Always at War: Economy, Labor, Life and Blood

Contributors for this dossier include: Randy Martin, Jodi Dean, Jackie Orr, Joe Masco, Caren Kaplan, Amit Rai, Sandra Trappen, and Cathy Hannabach. For this dossier, we invited colleagues, interdisciplinary scholars, some who write about war while others for the most part do not, to offer critical reflections about the pervasive nature of war in society, and how war is infrastructural to economy, labor, life and blood. Together, their responses show war as actively engaged in transforming the boundaries of civil life: war not only works through traditional institutions and mechanisms of governance and economy but increasingly it affectively permeates domestic institutions and social spaces that do not appear to be implicated in warfare. This dossier builds on previous work published by Social Text, as we aim to extend conversations about war further, so that war might more readily and more consistently inform critical vocabularies. We hope to enable links between war and the subjective, the ontological, the corporeal, the affective, the visual, and the performative as these are taken up across the disciplines.

Moving Violations

Randy Martin

  Long ago, on the lip of memory, when wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were offered as ways to deliver the world from terror, I recall reading a report on what U.S. military planners took to be the political limit … Continue reading “Moving Violations”