The sensual history of destruction

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Derek Gregory

I’ve been in Paris this week, first for a presentation to Michel Wieviorka‘s seminar at the École des Hautes Études on Wednesday morning and then for a different presentation to Pauline Guinard‘s seminar at the École Normale Supérieure on Wednesday evening. I hope this explains my silence! Lots of good questions at both, and also lively conversations about the French intervention in Mali — which made today a good day to visit the Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides.

An astonishing building, but I was disappointed at the exhibitions – too many uniforms and muskets and (especially when compared to the Imperial War Museum in London, even before its current reconstruction) remarkably little on the politics and culture of war (though there were some good three-screen videos). Given my current preoccupation with the First World War, I expected much more from what turned out to be a lifeless series of galleries; appropriate, you might think, but I left with very few impressions of how so many French soldiers managed to survive the trenches and the barrages. It was a far cry from the new history, anthropology and archaeology of the battlefield that has done so much to recover its raw physicality, its sensuality and even its intimacy.

So I returned to the hotel to start Lara Feigel‘s The love-charm of bombs: restless lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013) which I picked up at Foyle’s on my way through London (and still the best bookshop in the world). When people ask me to recommend books that convey the experience of being bombed, my selections always include the opening chapter of Randall Hansen‘s The fire and the fury: the Allied bombing of Germany 1942-1945, where he uses eyewitness accounts to conjure up ‘The day Hamburg died’ with extraordinary power and economy – there is now a rich literature on this in German and in English, most notably Keith Lowe‘s brilliant Inferno: the devastation of Hamburg 1943 – and the central chapters of Sarah Waters‘s stunning novel The Night-Watch. But I think I may have to add Feigel to the list because The love-charm of bombs traffics in that difficult but vital space between the documentary (Hansen) and the imaginative (Waters).

I say ‘may’ only because I’ve just started. But Part I, ‘One night in the lives of five writers, 26 September 1940’, uses the work and lives of five writers – Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilda Spiel and Henry Yorke (‘Henry Greene’) – to address, in a remarkably fresh and compelling fashion, the relation between aesthetics and violence. Feigel does this not in a conventional philosophical fashion, but by engaging directly with the ways in which, for these (and presumably other) writers, there was something thrilling, exhilarating and even sublime about the spectacle of military violence transforming the capital during the Blitz. This was far more visceral than voyeurism, though Feigel is very, very good on the visuals (and would surely have been even better had she included the work of artists and photographers), because these men and women were profoundly, physically involved in the Blitz as air raid wardens, ambulance drivers, and auxiliary firemen. The title comes from Graham Greene:

‘The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (“Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?”), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm.’

Feigel gives the events of that one night a peculiar intensity by beginning with what she calls a ‘newsreel’, a quick and lively summary of the Blitz, and then, as darkness falls, moving in sections from 7 p.m. (Blackout) through 10 p.m. (Fire) and 1 a.m. (Rescue) until 6 a.m., the All Clear, and the blessed arrival (for some, at least) of a new day. It’s something of a conceit: the five writers were not dutiful scribes each at their separate desks on 26 September , so to bring them into view on this artfully re-imagined night Feigel darts back from their loosely collective present into their pasts, placing them in myriad networks of other writers and friends, inserting them into the narrative arc of the falling bombs, and freely using their writings so that they issue forth as something far more than the usual silhouettes glimpsed against the light of burning buildings. And their involvements are profoundly sensuous: as the cover of the American edition (right) shows far better than the English edition above, and as the title intimates, even as they were unmoored from their familiar haunts and their old lives, they also sensed (and often seized) new possibilities for love as well as loss.

This is a very different ground to that crunched over by Patrick Deer in the equally brilliant Culture in camouflage: war, empire and modern British literature (still one of my favourite books about this or any other period) or Leo Mellor‘s Reading the ruins: modernism, bomb-sites and British culture (which I found remarkably austere), because its sense of culture is more sensuous, even sensual, because it addresses the erotics of surviving military violence in such an honest way, and – probably another way of saying the same two things – because it’s so close in spirit to Sarah Waters.

It’s also much closer to the way in which the humanities have recovered the Western Front. In fact, Feigel insist that ‘these writers, firefighting, ambulance-driving, patrolling the streets,were the successors of the soldier poets of the First World War, and their story remains to be told.’ There are of course difficulties in privileging the privileged, and some of the most arresting memorials about life in the trenches were produced not by the gentlemen-officers but by the ordinary soldiers: but as Feigel shows, there are also riches to be recovered by picking their pocket-books.

The Lincoln Brigade

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Derek Gregory

In a previous post on what I called ‘the martial Arts‘ I commented on the teaching of humanities at the US Military Academy at West Point. Now NBC has posted an extract from Slate columnist Fred Kaplan‘s new book, The insurgents: David Petraeus and the plot to change the American way of war (Simon & Schuster, 2013) that speaks directly to the role of the Department of Social Sciences (“Sosh”) in the reformulation of US counterinsurgency doctrine.

I’ve grown weary – and sceptical – of the constant placing of David Petraeus front and centre in these discussions, since I think that much of the effort was de-centred, emerging through pragmatic experiments by different commanders on the ground at different places in Afghanistan and particularly Iraq, but Kaplan provides an interesting gloss on the history of the social sciences at West Point – and in particular the attempt to produce ‘a sense of separate space for critical inquiry’ – and the reach of its interpersonal network of alumni who called themselves ‘the Lincoln Brigade’.

The social sciences program at West Point owed its power to General George ‘Abe’ Lincoln – who, astonishingly, insisted on a demotion to Colonel in order to take up a position at West Point – who, in the wake of the Second World War, envisaged a new kind of staff officer, one ‘with three heads’: one military, one political and one economic. (The current course catalog is here: it emphasises American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations and Economics).

Over the years, a network of Lincoln’s acolytes—and the acolytes of those acolytes—emerged and expanded. They called themselves the “Lincoln Brigade” (an inside joke on their left-wing stereotype, referring to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the group of American leftists who, in the 1930s, had gone off to fight against fascists in the Spanish Civil War). Over the years, when these alumni-officers were appointed to high-level positions, they’d usually phone Colonel Lincoln—or, later on, his successors as department chairmen—and ask for the new crop of top Sosh cadets, or the most promising junior faculty members, to come work as their assistants.

I can imagine that Petraeus on the cover – or between the covers – is a strong selling-point (the revelation of Petraeus’s affair pushed up the book’s publication from February), but Kaplan has used e-mails, documents and interviews to bring into sharper focus the role of men like John Nagl, H.R. McMaster and Peter Chiarelli in reformulating ‘the American way of war’.

Janet Maslin‘s New York Times review here, and Eliot Spitzer’s interview with Kaplan here (where he emphasises Petraeus’s skill at building a myth about himself….).

Judith Butler and the analytics of power

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Derek Gregory

Claire Pagès and Mathieu Trachman conduct a concise but wide-ranging interview with Judith Butler at Books & Ideas, in which she asks this about neo-liberalism and the economic:

‘[I]f we claim that neo-liberalism disposes populations to become disposable, and exposes populations to precarity, we have to ask whether we are speaking about a purely economic rationale and regime of power (by “ neo-liberalism ”), a regime of power that governs the practices of subject-formation, including self-making, and the valorization of the metric of instrumentality in ways that include and exceed the sphere conventionally denoted as “ economic ”. Indeed, does the power and pervasiveness of “ neo-liberalism” compel us to think about the heteronomy of the economic and the way that the rationalities that govern its operation exceed the purely economic. Must we give up an idea of the purely economic by virtue of neo-liberalism at the same time that we cannot do without the economic?’

Incidentally, readers who have followed the sometimes repellent response to Judith’s receipt of the Adorno Prize can find her speech at the award ceremony in Frankfurt on 11 September – ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life?’ – here (I think this is the Radical Philosophy version, with images that speak to the controversy) or, in unadorned form, here.

You can also find details of her new book, Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press) – which, in its closing chapter, engages with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish – here. Like all her work, this book – which also includes reflections around Arendt, Benjamin and Levinas – admirably fulfils her own beautifully understated view of what it is to be critical: that is, to be ‘willing to examine what we sometimes presuppose in our way of thinking, and that gets in the way of making a more livable world.’

‘The cartography of one man’s consciousness’

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Derek Gregory

Kevin Powers has won the Guardian‘s First Book Award for The Yellow Birds, widely praised as one of the finest American novels to have come out of the Iraq War. Powers enlisted when he was just 17 and served as a machine-gunner in Iraq in 2004-5; the title of this post comes from the novel, but the title of the novel comes from a US Army marching song:

“A yellow birdWith a yellow bill/

Was perched upon/ my windowsill.

“I lured him in/With a piece of bread/

And then I smashed/His fucking head.”

Writing in Time, Nate Rawlings begins his interview with Powers with an observation that speaks to my own work on war at a distance:

War has always been a strange and distant endeavor, brought home from the battlefields in letters, photographs and stories after the guns fell silent. Then beginning with the war in Vietnam, images of battlefield violence were beamed into our homes; you’d be hard pressed to find an American with a television who hasn’t seen images of troops battling in Iraq and Afghanistan. But after 11 years of war, the challenge is to make people truly understand that experience.

That was Powers’ starting-point too: he wanted to find an answer to the question he was constantly being asked: ‘What was it like over there?’ Yet he soon determined that, even in fictional form, he couldn’t do it: ‘War is only like itself’, he writes. That terse phrase circles back to an inquiry into war and representation – representations in war and representations of war – that is focal to any understanding of contemporary conflict: an inquiry that will, inevitably, need to confront the labile limits of representation itself. (And that is not a surreptitious bugle call for non-representational theory to gallop over the horizon to the rescue).

Minimally, The Yellow Birds is about memory and violence, about the landscape of death and the lingering foulness of war. The protagonist of the novel is Private John Bartle, who promises the mother of Private John Murphy that he will bring him back alive… There are thoughtful reviews from the Guardian’s John Burnside here, from Elizabeth Samet here – she’s a professor of English at the US Military Academy – and from Benjamin Percy here, and a (better) interview with Powers here.

At Slate, Jacob Silverman locates The Yellow Birds alongside three other novels from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He doesn’t like its lyricism – Powers is a poet, and it shows – but he makes a more telling point about all four novels:

‘These new American wars have bred manifold types of isolation. Here, actual indigenous peoples are rare, whether enemy or civilian; the one named Iraqi that appears in The Yellow Birds is killed almost as soon as he’s introduced. There is little attempt to explore the perspectives of the very people these wars are being waged upon.’

That’s true of so many novels from other wars too, but the point is all the sharper because Powers’ novel takes place, in part, in Tal Afar: one of the key sites from which the US Army traced the ‘cultural turn’ that was to be enshrined in its new counterinsurgency strategy. Powers left there in the spring of 2005, by which time Tal Afar was being described as ‘the next Fallujah’. But – according to George Packer at any rate – the tide was about to turn. In one of his Letters from Iraq, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar‘, Packer recorded the words of one US officer who, twelve months on, had been working the fragile contact zone between the US Army and different groups in the local population:

“History teaches you that war, at its heart, is a human endeavor. And if you ignore the human side — yours, the enemy’s, and the civilians’ — you set yourself up for failure. It’s not about weapons. It’s about people.”

War is about apprehending those ‘people’ in distinctive and differentiated ways, to be sure, but it’s also about apprehending the landscape in embodied ways that transcend the maps and jottings of today’s Human Terrain Teams. Here The Yellow Birds excels, and for a reflection on the sensuous, visceral landscape of an earlier Iraq war, one described in Anthony Swofford‘s Jarhead, you can’t do better than read Geoffrey Wright‘s fine essay, a sort of corpo-cartography of the combat zone, in ‘The desert of experience: Jarhead and the geography of the Persian Gulf War’, PMLA 124 (2009) 1677-1689. He addresses the later Iraq War in ‘The geography of the combat narrative: unearthing identity, narrative and agency in the Iraq War’, Genre XLIII (2010) 163-90.

And I do recommend reading The Yellow Birds too…