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…