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.
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”
Rumor/Contagion Here’s a story: In late 2012, a rumour circulated throughout the Bangladeshi community living in and around Mile End, London. A vampire was sucking the blood of children dry. This vampire would strike late at night and in … Continue reading “The Axiomatic of Counter-Terrorism”
In the month of January, 1970, the New York Times published an article, “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random.” [i] [ii] The lottery to which they were referring, of course, was the “life and death” lottery that selected … Continue reading “Mayberry R.F.D. Will Not Be Presented Tonight”
War appears as eventual. Whether via the state’s incitement of its citizens to hate, fight, and kill or the pacifists’ moral injunctions to lay down arms, to desert or refuse, war waged by states is presented as if it … Continue reading “No War but Class War”
dead land Mewat, waste land, dead land, empty land. Codified in the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, modified in the early 1920s as Britain re-structures the colonial governance of Palestine, and surviving today in the Occupied Territories through a series … Continue reading “a possible history of oblivion”
What’s left to be said about time or space or war? Let’s face it — in the piles of books and papers written on violence in modernity, on time-space compression, on spatialization vs. temporalization, on the militarization of everyday … Continue reading “Sensing Distance: The Time and Space of Contemporary War”
On January 28, 2003 President George W. Bush delivered his third State of the Union Address focusing on global security. In its name, he both defended the U.S. War on Terror invasion of Iraq through lies about weapons of … Continue reading “Securing Blood: PEPFAR and Neoliberal War”
In July of 1945, just as the conclusion of World War II was coming into view, Vannevar Bush, former dean of engineering at MIT, then administrator of the twin war-time revolutions of radar and the atomic bomb, founder of … Continue reading “As We May Think, 2012”
