Neomarxism and Thomas Barnett
I think I mentioned my turn towards Marxism lately, particularly Neomarxism in International Relations. This scholarship involves the three-volume work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn. I want to briefly summarize neo-Marxist theory and then draw links to Thomas Barnett’s work.
Neomarxists begin from the fundamental assumption of historical materialism: the history of the modern world is driven by the capitalist value surplus value through the exploitation of labor divorced from the means of production. As capitalism creates new exploitive relationships between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it ultimately creates contradictions that bring down the entire system in a socialist revolution.
Whereas Marx conceptualized his theory in terms of a single society (drawn from observations of Great Britain), Neomarxists study the entire capitalist world-system as a single unit of analysis, with specific attention to the historical evolution of the system leading up to its present form. Of particular importance are the contradictions created by the relationships between states that lead to their rise and fall within the global capitalist system. Thus, Wallerstein shows how capitalism emerges from feudalism through the death of the Hapsburgian bid for world-empire and the decline of the commercial Italian city-states, such as Venice and Genoa. While these survived the wars of the early 16th Century, political economic supremacy gave way to the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the first hegemonic nation-state to possess a comparative advantage in a series of commodities (herring, wooden ship-building). Thus, the Netherlands becomes the first hegemonic state in the capitalist ‘core’ and exploits several ‘peripheries’ and maintains a favorable division of labor. In this way, the political apparatus that is the Dutch ’state’ creates opportunities for the Dutch bourgeoisie to amass a surplus of capital. The construction of a favorable market requires a strong state, and this historical period sees the increasing strength of the Dutch Republic. At the same time, political organizations in the peripheries remain weak and are made dependent upon relationships with the core state. This is the political dimension of hegemony in a capitalist world-system.
However, all hegemonic states eventually decline as their comparative advantage in a set of commodities gives way to rising hegemonic states and their development of a comparative advantage in new commodities. In this way, ‘core’ status within the world economy shifts from one state to another as rising hegemons discover new and more efficient modes of production. The Netherlands declines in the late 17th Century and gives way to England, whose industrial mode of production and comparative advantage in textile production propelled it to the core of the capitalist world-economy and the incorporation of new peripheries into the world-system, namely New World colonies and Eastern Europe, particularly for foodstuffs imported by England. The terms of state strength, England experiences increasing state strength and the formation of a globe-spanning Navy and colonial administration while Poland remains a weak constitutional monarchy. Real power remains in the hands of feudal aristocrats who import their agricultural products to the core. The industrial ‘development’ of core states and the feudal ‘backwardness’ of peripheral states are thus interrelated phenomena of the global capitalist system.
To make a long historical story more relevant to contemporary events, the 19th Century saw competing capitalist European states industrialize and all gain colonies, thereby spreading the capitalist world-system across the entire globe. British hegemony ends with the challenge posed by Nazi Germany’s bid for world-empire, and hegemony then passes to the United States whose power peaks in 1945. We have been in decline since then, and given the economic turmoil of the past year, it should be clear that our hegemony is finally slipping away. The contradictions of our capitalist economy have collapsed on themselves and we are no longer at the center of the capitalist world-economy. This is obvious given the last twenty years of American capitalism. After the Wall fell, we created capitalist relations throughout the East with the onset of a new commodity, namely information. This led to capitalist overinvestment and speculation that could not be met by the consumption of information products: hence the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millenium. Instead of truly facing our own contradictions, we created new ones by lowering interest rates and exploiting two much older commodities: real estate and finance capital. The story is still the same. We exploited these commodities to the point at which their consumption could no longer support the massive amount of investment needed to sustain this economic system and the bubble collapsed, except this time that bubble was our entire economy. Hence, 10.2% official unemployment. The Empire State, formerly the center of late 20th Century capitalism, is now broke and the federal government faces massive budget deficits. Whether or not we experience complete social disorder as predicted by John Robb is a possibility, depending of course on how we deal with our own contradictions.
Whereto from here? The short term answer is that hegemony shifts to a new state with a more efficient mode of production and more profitable comparative advantage. The most obvious answer is China, or at least some other state that can manufacture goods more cheaply or develop new technology permitting the exchange of a new commodity (maybe energy, maybe information, etc). New semiperipheral states thereby increase in state strength and become core states, while older Core states seek to guard their economic and political stability via protectionism and socialist concessions to the proletariat, if they can afford them (universal education, universal health care). Yet, the same contradictions will lead to the decline of future core states and the rise of new ones which exploit new peripheries and control their weak states. Instability within the global system is thereby continually reproduced if the logic of the system is left unchanged.
However, there are moments in world history where agents (in this case, capitalist states) reflexively realize how their own actions reproduce instability. In weak states, such instability takes the form of terrorism and insurgency which can become global forms of political violence (see 9/11). At this reflexive moment, core states purposefully establish new relationships with peripheral states that are not exploitive but are mutually reciprocal. If true, then reflexive core states must develop a grand strategy to recognize the right of peripheral states to engage in capitalist development on their own terms, and encourage the development strong peripheral states that can propel themselves into the semi-periphery. As core states conceptualize a reflexive grand strategy, they do so as a means of resolving the contradictions created by their own participation in the global capitalist economy.
This is why Thomas Barnett’s grand strategy is so important. He argues that the United States should ensure that globalization engulfs the entire world-system. However, he also recognizes that capitalism creates in own instability within weak states that can only be resolved with strong bureaucratic institutions. Therefore, reflexive core states (America) must purposely support state-building throughout the world. Neomarxist terms are also deeply embedded his entire vision of grand strategy. Core states are considered ‘the Old Core’, semiperipheral states are considered the ‘New Core’, while peripheral weak or failed states exist in ‘the Gap’. To resolve this contradictions Barnett calls for the creation of System Administration, or the SysAdmin, a bureaucracy that regulates the capitalist world-system by creating conditions that permit the emergence of strong states in the periphery, thereby ’sealing the Gap’. The new relationships between Core and peripheral states becomes less exploitive and more reciprocal as each recognizes a ‘right to capital’ and the ability to regulate capitalism within its own borders.
I am not saying that the emergence of the SysAdmin will resolve all contradictions within the global capitalist economy. Far from it, as capitalism will produce new ones. However, the SysAdmin does work to create new state agents that jointly regulate the capitalist world- economy. This has already begun to happen with the emergence of the G-20, as the executive committee of the global bourgeoisie, including both old and new Core states (I think Barnett has said something to this effect, so it is not my terminology). If the G-20 acts reflexively, then it can jointly manage the contradictions produced by global capitalism and support of strong states in the periphery, leading to a ‘new’ new Core whose states are recognized by all other states as having a right to make decisions about their participation in global capitalism. In this way, a reflexive international state system overcomes capitalist contradictions by developing the bureaucratic capacity to reproduce itself.
The point of all this is not that Barnett is a Neomarxist. . However, his grand strategy is consistent with the long-term rise and demise of the world-capitalist system. Neomarxists don’t believe that capitalism will end in a grand moment of revolution, but through a process of incremental steps in which capitalism is tamed by global political organization. Thus, the long-term outcome for Neomarxists is the emergence of a democratic world-state, one that can regulate global capitalism according to the collective action of all of humanity. If this is the outcome (some non-Marxists using a constructivist teleology even say it is inevitable), then the formation of a System Administrator is one significant step in the eventual formation of a world state. It is the administrative kernel whereby humanity begins to tame capitalism and check its own contradictions by building regulative state institutions across the globe. And, if states can reflexively recognize each other and paradoxically transcend their own boundaries (like the European Union), then the long-term development of the world state becomes something other than a mere utopian fantasy.
So whither capitalism? Absolutely, before it withers us. But whence the SysAdmin? Whence a reflexive grand strategy? Time will tell, but hopefully sooner rather than later.
To be an imperialist
The lack of blogging is due to the start of the semester, studying for a major exam, and writing a prospectus. Since Friday night I ignored that stuff and played Empire: Total War until the sun came up, and periodically reading Patrick Jackson’s Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. In between long conversations with roommate and good friend Onur Bilginer and reading Jackson’s book, I posted Steve “is civilizing the enemy” onto Facebook (the bane of my destruction), to which Ortho replied “you sound like an imperialist. I could blame this on the fact that in Empire: Total War, my Prussian Empire is currently building a mitteleuropa centered on the conquest of the Austria. However, given the fact that I pretend to write about counterinsurgency theory, a Freudian slip is more likely.
It is an established argument against intervention that the result is imperialism, and that all capitalist states have engineered political conditions in other territories to create favorable economic outcomes. In Europe, this mostly took the form of colonial imperialism, while the American tradition is more recently characterized by covert action against ’sovereign’ states.(see Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973). While labor-intensive (occupational) forms of imperialism concurred prior the assumption of global capitalist hegemony (the Spanish-American War), one could argue that imperialist practice and the violations of sovereignty have been revived with Afghanistan and Iraq. One could even say it never really had a historical pause if we include the failed intervention in Vietnam (where where a legitimate state could never have emerged out of the development program of the United States), the eternally ongoing intervention in Bosnia (where a ‘Bosnian’ people cannot exist because of the consociational institutions we coercively imposed). From a Marxist perspective, The United States has sought to build states in those nations that are pliable and quiescent to a global capitalist organization of labor, and renounce any claim to regulate, in their own territory, the organization of citizens into workers. This condition is essential to a democracy since most of the population is composed of workers. If they are the majority, they should vote their class interest and check the bourgois impulse to bend over backwards for capitalism (creating a ‘natural ‘market’ through deregulation). Intervention is a imperial way of dominating the structure of their institutional regulation of capital, and interventions have failed most disasterously when the institutions we impose have no cultural content and no legitimacy.
It is interesting to apply this relationship to imperialism/capitalism and intervention to Iraq and Afghanistan. Generally this begins with common refrain that ‘we invaded for oil’ or ‘natural resources’. Which is true in a way, because the ‘we’ is not the United States but capitalism – the US will never control the means of production of those resources. Instead, it will be Chinese companies, which are heavily investing in oil and natural gas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet at the same time, the states we are attempting to build are structured to be democratic, and ideally should permit groups called ‘Iraqis’ or ‘Afghanis’ to regulate capitalism’s organization of their labor and resources. There is an inherent tension then between indirect incorporation of those states in global capitalism and the indirect creation of democratic institutions that can self-regulate their economies. Most importantly, and contra to traditional imperialism, we have to recognize the particular and subjective value of those institutions to Iraqis and Afghanis, and thus give sovereignty real meaning. In doing so, we socially construct the boundary between Self and Other (the US and Iraq/Afghanistan): we refrain from judging their mode of ‘civilization’ by comparing it to ours and instead empathically recognize their common normative value of democracy because we both accept each other’s subjective interpretation of democracy. This avoids the purely instrumentalist (and immoral) form of intervention that treats other nations as objects that must subjected to capitalism. In a purely political sense (in terms of ‘violating’ sovereignty), this is still imperialism but only in the short term, as the long-term goal is to create intersubjectively recognized (by all other states in the world) sovereign institution that no longer requires direct forms of intervention. This would be devoid of selfish conceptions of identity and value structures that is characterized by the exploitative relationships between core and peripheral states. In this way, the phrase ‘civilizing the enemy’ is completely wrong. By restraining ourselves from treating others as objects, we really civilize ourselves.
Finally, I mean to describe this reflexive form of ‘imperial’ action as an ideal-type, that can be compared to modes of ‘imperial’ action as practiced by the United States. It has only occurred in rare moments in history, and it may be true that it is happening to some extent now. Special thanks to Onur, with whom these ideas were developed as part of a reflexive solution to the dialectical tension between capitalism and democracy.
Back to the Classics
August was a ridiculously busy month (no vacations here), hence no blogging. In the meantime, Mr. Elkus has a great piece up at SWJ Blog. Rather than conceptualize new ways of thinking about war, complexity, and politics, we should recognize that these elements have always existed and our technoscientific way of thinking have also prevented us from seeing this:
Current insurgent and terrorist challenges have broken the carefully imposed (but wholly unsustainable) binary between defense and politics. It is temping to ascribe this cognitive dissonance to the maxim that insurgency and terrorism are overwhelmingly political forms of warfare. But this oft-held view denies the overwhelmingly political character of conventional engagements. It would be more accurate to state that conflict against non-state forces casts the
political dimensions of conflict into sharper view, and in doing so exposes some of the weaknesses of technoscientific thinking.
In American thought, Adam shows how this binary has generally been derived from realism and rational utilitarianism, the generally accepted paradigm of International Relations until the 1990s. During that time, this paradigm was challenged by critical IR theory, which seeks to rethink the foundations of International Relations and derive ways seeing the world that are novel yet timeless, and more grounded in classical political theory R.B.J. Walker exemplifies this trend. In Inside/Outside (written in 1993), he challenges the then dominant realist interpretation of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which expects that all states (and their Princes) will use power without regard to morality, and only with respect to their individual need to survive. Instead of Machiavelli-the-archrealist, Walker presents Machiavelli-the-republican, whose use of force (war/defense) is intimately related to his political condition. Walker uses Machiavelli’s discussion of the uses of fortresses in Chapter XX of The Prince as illustration, which argues that fortresses are only a useful form of defense if the prince in question is afraid of his people and incurs their hatred. Instead, the greatest fortress that produces the best defense is the people. (Walker 1993, 38) This same theme exists in Chapter XIX, in which Machiavelli argues that the Prince who has the loyalty of the people should not fear any conspiracy, as they will not support it. However, any action (including the use of force) that has the effect of turning the people against the Prince makes him vulnerable, and thus must fear everyone including the people.
Thus, Adam is absolutely right to say that the link between politics and defense has always existed: it is a theme that emerges in the early modern period with Machiavelli. In fact, the very notions of complexity and uncertainty that are central to the contemporary discourse on defense are fundamental to Machiavelli’s work, who instead uses the term fortuna. At best, fortune gives us a 50/50 chance of being successful in a chaotic world, and to cope with it one must be adventurous and not rigid in one’s plans (The Prince, Chapter XXV). Yet, such flexibility does not imply that an ‘ends justify the means’ approach to force is necessary, as American realism has argued. In his same discussion of Machiavelli’s understanding of fortesses, Walker points to two of Machiavelli themes, that of virtu and its fundamental connection with fortuna.
The first involves the direct connection he makes between military affairs and the idea of civic virtu, between the qualities of skill and courage, virility and virtuousity, and the requirements of citizenship with the political community. While it is true that the virile warrior may be required to engage in conflict outside the community, the qualities represented by the warrior, the man of virtu, are presented first and foremost as the qualities necessary for effective participation and citizenship within the community.
[The second theme] concerns Machiavelli’s insistence that political affairs, whether these concern fortresses or princes, must be understood and judged ‘according to circumstances’…[T]he virtu of a prince is understood in terms of a capacity to respond to fortuna, to the capricious bitch goddess who is ‘the arbiter of one half of our actions’. (Walker, 1993, 38-39)
In this sense, what Machiavelli does in the Prince is to provide
advice about how to prepare for the coming of fortuna: establish institutions, create respect for laws and customs, secure the support of the people, create an armed citizenry; above all, expect change to occur…[P]olitical life calls for the special skills appropriate for confronting fortuna: the skills of civic virtu, prudence and caution, the capacity to generate a lasting and stable order in the midst of temporal flux and contingency. (Walker, 1993, 40)
Again, these are precisely the same principles contemporary defense discourse on counterinsurgency emphasizes: the need to win the hearts and minds of the people (practicing virtu as a means of participation in a community) and the postpositivist belief that we must continually frame and reframe our perception of reality to inform us about what new actions to take or not to take in a chaotic and uncertain world (prudence and adventurism, both being necessary to deal with fortuna). Thus, while we may be moving into a new technoscientific paradigm (one that Bousquest calls chaoplexity and is defined by the concept of the network), we should remember, as Adam tells us, that this new paradigm has really always existed and must be anchored in the classic works of politics and war.
Quantum Personalities in IJ
Originally I wanted the follow-up to be about Eschaton and Baudrillard, but I got beaten to the punch. Gerry Canavan did it better than I could have. My attempts to write about this book will pale in comparison to his.
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Consistent with the earlier post, Wallace describes his characters as being constantly in flux, Selves who are addicted to validation by Others, who struggle to ‘fix’ themselves with a stable personality. In scientific terms, a useful way to think about this is quantum physics, and Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle. Instead of fixed particles, sure of the internal components that provide a definition of Self, IJ’s characters (with the exception of Coach Schtitt) are like waves or strings whose properties change depending on the position of an observer. The students’ observations of Charles Tavis, Headmaster of Enfield Tennis Academy (succeeding the late Sad Stork), illustrate the problem of really perceiving Others.
The thing that’s keeping things so tensely quiet out here amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-associating and arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry personna is really Tavis’s version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But…when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unqestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal’s openly adjustable uncle becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with…The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming over you from across the huge desk. If shit meets adminstrative fan, kids coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not from tears but from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there’s shit.” (526)
The implication here is a crisis of identity: how can Self define who Self is if not for Others? How can one say that inside, there is a Real Self, one that is authentic, unchanging, and essential, and that we can discern who the Real Self is among the people we see everyday? Aren’t we then just blank slates, voids filled up by the relationships around us? And what if those relationships are screwed up in some way?
And yet, we need those relationships to define us. Orin illustrates this problem, particularly his relationships with women. He wants to be wanted by women, but resents the fact that he is dependent on their desire, and so he comes to resent them. During the encounter with the Swedish hand-model:
It is not about conquest or capture…Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject’s fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he hasher, now has won her as if from someone or something else…that it is not conquest but surrender…that she must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing…
And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were part of her, and him.” (566, 567)
Anyway, there’s a political slant to all this, as you might have guessed…
Infinite Jest
What were you intending to do when you started this book?
I wanted to do something sad. I’d done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I’d never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it’s like to live in America around the millennium.
And what is that like?
There’s something particularly sad about it, something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it’s unique to our generation I really don’t know.
Besides counterinsurgency and military theory, my summer has been utterly consumed by David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Earlier I read his first book, Broom of the System, which is infused with constructivist theory about Self and Other, language, what’s real and what’s not, etc. Infinite Jest contains similar themes, yet is darker and equally hilarious. Last September, Wallace hung himself using his belt.
Hard to describe this book. To start, its 1100+ pages. It seems to mock and dare you to read it. It doesn’t have so much as a plot as a revolving narrative that goes back and forth some forty years and switches among a range of characters, including the Incandenza family, comprising the brothers Hal, Orin, Mario, and their mother Avril, who reside at the Enfield Tennis Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Hal himself is an ace tennis player). Hanging over their experiences is their late father, the filmmaker James O. Incandenza, who founded the Academy and kills himself years earlier by placing his head in a microwave during the post-production of Infinite Jest, a film that so perfectly entertains its viewers that it kills them. This is at the heart of IJ’s critique of American society, namely that we are all entertaining ourselves to death, if not addicted to the notion of being entertained, chemically (Hal is addicted to getting stoned). The other main plotline revolves around Don Gately, a recovering alcoholic who continuously reflects upon the nature of addiction, and how he’s managed to kick the habit by giving himself over completely to the rules of AA.
The above description is pretty standard. Most any other book review describes IJ in the same way. Some things though that stick out for me. The book is not just a cultural critique, but is intensely political. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have been consolidated into the Organization of North American Nations as a means of creating a massive landfill – The Great Concavity – that stretches from Quebec to the northern half of New York and most of New England. This is known as experialism, the forcible inclusion of political Others (Mexico and Canada) into a single ONAN-Self. This is resisted by Quebecois separatist terrorists, who struggle to find the original copy of IJ and play it for the entire US, theoretically killing them. This grand political conflict plays out among the Incandenzas as well. Hal’s major competition at Enfield is John Wayne, a tennis player from Quebec who never tires from drills. Avril is also Quebecois.
The great tension felt among Hal and the other addicts is one involving how secure Self is. Addiction to either hard drugs or ’soft’ drugs like entertainment is a problem rooted the inability of Self to be grounded, and secure. One always needs some kind of validation in Others, in things. How to balance relationships with Others appears to be the problem IJ’s characters grapple with. For example, Hal has an inability to maintain relationships with others. He fails to think about others in his family, save for half-brother Mario. He can’t discuss his feelings with a therapist who asks what it was like to find his father’s body hanging out of a microwave. One might say he has an inability to reflect, to emphasize. In the narrative that follows Don Gately through various AA meetings, empathy is precisely what one must practice to overcome one’s addictions.
This is one solution to the problems the book poses, and another lies in tennis. The main coach at Enfield is Coach Schtitt, a German who instructs his students to play tennis not against opponents, but against themselves. Schtitt’s training regiment is designed to teach the E.T.A.s to be break free of the constraints that bound up the actions of each individual. The book acknowledges that we are our own worst enemy.
Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: his more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As your are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.” (84)
More to come.
Arranging Minds
In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence recollects on his own theorizing about how to empower the Arabs in their uprising against the Ottoman Empire. His strategy came to him amid eight days of fever and dysentery, and foresaw a campaign whose greatest impact was psychological, and social. Specific tactical uses of violence were small actions designed to create larger perceptual effects among the Arabs. This was his ultimate strategic aim. Borrowing from Xenophon, he called this psychological element to-be developed among the Arabs as diathetics.
“Of this our ‘propaganda’ was the stained and ignoble offspring. It was the pathic, almost the ethical, in war. Some of it concerned the crowd, an adjustment of its spirit to the point where it became useful to exploit in action, and the pre-direction of this changing spirit to a certain end. Some of it concerned the individual, and then it became a rare art of human kindness, transcending, by purposed emotion, the gradual logical sequence of the mind. It was more subtle than tactics, and better worth, doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men’s minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them ; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation wwaiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle.” (200-201)
The bolded quote suggests the importance of organizational perception. To ‘arrange their minds’ implies creating a common organizational perception among all participants. All participants had to understand the psychological strategy of the insurgency, and learn to use kindness to adjust the ’spirit of the crowd’, or the mass of the people. In this way, arranging the mind of Self allowed Lawrence to arranging the minds of Others, of those not involved in the insurgency:
“A province would be won when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom.” (202)
On the whole, Lawrence suggests that demonstration effects of the insurgency are what count. Small acts of violence are important, but instances of social interaction between ascendent insurgents and the people are what build its strength and gave the insurgency its momentum.
Cross-posted at PVC Blog.
Arranging Minds
T.E. Lawrence recollects on his own theorizing about how to empower the Arabs in their uprising against the Ottoman Empire. His strategy came to him amid eight days of fever and dysentery, and foresaw a campaign whose greatest impact was psychological, and social. Specific tactical uses of violence were small actions designed to create larger perceptual effects among the Arabs. This was his ultimate strategic aim. Borrowing from Xenophon, he called this psychological element to-be developed among the Arabs as diathetics.
“Of this our ‘propaganda’ was the stained and ignoble offspring. It was the pathic, almost the ethical, in war. Some of it concerned the crowd, an adjustment of its spirit to the point where it became useful to exploit in action, and the pre-direction of this changing spirit to a certain end. Some of it concerned the individual, and then it became a rare art of human kindness, transcending, by purposed emotion, the gradual logical sequence of the mind. It was more subtle than tactics, and better worth, doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with subjects incapable of direct command. It considered the capacity for mood of our men, their complexities and mutability, and the cultivation of whatever in them promised to profit our intention. We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men’s minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them ; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation wwaiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle.” (200-201)
The bolded quote suggests the importance of organizational perception. To ‘arrange their minds’ implies creating a common organizational perception among all participants. All participants had to understand the psychological strategy of the insurgency, and learn to use kindness to adjust the ’spirit of the crowd’, or the mass of the people. In this way, arranging the mind of Self allowed Lawrence to arranging the minds of Others, of those not involved in the insurgency:
“A province would be won when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom.” (202)
On the whole, Lawrence suggests that demonstration effects of the insurgency are what count. Small acts of violence are important, but instances of social interaction between ascendent insurgents and the people are what build its strength and gave the insurgency its momentum.
Bousquet, Chaoplexic Warfare, and Counterinsurgency
Just finished Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare, which documents how scientific metaphors, or regimes, have evolved throughout history in providing society with a way to conceptualize warfare. These regimes are mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and chaoplexic, and correspond to key technologies such as the clock, engine, computer, and network. Given American military dominance during and following the Cold War, much more attention is focused on the cybernetic and chaoplexic regimes, and the apparent inability of American military theory to embrace chaoplexic warfare fought by decentralized networks. While this is true of military theory, if we think about recent doctrinal achievements in the practice of counterinsurgency, it becomes apparent that the US military has tentatively realized many of the elements that define ‘netwar’ through the formation of counterinsurgency networks.
Cybernetics, Homeostatis, and Negative Feedback
Cybernetics is a field that focuses on how information is used to direct some kind of system. This is the logic of any self-correcting servomechanism, in which information is received, processed, and used to maintain the system’s goal directedness. “Indeed a cybernetic mechanism is defined in terms of a process which is governed by rules of operaiton and a continuous flow of data to which these rules can be applied.” (Bousquet 2008, 11) Thus, an anti-aircraft battery is a servomechanism that continously changes where it faces based upon new information provided by radar. In this way, cybernetics is concerned with negative or balancing feedback that tells the system how to regulate itself, otherwise known as homeostasis. Cybernetic systems can thus fulfill their goals by acquiring more and more information: “uncertainty and unpredictability – chaos in other words – are understood as information deficiencies and thus susceptible to be overcome by the appropriate delpylmeny of negentropic infromation technologies and computerised simulations of conflict.” (Bousquet 2008, 124) The American practice of warfare since 1945 has been traditionally focused on cybernetics. Bousquet shows how during Vietnam, the staff at the Defense Department relied on cybernetic modeling to quantify the American effort and inform us as to what levels of military force were necessary to win the war. Little recognition was made at the time that the assumptions of our cybernetic systems might have been wrong, a qualitative issue of how we assigned meaning to observed information that could not be solved by increasing the quantitive amount of information gathered.
This is where culture comes in. According to Bousquet, cybernetic theory understood that messages might be distorted by noise. We can situate culture in cybernetics by conceptualizing ‘noise’ as culture, in the sense that ‘noise’ is always present not only in the jarbled distractions of the outside world, but in our own minds in the way we assign meaning to incoming information. These are what are later described as schemata, which allow a “complex adaptive system to extract regularities from the raw data flow that traverses it.” (Bousquet 2008, 178) Schemata is also used by Wendt to describe how identity is a bundle of subjective perceptions that give meaning to observed events. “Each [identity] is a script or schema, constituted to varying degrees by cultural forms, about who we are and what we should do in a certain context.” (Wendt 1999, 230) The flaw of cybernetics then, is that it does not account the qualitative dimensions of information perception and understanding. The system may remain homeostatically goal-oriented, but how it understands its own context and how it perceives new events may lead it to fail in achieving that goal. We will return to this point later in thinking about reflexivity.
Chaoplexy, Autopoesis, and Positive Feedback
The final technoscientific regime – the one in current ascendence – is that of chaoplexic warfare, and explores how seemingly random and non-linear events are caused by an underlying pattern, or order. This notion is at the heart of chaos theory, which privileges spontaneous, self-organizing structures such as networks. Whereas cybernetics merely required more information to overcome uncertainty, chaos theory embraces it using non-linear mathematical functions. These explore how small changes can lead to large systematic changes. Further, these small changes induce structural changes within complex adaptive systems, which alter their internal configurations based on new information, interpreted by the system’s schemata. In this way, systems of loosely connected nodes change and alter their structure through positive feedback – or autopoesis – which occurs “when disturbances are amplified and thus move the system further away from its point of origin.” (Bousquet 2008, 165)
We can introduce culture into our understanding of self-organizing networks as well. For example, Bousquest discusses the global al Qaeda network can be understood as an autopoetic bottom-up organization, whose foundations and capacity to self-organize is made possible by common schema/cultural perceptions. Bousquet cites the work of Marc Sageman in this section, who has written two books about the formation of al Qaeda. In the first, Understanding Terror Networks, he describes al Qaeda as a global social movement composed of individuals with a common perspective of the world (one might say a common schemata), one that generates terrorist operatives as individuals make interpersonal contact and interact with one another. Through weak ties of friendship or kinship, small cliques of individuals connect to the global network and are radicalized by those ties, progressively losing social relationships to non-radical individuals. In this way, weak social ties make possible the emergence of a shared identity among al Qaeda operatives: “Ideology … played a central role in sustaining commitment to this version of Islam. Although affiliation is a social phenomenon, intensification of faith and beliefs in a stage characterized by active personal learning about the new faith…[Recruits] progressively accept the new faith because it makes sense in their new interpretation of the world and their role in it. This learning process involves intense social interactions, but it also requires intense introspection. Past biographical experiences are reinterpreted in accordance with the new faith and provide vivid proof of its superiority.” (Sageman 2004, 117) Thus, the positive feedback that leads to the organization of new members in the networks is the mutual transmission and recognition of jihadi beliefs among willing participants. Through spontaneous social interaction and the forging of a common identity, culture serves as the autopoetic foundation network growth.
Counterinsurgency as Network Building
Given the above model of chaotic/autopoetic growth of insurgent networks, and the fact that several observers such as John Sullivan have suggested that countering insurgent networks requires building opposing counterinsurgent networks (see the last chapter of Networks, Terrorism, and Global Insurgency). If networks emerge based on interactions that foster a common cultural worldview or schemata, then this suggests that counterinsurgents must build networks amongst the people. This is the orgnaizational form that must be developed to defeat insurgents and ultimately separate them from the population, but that organization does not exist independent of counterinsurgent operations – it emerges chaotically and autopoetically out of their interactions with the people, thereby fostering a common identity. Literally, they must win Hands in the Field that do not exist at the start of their operations. We can think about how this happens on two levels. At the mass level, counterinsurgents interact regularly with the people through patrols in populated areas. These suggest to the people that counterinsurgents are reliable partners in cooperation for joint goals as long as operations convey a recognition of the autonomy and individuality of the people. This leads to the creation of very weak ties between counterinsurgents and the people, but can be activated through social interaction. At the elite level, counterinsurgents must make social relationships with local elites, such as tribal sheiks or elders. One example of this is the work of Capt. Travis Patriquin in al-Anbar Province in 2006. As an Arabic speaking officer in Col. Sean MacFarland’s BCT, Capt. Patriquin served as a crucial broker whose weak ties between tribal sheiks and Col. MacFarland enabled them to jointly mobilize Sunni tribesmen into the Awakening. Thus, on both levels (mass and elite), social interaction permitted the emergence of a common schemata that drove the self-organization of Sunni tribes into a counterinsurgent network, thereby defeating al-Qaeda. Once McFarland, Patriquin, and their BCT made it known they were seeking partners in cooperation (and were willing to pay for cooperation), they initiated a reinforcing positive feedback loop leading to the system’s self-organization. [1]
Thus, counterinsurgency operations indicate that the US military is having some success with chaoplexic warfare and the forging of counternetworks to combat those of insurgents. This of course does not mean that all is well in Anbar, or (as Bousquet points out) that such autopoetic operations yield predictability regarding long-term outcomes. But, future thinking will be devoted to understanding how the military, in conjunction with civilian efforts, can lay the cultural foundations of autopoetic network-building through social interaction.
[1] Patriquin was sadly killed in action in December 2006 by a roadside bomb. For more on the Awakening, MacFarland, and Patriquin, see Bing West’s The Strongest Tribe and Tom Ricks’s The Gamble.
McChrystal as Weberian Counterinsurgent
Much longer post in the works, up either tonight or tomorrow.
Sovereignty and Intervention in Iran
A great small but dense IR book is Simulating Sovereignty by Cynthia Weber, in which she semiotically explains how the United States had discursively constructed the meaning of intervention (and objectively defined violations of sovereignty) to exclude many foreign policies. In particular, Wilson is shown to describe American interventions as justified based on the fact that military rulers in Mexico and the Russian Bolsheviks were not considered to be representative of the people. Semiotically, the term sovereignty was defined in referent to popular legitimacy. Thus, Wilson framed his actions as non-interventionist (and therefore normatively justifiable) because implicitly recognized the sovereignty of the people and acted upon it, seeking to overthrow obstacles to ’sovereignty’ being realized.
We can think of the international response to the Iranian revolts in terms of sovereignty and intervention, and in particular, pay attention to how other states recognize the external sovereignty of Iran (following the principle of non-intervention) in relation to the popular legitimacy of the state among the people. Because political actors can construct sovereignty and intervention for their own purposes, both the regime and the opposition justify their actions with relation to the regime and other interaction actors, societies, networks, etc. In doing so, they discursively borrow and reinvent old narrative themes to mobilize enough support to overwhelm their opponents. How Iranian actors and interactional actors construct the socially understood meanings of sovereignty and intervention impacts their mobilization. This is why Obama refrains from forcefully supporting the Iranian opposition because it reinforces the narrative of foreign intervention in Iranian politics, one that specifically refers to United States and its support of the Shah. The expression of overt support to one side from a historically hostile hegemonic state might simply shift the focus of the crisis to new social relationships. Mossavi would be altercast as a collaborator and the regime would ride a nationalist backlash.
The problem is really how we recognize the boundaries of the Iranian nation, and discursively act on that definition to contribute to a desired outcome without our fingerprints on it. Hence, Obama says “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.” Implicit here is consent of the people, which obligates the government to recognize popular discontent in the form of protest. The inability to do so puts the moral onus on the regime, as it fails to recognize the sovereignty of its own people. We play up our soft stance in the name of non-intervention and sovereignty, but of course made sure Twitter kept running, thereby aiding popular mobilization against the regime. Thus, we define boundaries and take actions across them in reference to a popular sovereignty that has yet to fully materialize. Paradoxically, we can only support the Iranian resistance by not directly aiding it, but only by constituting the conditions in which it can fully emerge.
