s sake. Ten years later in his infamous The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard described the solipsism of war as a system preening for its grand entrance: “The war … watches itself in a mirror: Am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?” The “will to spectacle,” as Baudrillard termed it, threatened to become the dominant impulse governing military operations such that we would no longer be able to evaluate a war as just or unjust, righteous or evil, but would have to assess it entirely by its ability to create a scene. This has been one of the great challenges in understanding the spectacle of war in the post-Napoleonic era. War imposes itself upon a mass audience, presenting itself as a show that no one can afford to miss, but this war time performance unfolds according to solipsistic standards that can be appreciated only by a warring compatriot or an armed foe. Small wonder that the modern viewer so often feels cheated, as if for all the millions of lives and trillions of dollars that have been poured into the production of the theater of war, there has been precious little return for its public.

In conceiving of war as the sum of social and cultural practices that confirm a commitment to fighting one’s opponents, Hobbes opened the door to what in the twentieth century would be termed “total war.” Once we suspend the distinction between threatened and actual combat, between battle imagined and battle realized, all wars become at once cold and hot and yet neither cold nor hot, neither completely dormant nor fully actualized. It is thus no longer clear on what basis we can distinguish between military and civilian operations. While the suffering and destruction that have occurred as a result of armed conflict over the past two centuries have been unparalleled in their scale and consequence, war’s significance has never simply been a factor of the immediacy of its physical consequences for the material well-being of peoples and property. Equally consequential has been the way in which any given campaign has necessitated a reconceptualization of the boundaries between the material and ideal realities of violence. Each warring party has had to reinvent its audience, setting forth an account of what people should see when they confront its expressions of willingness to fight. Beyond what we commonly recognize as propaganda—boasts of imminent or realized success in clashes with the enemy—war unfolds as a presentation of standards against which onlookers are to evaluate the significance of what they observe. Every war asks its audience to learn to read the socio-cultural landscape all over again.

This point has important implications for what it means to represent a war. Following Hobbes, any depiction of a battle must illustrate the disjunction between war as an act of demolition and war as a set of signifying practices that aim to perform an intent. From painting and lyric poetry to novels, photography, and film, the challenge has been how to capture both war’s immediate consequentiality in the physical world and the fact that it is organized by semantic systems designed to regulate its legibility. Any story about a military operation—whether imparted verbally or visually—runs the risk of coming into conflict with the interpretive paradigms that the warring forces have set forth on their own behalf. To represent a war is to participate in a struggle for control of how it is to be understood, a contest waged not with colleagues or competitors in the pressroom but with combat’s autorepresentational forces themselves.

In a study of French battle paintings in the ancien régime, Norman Bryson elucidates one of the key aspects of this dynamic and suggests that the intermingling of allegorical and historical figures within a single canvas reveals that “event is Scripture even as it happens: the battle is already narrative at the moment it takes place.” A battle is marked by the formal logics of signification and expression as it occurs and not simply in being reconstructed by an artist after the fact. As a result, Bryson maintains that when “Tolstoy or Stendhal describe their battles, narrative is not super-added to a scene which lacks discursive intelligibility, but is instead the repetition of a discourse which is pre-existent. War is perhaps the most ancient, and certainly one of the most powerful, of rhetorical topoi.” Far from simply a topic selected by an author who writes about it, war has a narrative impulse of its own that is integral to its elaboration. “In war,” Bryson writes, “events acquire a dimension that has already all the intelligibility, visibility, and recountability of the narrative act.” The novelist’s depiction of a battle reproduces a dynamic internal to that battle. However ghastly or incomprehensible the events of war may seem, they unfold such that this horror performs a demonstrative function. The scene is a means to an end, part of a larger presentational system.

Once the acts of war are no longer self-evidently consequential—that is, once we accept that war is as much the performance and interpretation of specific signifying intentions as it is a program of harming people and property—the concrete physical parameters of military engagement cease to have the same organization al primacy, and war, no matter how bloody or destructive, threatens to become a conflict of meanings and ideas. Bryson’s conclusion is that the ultimate achievement of warfare is to make a drive or rationale perceptible. A battlefield, he proposes, is a distillation of the relations between intention and cause and effect that organize a narrative so that “in the battle, human action consolidates into a united purposiveness that is patent and visible at all points.” There is no room for compromise; the battle must culminate in a “public violence” that is “fully displayed and intelligible.” Can the display ever be absolute enough, however, to ensure that the battle is “fully displayed”? By allowing for a distinction between a battle as something processed with the senses (its “visibility”) and a battle as something grasped through logical or narratological abstractions (its “recountability”), Bryson raises the possibility that these two different manifestations of combat may not be mutually reinforcing or even compatible. What if the historical and allegorical figures constitute such different representational modalities that “full display” and “intelligibility” prove contrary aims? Bryson appears to acknowledge—albeit indirectly—that the intended effect of a battle’s show may not be realized: “[W]hat is sought is absolute publicity, for the battle is a form of aggression that takes place without guile, deceit, or any aspect of the clandestine. In the swordplay of the duel, there is room for the artistry of fencing, which is full of feints and misdirections: but in the swordplay of battle, intentions and action are far more co-extensive.” The recourse to the figure of the duel, itself a form of argumentative “misdirection,” bespeaks a recognition that a battle must at every stage defend itself against the charge of having succumbed to the trickery of fencing. This need to simulate a lack of simulation introduces an element of mediation that compromises any claim to a direct display of intention. Proceeding from the attempt to sidestep or ignore the difficulties of distinguishing between purposiveness rendered visible and the semblance of purposiveness—the distinction that for Hobbes is constitutive of warfare as such—Bryson nonetheless arrives at a rather Hobbesian conclusion when he acknowledges that military combat is defined by a signifying excess and that “battles possess a spectacularity that is heraldic: each side blazons its identity with a clarity that is not at all exhausted by strategic need.”

It is not by chance, then, that war stories—whether verbal narratives, photographs, or films—are perpetually attacked for not seeming real enough. The standards of “reality” that reality fails to meet are themselves the very real products of such war stories. The point is not that war is “unrepresentable” but rather that war itself is partly a contest between different paradigms of representation that are not easily coordinated with one another. If, as Bryson would have it, war is a rhetorical topos, it is far from clear what form of knowledge this topos makes available. Following Hobbes, telling a story or painting a picture of a battle is as much an effort to illustrate a signifying dynamic as an attempt to depict the physical horror of men and machines in a sea of blood. Of course, if the difference between a willingness to aggress and actualized conflict is what distinguishes war from mere violence, then war constitutes a rather shaky reference point for a narrative of historical events since it comprises possibilities and virtual phenomena as much as instantiated acts. Classically regarded as the ultimate forum of historical praxis, the grandest stage on which the designs of an individual warmonger or an entire population could be displayed for all to see, war is equally the one sphere in which the intent to act may be just as consequential as (or more so than) the action itself.

One consequence of Bryson’s position is that he is reluctant to dismiss military historiography’s tendency—widely regarded today as hopelessly old-fashioned—to focus on a given era’s battles as the key to understanding it. “Childlike” in its simplicity, such an approach nonetheless rehearses something complex fashioned “from history itself” since the battle has already performed its own interpretation and told its own story. As a result, “far from shaping the event into meaning, all the historian there has to do is to repeat the writing that emanates spontaneously from history itself.” Like painters or novelists, historians who confront war find that a key aspect of their work is done before they start since war takes place by articulating criteria for what will count as meaningful incidents, e.g., battles, as well as what will qualify as mere happenstance.

Part of the reason, then, that war is so extraordinarily destructive on a social, cultural, and corporeal level is that it is a profoundly presumptuous activity, a series of events that seeks to dictate how it is to be represented, interpreted, and understood as it occurs. To study war, we must analyze the ways in which military operations aim to recast aesthetic and historiographical paradigms, and we must consider whether these ambitions can be resisted. To date, even the sustained efforts of social and cultural historians to challenge the dominant narratives of great generals on horse back have failed to unsettle the fundamental model according to which battles are the ultimate example of self-evidently meaningful phenomena.

To understand more precisely what it would mean to write about a war without ceding authority to its participants’ interpretive systems, we must recognize a key difference between Hobbes and his inheritors, such as Bryson. Despite acknowledging that a battle may not always succeed in realizing a full display of its purveyors’ ambition for absolute publicity, Bryson privileges both the battle and the battlefield as the essence of war since the clash of opposing armies is what provides “the consolidation of open intelligibility.” In contrast, Hobbes’s conception of warlike postures and war spectacles rests on a clear distinction between a war and the battles waged in its name, which may never be as significant as the aggressive posing that precedes and follows them. Indeed, in his terms it may not be necessary for the battles to be part of the discussion at all since what is constitutive of war time is the expression of a willingness to fight rather than actual combat per se.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Watching War New Editionby Jan Mieszkowski Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.