War as Event(s)ing and Case Study

Fry, Tony

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24720-1_3

Tony Fry²

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Abstract

There is now a significant gap between common perceptions and representations of war and its actual and emergent actualities. What will now to be presented provides a variety of ways in which the think war that are more appropriate to present times. The overall framing is via the concept of ‘the event’ as it has been theorised by a number of philosophers, and as it occupies a central position in developing approaches to Unstaging War. What will become apparent in exposing substantial changes in the nature of war is that they are many ontological transformations underway. The ranges of these changes of war are extensive and multidimensional and have taken war beyond conventional characterisations of warfighting. By implication the narrativization of war needs to change. The most substantial change being acknowledged is that as an event war it can no longer be appropriately viewed as discrete in space, time, form or as separate from the unsustainability of the ‘human’ condition. The argument of the chapter is complimented with a case study on the weaponisation of design that links to transformations of war now happening and to the concept of unstaging.

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Notes

1.
What this qualification acknowledges is that different cosmologies have defined and named our ‘being’ in different ways. In this context the hegemonic human has a history of categorical imposition via modernity.
2.
As was learnt from Plato’s “allegory of the cave” we see with our mind not our eyes’—for our eyes are simply instruments that facilitate sight Plato’s (1998), ‘Doctrine of Truth,’ in Pathmarks (trans. Thomas Sheehan, ed. William McNeill), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–182.
3.
Alfred North Whitehead (1978), Process and Reality, New York: Free Press, pp. 72–73.
4.
Derek Gregory (2016), ‘Territory of the Screen,’ Media Tropes e-Journal, Vol. V, No. 2, p. 123, https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/download/26424/19604/ (accessed December 6, 2017).
5.
Gilles Deleuze (1993), The Fold (trans. Tom Conley), London: The Athone Press, pp. 77–82.
6.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 52.
7.
Ibid.
8.
See full account, Alain Badiou (2007), ‘The Event in Deleuze’ (trans. Jon Roffe), Parrhesia, No. 2, pp. 37–44; Gilles Deleuze (1990), The Logic of Sense (trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale), London: The Athone Press.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Martin Heidegger (2013), The Event (trans. Richard Rojcewicz), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
11.
Ibid., p. 127.
12.
A recent example: the word application(s), in the context of electronic devices both illustrated to point and makes ‘ap’ a prefix in waiting (destined to become a post-fix).
13.
Ibid., p. 153.
14.
Ibid., para 188, p. 154.
15.
Ibid., para 193, p. 156.
16.
Ibid., para 197, p. 162.
17.
Ibid.
18.
Ibid., para 199, p. 163.
19.
Ibid., para 205, p. 168.
20.
Worlding, and questions of what constitutes worlds, were an extremely important feature of his work from its beginning especially evident in Martin Heidegger (2002), Towards the Definition of Philosophy (trans. Ted Sadler), London: Continuum (the publication is of his early Freiburg Lectures [1919–1923]); Martin Heidegger (1988) [1927], The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (trans. Albert Hofstadtter), Bloomington: University of Indiana Press; (1988) [1927], Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson), Oxford: Blackwell; and (1995), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. For a wider view on writing on Worlding, see Pheng Cheah (2016), What Is a World? Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
21.
Graham Livesey, Graham (2015), ‘Deleuze, Whitehead, the Event, and the Contemporary City,’ notes https://whiteheadresearch.org/occasions/conferences/event-anddecision/papers/Graham%20Livesey_Final%20Draft.pdf, p. 14.
22.
Tony Fry (2009), Design Futuring, Oxford: Berg.
23.
In particular, the influence of Badiou and Heidegger will be evident in Chapter 11, when considering a new practice.
24.
Martin Heidegger (1982), On the Way to Language (trans. Peter D. Hertz), New York: Harper & Row, p. 83.
25.
Carl Schmitt (2011), Writing on War (trans. Timothy Nunan), Oxford: Polity Press, p. 130.
26.
The concept of ‘unrestricted warfare ’ already mentioned, and to be further elaborated in Chapter 6, is one example of the emergent condition of war as event. Another is the ‘war on terror,’ which likewise has no fixed location or form, is both real and unreal, is part of the unbounded, and so defies containment.
27.
Tony Fry (2015), ‘Remembering and Dismembering,’ in Design and the Question of History (Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot, and Susan C. Stewart), London: Bloomsbury, pp. 25–63; Keith Jenkins (2009), At the Limits of History, London: Routledge.
28.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), evocatively state that nomads invented the ‘war machine ,’ A Thousand Plateau (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 417. However while nomads may well have established the conditions out of which the war machine emerged this view is contestable for it enfolds into a much earlier historicity/archaeology of movement, spatial colonization and calculation—see the Hans Barnard and Willeke Wendrich (ed.) (2008), The Archaeology of Mobility, Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute, University of California, Los Angeles.
29.
Hans Barnard and Willeke Wendrich (2008), The Archaeology of Mobility: Old World and New World Nomadism, Los Angeles: University of California, Cotsen Institute; James C. Scott (2009), The Art of Not Being Governed, New Haven: Yale University Press.
30.
See the seminal essay, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine ’, Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 351–424.
31.
Charles C. Scott (2009), The Art of Not Being Governed, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 150–153.
32.
Ibid., 1.5.7.5, p. 55.
33.
City planning provides a very clear example of striated space ordered by reason and imposed in time by the violence of colonial law. Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nuevo población y pacificación de las Indias dadas por Felipe II, el 13 de julio de 1573, en el Bosque de Segovia, según el original que se conserva en el Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla. Ministerio de la Vivienda, Madrid, 1973.—English translation of these Law of the Indies directing the creation of cities in Colombia by Axel Mundigo and Dora Crouch (1977), reprinted by The New City with permission from ‘The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited,’ Town Planning Review, Vol. 48, July, pp. 247–268.
34.
Sumantra Maitra, ‘Women and War,’ Global Policy Journal, pp. 1–9, globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/22/04/2013/women-and-war-women-combat-and-internal-debate-field-gender-studies (accessed July 9, 2017).
35.
Ibid., pp. 4–9. Such a view is not new. Hannah Arendt (1952), citing Bertrand de Jouvenel many decade ago who observed what is a central feature of military culture: ‘A man feels himself a man when he is imposing himself and making others instruments of his will,’ Power : The Natural History of Its Growth, London: Faber, p. 36.
36.
Margaret Poulos (2008), Arm and the Women, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
37.
Joyce, P. Kaufmann and Kristen P. Williams (2013), Women at War, Women Building Peace, Boulder: Kumarian Press.
38.
Poulos, Arm and the Women.
39.
Cristina Richie (2014), ‘Women Combatants and Just War Theory,’ Political Theology Today, January 17, http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/women-combatants-and-just-war-theory/ (accessed July 8, 2017).
40.
Maitra, ‘Women and War’, pp. 4–9.
41.
Poulos, Arm and the Women.
42.
Claire Duncanson and Rachel Woodward (2016), ‘Regendering the Military: Theorizing Women’s Military Participation,’ Security Dialogue, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 3–21.
43.
Ibid., p. 4.
44.
Ibid.
45.
Ibid., p. 5.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid., p. 9.
49.
Ibid., p. 12.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Stephan Graham (2011), Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, London: Verso, p. 27.
52.
For example it took many months and thousands of Iraqi troops to defeat just a few hundred ISIL fighters in Mosul.
53.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/12/12/1570000000000-much-world-spent-arms-year/ (accessed March 12, 2017).
54.
Tony Fry (1999), A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, Sydney: UNSW Press.
55.
Cheah, What Is a World? p. 98.
56.
U.S. Army, Operation Ranch Hand, 1961–1971.
57.
Jeannie L. Sowers, Erika Weinthal, and Neda Zawahri, ‘Targeting Environmental Infrastructures, International law, and Civilians in the New Middle Eastern Wars,’ Security Dialogue, September 7, 2017, pp. 411–414, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0967010617716615 (accessed september 4, 2018). See also M. Tignino (2018), Water During and After Conflict, Leiden: Brill; and J.E. Austin and C.E. Bruch (eds.) (2000), The Environmental Consequences of War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
58.
There are many millions of lands mines scattered in former war zones around the world. They kill a quarter of a million civilians each year, and injure many more. The war may have ended but its creation of death has not. Derek Gregory (2010), ‘War and Peace,’ Transactions, Journal Institute of British Geographers, NS 35, p. 158.
59.
Brian Massumi (2015), Ontopower, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 11.
60.
Siegfried Kracauer (1986), ‘Das Ornament der Masse,’ cited by David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 152.
61.
Paul Virilio (1989), War and Cinema (trans. Patrick Camiller), London: Verso, p. 6.
62.
Control was by ‘embedding the in military units’ that directed what they could see and report.
63.
See, Graham, Cities Under Siege, pp. 68–71; Evan and Giroux (2015), Disposable Futures, San Francisco: City Lights, p. 43.
64.
Evan and Giroux, Disposable Futures, p. 71.
65.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1968) [1901], The Will to Power (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollindale), New York: Vintage.
66.
Martin Heidegger (1987), Nietzsche, Vol. 4 (trans. David Frarell Krell), New York: HarperCollins, p. 203.
67.
Ibid.
68.
Ibid., p. 248.
69.
Martin Heidegger (1972), On Time and Being (trans. Joan Stambaugh), New York: Harper & Row, p. 3.
70.
“The Chinese language does not conjugate and therefore does not separate tenses in a decisive way”—so “time does not exist as the past that no longer ‘is’, nor a future which ‘is’ not yet.” Francois Jullien (2014), On the Universal (trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski), Oxford: Polity, p. 155.
71.
Ibid., p. 121.
72.
Cheah, What Is a World? p. 2.
73.
Benedict Anderson (1983), Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
74.
Ibid., p. 17.
75.
Arturo Escobar (2018), Design for the Pluriverse, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Tony Fry (2011), Design as Politics, London: Berg; Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry (2014), Design in the Borderlands, London: Routledge; and Betti Mareenko and Jamie Brassett, Deleuze and Design, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
76.
Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis (2017), ‘Design and the Global South,’ Design Philosophy Papers, Vol. 15, No. 1; Escobar (2018), Design for the Pluriverse.
77.
Aaron P. Jackson (2019), ‘A Brief History of Military Design Thinking ,’ https://medium.com@aaronpjackson/a-brief-history-of-military-design-thinking-b27ba9571b89 (accessed March 1, 2019). See also Shimon Naveh, Jim Schneider, and Timothy Challans (2009), The Structure of Operational Revolution: A Prolegomena, Washington, DC: Booz, Allen, Hamilton.
78.
U.S. Army (2010), published Doctrine Publication ADP 5-0, followed by ADP (FM 5-0), 2012, an updated version, The Operations Process, Headquarters of the US Department of the Army, Washington, DC.
79.
Grome, A., B. Crandall, L. Rasmussen, and H. Wolters (2012), Army Design Methodology: Commander’s Resource, U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioural and Social Sciences, Arlington, p. 7.
80.
U.S. Army (2006), FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5 (2006), Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Headquarters, Department of Army Publication, Washington, DC/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication, Washington, DC.
81.
U.S. Army (2014), FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5 (2014), Insurgencies and Counter Insurgencies, Headquarters, Department of Army Publication, Washington, DC/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication, Washington, DC.
82.
Ibid., 1.19.
83.
Antoine Bousquet cited by Dan Öberg (2018), ‘Warfare as Design: Transgressive Creativity and Reductive Operational Planning,’ in Security Dialogue, pp. 1–17, sagepub.com/journals-permissions.
84.
ADP 5-0 (FM 5-0), 2012: 7–8.
85.
U.S. Joint Services (2017), Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Publication, JP-5.0: IV. Washington, DC.
86.
The future of COIN) from a US perspective is uncertain. It appears that the way its history from Vietnam to Afghanistan is now being viewed by a strengthening the traditional big war faction in the US military has been bolstered by President Trump’s popularist powered process of troop withdrawals first from Syria—this as part of a more isolationist foreign policy. Certainly fears have been voiced that lessons learnt from COIN could be a risk of being lost.
87.
N. Finney, (2008), Human Terrain Team Handbook, Fort Leavenworth, KS: Human Terrain System ; C. J. Sims (2017), The Human Terrain System: Operationally Relevant Social Science Research in Iraq and Afghanistan , Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) and U.S. Army War College (USAWC) Press.
88.
It was mixed because the anthropological knowledge in the team was not necessarily knowledge of the local culture and the timeframe of such research was at odds with the military demand of immediate answers.
89.
McFate Montgomery (2018), Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
90.
Marshall Sahlins (2009), ‘Preface,’ in Counter Counterinsurgency Manual, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, p. ii.
91.
Roborto Gonzáles, (2009), ‘Embedded,’ in Counter Counterinsurgency Manual, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, p. 113.
92.
In June 2013 the Guardian reported that a court in The Hague had awarded Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising a payouts totalling £20 million pounds sterling.
93.
Öberg (2018), ‘Warfare as Design,’ p. 2.
94.
Two qualifications should be noted: (i) most armies of the Global South , and for matter the world, predominantly exist as internal security forces; (ii) the design object of winning without conflict, given attention in Sun Tzu’s Art of War (perhaps still the most influential text on asymmetrical combat) gets virtually no attention in militarized design as it is characterized as ‘warfighting design’.
95.
The Royal Military College Saint-Jean and Centre for National Security Studies Symposium on Systems Thinking and Design, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWikgioTQcg.
96.
Ben Zweibelson (2011), ‘Cartel Next: How Army Design Methodology Offers Holistic and Dissimilar Approaches to the Mexican Drug Problem,’ Small Wars Journal, June, No. 5.
97.
Niklas Luhmann (1989), Ecological Communication (trans. John Bednarz, Jr.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 80.
98.
Allopoiesis is a process in which a system produces something other than the system itself, whereas autopoiesis is a self-replicating system. Relationality is a condition of systemic relations. See H.R. Maturana and F.F.J. Verela (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition, Boston: Riedel.
99.
Sustain-able design, Speculative design, Transition design, Design futuring, Design for the Global South being a few examples of this uneven process underway.
100.
Ben Zweibelson trained as a graphic designer and has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut. He also has a Masters degree that centred on military design applications for theory, doctrine and practice.
101.
Zweibelson, B. (2017), ‘Blending Postmodernism with Military Design Methodologies: Heresy, Subversion, and Other Myths of Organizational Change,’ Joint Military and Strategic Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 152.
102.
Ibid., 153.
103.
Remembering as we first learnt from Plato that we see with our mind, not our eyes—mere optical instruments of transmission.
104.
Mainstream design, is its dominant bondage as a service provider to the economic status quo, is equally delimited.
105.
Ben Zweibelson and Aaron P. Jackson, ‘Teachers, Leave Them Kids Alone: Debating Two Approaches for Design Education in Military Organisations,’ https://cmjs-rmcsj.forces.gc.ca-bk/art/2018/art-art-2018-4.eng.asp (accessed February 26, 2019).
106.
Öberg , ‘Warfare as Design,’ p. 12.
107.
While dialectically creation is indivisible from destruction, the ethical issue, when it relates to human actions, is: does what is created justify what is destroyed? This is a historically loaded question that of course haunts the social perception of military conduct.
108.
Öberg , ‘Warfare as Design,’ p. 12.
109.
Unstaging war is essentially any performative action that de-centres a propensity to war and its legitimacy; and, deescalates its severity if it occurs.

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Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, Launceston, TAS, Australia
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Fry, T. (2019). War as Event(s)ing and Case Study. In: Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict and Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24720-1_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24720-1_3
Published: 25 July 2019
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