Have we ever been civilian? On war’s expansion beyond the battlefield.

As military and other forms of political violence become the planetary norm, On Posthuman War traces the expansion of war as manifest within humanity’s individual, sociocultural, and biological existence. Author Mike Hill identifies three human-focused disciplines newly turned against humanity (demography, anthropology, and neuroscience) and questions the very notion of society. This episode brings Hill into conversation with Robyn Marasco and Warren Montag.

Mike Hill is professor of English at SUNY Albany. He is coauthor (with Warren Montag) of The Other Adam Smith and author of After Whiteness and On Posthuman War.

Robyn Marasco teaches political theory at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Marasco is author of The Highway of Despair.

Warren Montag is professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Montag is author of several books including Althusser and His Contemporaries.

Episode references:

Immanuel Kant

Claus von Clausewitz (On War)

Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3–24) of 2006

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (from University of Chicago Press)

The Gates Doctrine

National Security Strategy

American Sniper (opening of the film)

Alain Badiou

Topics:

US war strategy (specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan)

Gender politics in the US

Crisis in the humanities

Climate change

Terms/keywords:

Civilianized

De-civilianized

Identity infiltration

Computation

“Moving through the three fields of study identified in what follows as war disciplines (demography, anthropology, and neuroscience), computational technology is key … because, like war, it is both ubiquitous and largely invisible.” (from the Preface, page xxi)

Episode Transcript

Mike Hill (00:03):
So war has not only been proximate, it's been
foundational.

Robyn Marasco (00:07):
The citizen was always presumed to be a
potential soldier.

Warren Montag (00:13):
It is useful to see the kinds of strategies that
Mike is talking about as ways toeliminate the fog and friction
of war.

Mike Hill (00:26):
Everybody, my name is Mike Hill. I'm a professor in
the English department at SUNYAlbany. I'm also a member of the
Institute for Public Health andthe Environment and a core
member of the reenlightenmentgroup. And I'm the author of On
Posthuman War, Computation andMilitary Violence, which we're
gonna talk about today.

Warren Montag (00:44):
I'm Warren Montag. I teach English
literature at Occidental Collegein Los Angeles.

Robyn Marasco (00:51):
And I am Robin Morasco. I teach political
theory at Hunter College and theGraduate Center at CUNY.

Mike Hill (00:59):
Well, thank you both, Warren and Robin, for for
agreeing to do this. I so muchappreciate both your presence
here and and also your havingtaken the time to to read the
book. The title of the book onposthuman war and the subtitle
computation and militaryviolence, you know, has some
keywords clearly in it. And andone of them turns out to be a
word that I'm not terriblywedded to, but it's there as a

(01:21):
kind of shorthand, and that wordis posthuman. And I suppose I'm
less interested in in the postpart of the posthuman than I am
in in the human part.
Its history is a a a politicalconcept, one that dates back at
least as far as theenlightenment. It's connected
specifically with westernmodernity and and has to do with

(01:42):
what we call civil society, thepublic sphere. The idea that
there is a realm of reason anddialogue, intersubjectivity and
give and take that is somehowabsolutely separate from
political coercion, let alonecertain kinds of violence and
especially military violence.And this is something that is is

(02:04):
core to an entire history of ofnatural law theory going back
through Locke and Hobbes andlots of other names that I'm
sure people know. One of thepremises there then is that the
state has a monopoly over whereviolence is used and that one of
the big no nos for a human beingper se or a citizen to claim

(02:24):
rights is that whateverpolitical agency that citizen or
that rights bearing human beinghas, Those politics have to
exist at the level ofdiscussion.
As Kant says, argue but obey.And what you obey is the law.
And when you break the law, thestate then decides that
political force or force of onekind or another may be useful.

(02:46):
The historical irony of allthis, of course, is that as
everybody knows who studies theenlightenment, that this was a
period not only of, rationaldiscourse in the dawn of the
public sphere, but extremeviolence. And and that that
violence occurred in a way thatwas exterior, to civil society
or so was the claim, but alsooften hidden.

(03:07):
That is, it existed at theperiphery. This is, of course,
at the time of of of colonialismand nothing short of the radical
forms of military violence andoccupations of other places to
produce the kind of wealthnecessary to go into the public
sphere so that people couldclaim rights in the first place.
And it also ought to be saidthat those rights have to do
with the possession of privateproperty and wealth and so on.

(03:28):
So if we had this historicalparadigm where the human being
per se is defined as acivilianized member of civil
society and, participant in thepublic sphere outside of
political force, the post inpost human war is suggesting
that something else is happeningor has happened. And the term I

(03:49):
use to talk about that somethingelse is desivilianization.
That is, after nine eleven, theconnection between citizen or
civilian, let's say, and soldierand combatant becomes rather
tenuous. And it's not tenuous ina sort of accidental way. It's
it's tenuous in a in a quitelegal way. I mean, the,

(04:10):
surveillance apparatus that getsput into place after nine
eleven, the idea that, everycitizen may also be a suspect,
and you can think about themassive kinds of data dumps and
other forms of computational,surveillance that that occurs
during that period. I thinkushered in a moment of, again,
what I call desivilianization.

(04:31):
We can look at that not justinternally to civil society, and
there are other examples of thatwe can name, but also the way in
which the battlefield itself,exterior to the nation state,
taking care of course of theglobal war on terror, gets
reconstituted such that whatwe're talking about now are no
longer fighting on clearlydemarcated battlefields with
strict lines of opposition. Thatthis is a network centric way of

(04:54):
thinking about the enemy, wherenot only could the enemy be your
next door neighbor or the enemycould be you, but that on the
battlefield, new techniques ofwar are being put into place.
And so in chapter one, I talkabout what's called the
revolution in military affairs,which looks specifically at
identity in a civil societycontext or at least in a
nonmilitary context to usethings like the human terrain

(05:17):
system programs, which areanthropological forms of
research to to look at civilianpopulation patterns, to look at
kinship relationships, to lookat even things like population
flows that are now perceptiblefrom the perspective of of, say,
a loitering drone. These areexamples of what some of the
counterinsurgency field manualscalled achieving identity

(05:40):
supremacy or even as a form ofcounterinsurgency using what
they call, identityinfiltration.
And so when we start thinkingabout terms like the human being
or the self or the citizen oridentity, terms that used to be
thought about as, you know,desibilianized or rather
civilianized terms or become acivilianized in these ways, we
start to see patterns between,the so called homeland and,

(06:03):
what's happening, on thebattlefield. So I'm interested
in a couple of things in thecore of the book. One is
demography, how identities areare traced and how they
interact. The other isanthropology, which is a long
history connected to, towarfare, which we can talk
about. And then the thirdchapter, and I'll just end with
the overview here, talks aboutwar neuroscience.
And so what is interesting tofind out as one looks at the

(06:27):
research going on on the humanbrain that is connecting
cognition to data and then,therefore, to weaponry, is that
the brain itself, its veryarchitecture, is described as a
battlefield domain. And at leastin the eyes of the researchers
is a kind of seamless expansion,right, that absorbs both civil

(06:47):
society, the externalbattlefields, and even the human
body itself, it turns out, atthe very end. The final thing
I'll say just by word ofoverview is the other key word,
and that is computation. Theidea that in the same way that
we talked about theenlightenment period as being
one where the human being per setakes on these modern meanings.

(07:08):
The media revolution that occursat that particular time is, of
course, print culture, reading,writing, circulation of books,
magazines, newspapers, and soon.
And it's a it's a big part ofthe establishment of civil
society. Clearly, there's beenanother media revolution that we
can talk about, and that iscomputation. And so, again, when
you read some of the militaryresearch, what they talk about

(07:30):
very often is data as a kind ofwar material. One of their
favorite phrases is bullets,beams, and data. And the
assumption there is that if itcan be turned into numbers, then
it can also be directed towardsa military, outcome.
And so these techniques, forexample, in the human training
systems program or in some ofthe military neuroscience and in

(07:53):
some of the identityinfiltration techniques are all
fundamentally computational.They don't occur by one set of
eyes looking at another set ofeyes. They occur through
biometrics. They occur throughreally complicated algorithmic
forms of, of surveillance andpopulation control. And so the
computational part of theproject here, ought to be also

(08:16):
be something that's putalongside that that term human
being.

Warren Montag (08:21):
Okay. First of all, I wanted to say that the
strength, and I think, Mike'sbook is an extraordinarily
useful and very well researchedtext that's overflowing with
information, sort of inimitation of the object of the
book in some way. I think anyonewho reads it can easily feel
overwhelmed because there aremany it's pointing in many

(08:43):
different directions. And one ofthe ways that I tried to cope
with that is to look at thecritiques within the military of
the strategy that's, wasoutlined in 02/2006 with,
General Petraeus and the idea ofterrain to not just to the
human, but also really toeverything. It's a kind of

(09:05):
totalizing idea, which poseshuge problems for the military.
But one of the things that Ifound very useful is that a
number of commentators who arein the military said that, in
fact, we could understand,Petraeus' counterinsurgency
strategy in terms of Clausewitzin in a certain way, the on war.

(09:28):
And he talks about two thingsthat I think are very much at
play. And the the for example,the various versions of field
manual three dash 24 oncounterinsurgency, which first
came out in, twenty o six. AndClausewitz has two concepts that
keep getting referred to. Thefog of war, which has to do with

(09:50):
knowledge that at any giventime, there is so much that you
can't see.
At that time, it was taken as aimmutable category because you
can never eliminate that fog,and you have to sort of figure
out how to maneuver within it.And then also, sort of the
corollary to that is thefriction of war, which is, all

(10:13):
the unforeseeable elements,forces that prevent the, an army
from achieving what onceappeared to be easily achievable
goals. And I think it's it'svery useful to use that to
understand what was going on intwenty o six because, as we
know, I don't wanna go into thehistory in any detail, but it

(10:35):
was a disaster in twenty o six,Iraq and Afghanistan. And, the
military had obviously stumbledinto something that they had
absolutely no preparation forand were caught off guard in
many different ways. And soPetraeus made a kind of bold
effort, which I think we can saynow was was a complete failure

(10:57):
in many ways, which doesn't meanit won't continue, but it was a
complete failure, to extend thebattlefield or the the terrain
to the totality of what's infront of him.
And it was very demanding. And,I mean, looking at the precise
wording of the of the fieldmanual in any of its versions,
what I found absolutely stunningwas the the ignorance and the

(11:20):
naivete in that document whereyou can just learn a culture in
a matter of a few months. And ifyou just walk out among the
people instead of remaininginside your armored vehicle,
then this is the solution to aproblem of knowledge because
you'll see what's going on,etcetera. And then you learn all

(11:42):
their customs. You know, likeyou could read, like, like, an
etiquette book or something andthen know what to do, what not
to do.
And then, you know, finally, ashe he says in a very funny way,
yes. You might even learn theirlanguage. Yeah. I mean, it's
it's sort of mind boggling thatsomeone could say that at that
point in that that, conflict.And this is of course, it leads

(12:05):
to, much more complicatedscenarios and a sense of how
complicated this new battlefieldis.
It's not something you can justautomatically draw up and and
use like a map or something. SoI think it is useful to see the
kinds of strategies that Mike istalking about as ways to

(12:25):
eliminate the fog and frictionof war in that sense. And I
think, if we look at the threecategories, demography is
extremely important. We can seethat there was an invasion of a
country that for the US militarywas basically homogeneous,
except for clearly identifiableand historically, you know, very

(12:48):
important minority groups. Therewas no sense I mean, there
wasn't even a clear sense thatthe Arabic that's spoken in Iraq
is not the same that's spoken inother places or even within
Iraq.
It may be very difficult for oneperson to understand another
person's dialects, etcetera.And, the the number of languages

(13:09):
wasn't really known, which iskind of extraordinary. And,
there was some very vague notionof these minority groups, but it
wasn't very serviceable. SoPetraeus was proposing, and I
don't think he knew the extentof what he was proposing, to
begin to figure out, like, howmany different groups they are,

(13:30):
how is the society organized interms of given populations
according to ethnicity or tribalmembership, which is important
there, and, also in Afghanistan.And, I think that what they then
embarked on was an impossiblemission of a kind of
totalization of all thisinformation.

(13:51):
And what happened, as, one ofthe commentators says, is that
there was overload and theentire gathering of data became
impossible. There was so muchinformation and so little
ability to filter out theaccurate, the inaccurate, the
partially accurate, etcetera,that it actually just set up a

(14:11):
whole new set of problems. Withwith the demographic approach,
there's even a concentration on,you know, the typical modes of
inquiry or kinds of inquiry thatwe associate with demography.
Are people starving? Are theyhungry?
Are they malnourished? What istheir economic status? Are they
employed, unemployed? You know,just to gather that data in a

(14:34):
short period of time in a waythat could be used by the
military is impossible as theyfound out. So it was the
beginning of a kind of projectof information that was doomed
to failure from the start, Andits naivete was that belief
that, oh, this could all be donequite easily with new
computational techniques and,you know, statistical models for

(14:58):
analyzing data, etcetera,etcetera.
K? And then the, anthropologicalchapter of Mike's book is
extremely maybe even moreimportant in a certain way
because this is where the USarmy had to deal with Islam.
They couldn't just read a book.They began to confront the fact
that there are differentbranches of Islam, that even

(15:20):
within Sunni or Shiite Islam,there are many differences, and
people, may have, you know,sharp antagonisms that they're
not aware of. And Islam, youknow, really texts like the
Quran is not at all an easything that one just you just
pick up the Quran and leafthrough it or something like
that.

(15:40):
Again, they discovered that thiscivilization or society that
they regarded as rather simplein some ways was extraordinarily
complicated. And then they hadthings like when they looked at
manners, like etiquette,etcetera, the binary opposition
that's proposed in the the fieldmanual is formal and informal.

(16:02):
So manners, the way you interactwith other people is either
formal, which it appeared thatthe Iraqi model was formal, and
the Americans are informal. It'sabsurd. It's it's completely
ethnocentric in every possibleway.
It's completely inaccurate. Andso the magnitude of the problem

(16:24):
posed by Petraeus' strategy is,you know, becomes more apparent
with every, aspect of life thatthey want to investigate in the
army. What happened was that theUS army was constantly creating
conflicts, which functioned as

Robyn Marasco (16:39):
friction

Warren Montag (16:39):
that impeded them at every step, and they couldn't
gather sufficient information,which just appeared to
complicate everything even more.It didn't lead anywhere except
for despair and then withdrawal.And one of the things just the
neuroscience chapter is very,very interesting. And I think it
is important not just for, howto infiltrate the brain, but

(17:02):
also how to extend theperceptual capacities of the
individual soldier through, youknow, we might call prosthetic
devices that, you know, thatthey end up in many cases
wearing on their body, thatrecord information, that analyze
information, transmitinformation, and that too

(17:24):
produces contradictions. Itendangers the very soldiers that
it's supposed to aid and and,make more safe by forcing them
into situations where they'rethe data gatherers.
The critiques of this within thearmy, the critiques of the human
terrain strategy. I thinkthere's a notion that it's

(17:45):
impossible to actuallyoperationalize the idea of a
human terrain, that there's somany variables, so many areas,
and the more you know, the moreyou have to know, and it becomes
a burden whose profit for themilitary is very murky. And we
can see now a reaction againstit. Just finally, One of the

(18:06):
most interesting articles that Iread very recently was from 2020
by a member of the military. Thetitle of the article is why the
Taliban is unbeatable.
And this is produced by an armyofficer, somebody who had been a
commander. And he gave a verygood description, not of the,

(18:26):
you know, every detail ofTaliban life or something like
that, but he could describe whythey were able to win, not only
militarily, which they did,which is extraordinary in many
ways, but also to get theallegiance of the people and
leaving the resistance to theirtheir program really isolated to

(18:48):
Kabul. And, it's it's somethingthat's very difficult for people
to understand or to accept. ButI think that the military
produced this, commentary, whichI think was shared not openly by
many people. That that was animpossible conflict.
They would never win, andthat's, led to the withdrawal. I

(19:09):
think there's a lot to discuss,and I think it's an extremely
rich book that, we'll be goingback to many times.

Mike Hill (19:16):
Yeah. Thinking back to 02/2006 and and specifically
Petraeus is a sort of figurehead of what they call very
explicitly the rise of the ofthe scholar soldiers. So it's
not just this citizen combatant,it's a scholar soldier. I think
one of the reasons that term isworth holding on to or at least
thinking critically about, it ithas to do with this issue of
knowledge informationmanagement. I mean, portrays as

(19:38):
a PhD in international studiesfrom Princeton, the
counterinsurgency field manualthat that Lauren mentioned was
produced by the University ofChicago Press, practically a
bestseller.
It probably outsold a lot of ourown books. And the word that
gets used in there over and overis culture. It's a keyword in
that book. And it says that, youknow, for us to to fight the war
that we're gonna now need tofight, right, which is a multi

(20:02):
front war. And in fact, the wordmulti, I think, is what Warren
was trying to get at inreferencing Clausewitz and the
idea of the sort of spatial andtemporal complexities of
posthuman war, which is thisidea of fog, which is, you know,
not knowing and not having acomplete sense of the
battlefield.
Because once you make everythingan area of operation, if you
think that through, there reallyis no position from which you

(20:25):
can find an oppositionalrelationship to an enemy without
that enemy turning intosomething that either disappears
or pops up in places you don'texpect. And that's the problem
of a network centricbattlefield. Now on the one
hand, that's gonna produce a lotof fog and a lot of friction.
That is things are gonna not gowell when you think they're

(20:46):
gonna go well. And on the otherhand, what it did for the
scholar soldier in theory, andthe theory didn't work out as as
Warren rightly says, is that itjust puts a new opportunity in
play.
And that opportunity is isinformational. They call it full
spectrum warfare. Right? Itmeans that everything is
operational. The fact thatDefense Department secretary

(21:08):
Gates, right, people willremember Gates, and and was also
the university president, saidmany important things addressing
the American, universityprofessors.
Where he's actually talkingabout the importance not just of
bringing civilian knowledgepractices, into alignment with
what we can and should be doingfor issues of security, but

(21:32):
especially fields, he says, inhumanities and

Warren Montag (21:35):
in the liberal arts and social sciences.

Mike Hill (21:37):
And this was a, you know, interesting development
alongside the correspondingdisintegration of those fields
in their traditional senses interms of at least support
majors, faculty hires, and so onin in the universities to see a
strange backdoor revitalizationof humanistic thinking as a
militarized application isanother part of of this problem.

(22:02):
And Gates is is very clear aboutthat. In the human terrain
systems program, For example,you could see job ads, and I
applied for one, just for kicks,that read a lot like sort of the
an MLA job description, youknow, rewritten with a military
goal at the end. You know, itthe word cultural studies was
used without irony in some ofthese human trade system program

(22:26):
applications. So the goal was toput experts in the humanities
disciplines, let's just say, orhumanistic kinds of concerns,
but then to recalibrate.
That's probably exactly theappropriate word to recalibrate
humanistic discourse in amilitary fashion. So that was
the promise. And the reason thatthe promise didn't pan out was

(22:46):
exactly as Warren says and this,I think also just worth
emphasizing. It was a promisepredicated upon a presumption of
the ability to process morefaster. And the way you do that
is not through traditional waysof thinking, reading, writing,
discussing, all those old civilsociety modalities, right, that

(23:07):
we recognize as maybe part ofmodernity and maybe no longer
part of the present becausecomputation is also the emphasis
in all of the revolution andmilitary affairs discourse and
in all of the counterinsurgencystrategy material.
They thought they were gonnalearn the lessons from the
strategic hamlet initiatives ofthe Vietnam War, where some of

(23:29):
these cultural practices wereput into place for the first
time, for, uses of populationcontrol and surveillance, which
also failed because they thoughtthe lack of of computational
power. And so there were gonnabe new forms of mapping, real
time census taking, all kinds ofvariations beyond just the usual

(23:49):
ones that you can see with humaneyes that were gonna be put into
this fast database that wasgonna beam back just like the
drone, you know, commands are tovarious data centers in The US
and then beam back to thesoldiers so that all these kinds
of control could happen, whichdidn't. But the premises, in
other words, was all I'm tryingto to get at here of this being

(24:11):
a knowledge operation and acultural operation and one that
in that involves a promiseabout, you know, computational
power was how the the posthumanwar promise, right, was set up.

Robyn Marasco (24:23):
Thanks. I just first wanna thank you, Mike, for
writing this book and for theinvitation to talk about it
here. And maybe I'll say a a fewthings just about the book and
the kind of reader's experienceof the book, which I also
appreciate. There's a kind ofcinematic quality, and I think

(24:44):
Warren alluded to one dimensionof this, the kind of
proliferation of images andinformation and kind of lines of
potential inquiry and analogiesand metaphor. There's even a
sort of reflection on analogy.
And so there's something in thekind of in that experience that
reads a cinematic. There's also,I think, surprising resemblances

(25:08):
between major, kind ofcharacters and figures in the
plot. Right? And so we get theUS military and the American
Anthropological Association,resembling one another in a
surprising narrative twist.Right?
We get a kind of university,DEI, multicultural liberalism

(25:29):
being echoed in the Petraeusstrategy. Right? So we get,
again, in this, like, quasicinematic, experience, we get,
the kind of resemblance betweenperhaps our assumed villains and
our assumed heroes that wehadn't expected. And then

(25:49):
finally, I mean, sort ofmasterfully, we get this
cliffhanger ending that in themanner of all contemporary
Hollywood cinema ends on theopening to part two to the next
installment. We get thecliffhanger ending that opens to

(26:12):
the next study contributioninstallment, which is going to
be on ecology and posthuman war.
So there's something I justthink of a, like, formal
exercise that's kind ofmarvelous about it. I appreciate
also the way that it opens witha proper preface and opening in

(26:34):
which, Mike, you describe yourown experience as a journalist,
scholar, participant in a kindof simulated boot camp
experience on Parris Island. Andso I'd like us to talk maybe a
little bit in our discussionabout what that experience was

(26:55):
for you, what you felt yourselfinitiated into, and the process
of unmaking and remaking that isa kind of classical part of the
sort of boot camp experience andand I think embedded in the
mythology of the US military.You know, I think this is a book
in general about how what you'recalling posthuman war and I

(27:18):
appreciate that you began withyour ambivalence around that
term, or at least the way thatyou weren't necessarily wedded
to that term. I think that termfor you is to mark or note the
displacement of a set ofdualisms through which we have
come to understand the conductof war and are being kind of

(27:40):
upset by some of itscontemporary technologies and
the applications of thosetechnologies.
And I take the primary dualismin some sense to be the dualism
that defines war and politicsitself. And so that's why you
keep returning to class fitsthat gets then kind of rewritten

(28:01):
and revised by Foucault, but Ithink you're suggesting must be
rethought entirely in the wakeof what I think Warren is
rightly calling the Petraeusstrategy. I'm sort of interested
in the dualisms that remain, ormaybe even the dualisms that get
shored up in the context ofthose other dualisms that

(28:26):
collapse or at least fall intodisrepair. I was sort of reading
in the context of thinking aboutthe politics of gender and
sexuality in the present, how itrelates to the reorganization of
kind of military logics andapplications, a particular

(28:47):
politics of gender, sexualityand the family that has emerged
on the right and how it relatesto this kind of new conduct of
war. And in this regard, I havea number of different questions.
The first and I guess most basicis, have we ever been civilians?

(29:09):
The sort of very argument aboutthe de de civilianization of
civil society might be premisedon a certain understanding of
the construction of civilsociety that was itself premised
on a certain politics of gender,a certain politics of manhood,

(29:33):
that organized manhood intoparticular domains, and that
from a different perspective,perspective, it might appear
that we have never been fullycivilian in a number of ways, in
the ways that the citizen wasalways presumed to be a
potential soldier tasked withthe protection of the nation,

(29:56):
all of the potential sacrifices,but also honors and rewards that
come with that. But also the waythat the family itself, you
could say, in its hierarchy andits powers, were always premised
on the possibility of amasculine violence that
circulated, at least in animaginary or ideological way,

(30:20):
outside the home and made, insome sense, the home itself, the
family, as a kind of fortress.And the citizen, therefore, as
always, with respect to his ownhousehold, a kind of soldier.

(30:40):
And so, for me, it's no surprisethat we have the overturning of
Roe v.
Wade and new laws restrictingabortion at the very same moment
that we have a pretty radicalredefinition of our gun culture,
gun politics, and gun laws, inwhich I think there's some

(31:05):
relationship between the two.It's not just about the new
conduct of war, the posthumanwar, the citizen combatant, the
citizen who is also potentiallyfully armed with a military
arsenal, but also the way thatmasculinity gets forged in that

(31:28):
nexus. I sort of, throughout thebook, wanted you to actually
talk about the politics ofmanhood, both as it pertains to
what seems to be your ongoingresearch interest in sites of
what I might see as politicalmasculinity, where, like, the

(31:49):
politics of masculinity is,like, especially and that what
seems to me so interesting hereand might reflect that the
Petraeus strategy is the waythat women might be invited to
participate in it. That in somesense, the new technologies, you
know, the new neuroscienceinvites women in a kind of

(32:11):
gender neutral way into apolitics that they had been
historically excluded from. Andthen also the particular
anxieties that that provokes.
So the particular kinds ofpolitics that are responsive
precisely to the way that womencan now participate in a a kind

(32:32):
of political masculinity. I'malso interested in hearing you
say something in this regardabout the mobilization of
private citizens in, forinstance, Texas, SB eight, the
abortion law that activates aprivate citizenry as sort of
vigilantes on behalf of a sortof new politics of the state, a

(32:55):
kind of reproductive, aneonatalist politics of the
state, it seems to me, relayed,again, without being too
conspiratorial. And that's allready to anticipate another
comment I wanna make. But, like,without being too
conspiratorial, I'm sort ofinterested in how you see these
developments as the kind of homefront of, a kind of politics of

(33:19):
terrain. Maybe the final thingI'll raise is, for me, a
question that really comes up,if you'll allow me to point to a
specific passage in the book.
It's something that comes up onpage 69. You're in some sense
describing what you've said tothis point about the Gates
doctrine, the national securitystrategy, and as it relates to

(33:40):
The U. S. Census, a new sort oftechniques of of gathering
information about a citizenry,the Republican dream of a three
way harmony among theindividual, the public sphere,
and the the state is apparentlyended by the cruel awakening of
posthuman war. This crueltyexists because the assault on
civil rights has intensifiedaccording to a further

(34:02):
securitization of civil rights.
This is this marvelous story youtell us about actually the
weaponization of racialdifference to, in some sense,
defeat a civil rights projectand a racial justice project.
And so I do think we have to getback to that cynical
weaponization of a kind of rightwing multiculturalism to

(34:25):
precisely defeat a moreemancipatory politics. But the
thing I'm most interested in isthe reference here you make to
Kant. You quote Kant as saying,the state will invite their
philosophers to help silently,making a secret of it. Right?
He thus places emphasis on bothwhat is absent to transcendental

(34:46):
thought, as well as what cannotbe said about knowledge if
you're bent onintersubjectivity. Quite
interested in this idea of thesecret, what is unsaid, what
cannot be said. It seems to mealso has to be thought in
relationship to kind of newconspiracisms, new forms of

(35:08):
conspiracism, what we imaginecannot be said, the sort of
secrets, the secret alliancebetween the state and its
philosophers, that kind ofhidden conspiracy between the
state and the philosopher or thescholar that a figure like Gates

(35:29):
or Petraeus might be seen toembody. I'd like to hear you say
something about that, but Imight also want to connect it to
my thinking around the familybecause it's my own hunch that,
like, the family, the householditself has long been thought to

(35:50):
harbor a set of secrets, a kindof aristocratic alliance, women
often the kind of emblems of it.So Nancy Pelosi or Hillary
Clinton can very weirdly cometo, I think, stand in for this
conspiracy imagined to be kindof harbored somewhere in the

(36:15):
family.
The family panic in our presentis not just about, like, oh, my
gosh, the decay of thisinstitution, you know, the fall
of patriarchy. It's also aroundan anxiety around a conspiracy,
emblematized in women, in thepower of women, in the authority

(36:36):
of women, which has alwaysweirdly existed and flourished
in the family, even underpatriarchy. I don't know if you
feel this is quite a far, like,far afield from what you're
interested in, but these are theset of things that, were sort of
raised for me and thinking aboutthe family, the military, the

(36:58):
contemporary kind of conduct ofposthuman war. Thanks.

Warren Montag (37:02):
Can I just interject one quick thing?

Mike Hill (37:05):
Sure.

Warren Montag (37:05):
I was just thinking about, the well known
misogyny that's typical of thefar right today. I've I've
talked to a number of peopleabout the opening scene of the
film, American Sniper, and itinvolves, having to kill a woman
and a child walking down thestreet. And the woman, of

(37:27):
course, is wearing, basicallycovering her entire body. If you
look at testimonies and, and,statements by soldiers who
served in Iraq, the attitudetowards the women wearing that
kind of clothing that coverstheir bodies is resentment, that
they are denying the soldiersthe pleasure. And they're they
don't put it in that way, butthey're denying the soldiers the

(37:49):
pleasure of seeing them.
The expectation and the demandin a way is that these women
expose themselves to thesoldiers, which they refuse to
do. That's part of it. But theother side is the growing fear
that this clothing is in factused to hide, which it is in
that film, used to hide weapons,explosives. It's like, mean,

(38:12):
this goes back to the Battle ofAlgiers. It's something very
similar.
And so I I think the misogyny,that's one of many causes, but
the war and the specific placethat the war occurred, etcetera,
helped formulate the currentmisogyny in many ways. The
soldiers discussed with thehijab has nothing to do with

(38:32):
feminism. It's the demand thatyou should expose yourself to me
because I'm here, you know,helping you or something like
that. I mean, you could connectit to everything, Robin, that
you're just saying. It's part ofthat experience of, you know,
this sort of neo colonial war.

Mike Hill (38:48):
Mhmm. Mhmm. I really love the way this conversation
is turning out because what I'mhearing are some really useful
and powerful applications ofsome of the things that I tried
to to suss out about the currentmoment and and and some shifts
around how we understandprivacy, how we understand
publicity, and how weunderstand, political violence

(39:10):
and specifically, you know, war.And I think if we could answer
the question that Robinbrilliantly put on the table,
what is it that is sosignificant about this
concurrence of a preoccupationwith women and women's body?
Let's say Roe v Wade.
And we could also even add thehysteria over trans identity,

(39:33):
you know, leading in drag tochildren who were completely
innocent of the whole thing.This family panic, as as Robin
put it in such an eloquent way,and then how that is absolutely
an essential symptom of theweaponization of a sphere of
intimacy, call it the self, callit identity. We could call it

(39:56):
the private sphere or moreaccurately, and again, the
gender politics are essentialhere, the domestic sphere.
Clearly, when the the idea ofthe human being per se is being
invented and there is thepromise of this new
universality, it is auniversality of the absolute
few, not just in terms of thenumbers of bodies on the

(40:20):
colonial periphery that producethe wealth that made it possible
for the conjugal patriarchalfigurehead to have the
disposable income to eitherproperty to claim the home, to
create the domestic sphere,which is supposed to lie outside
of politics, outside of publicdiscourse, and especially

(40:42):
outside of the state. But thatthat alignment that you
described, once it comes undone,that may be a way to explain the
panic, the family panic.
Right? That in other words, whatI called autogenic war in this
text, right, is maybe one way toexplain the hypervigilance

(41:02):
around sexuality and especiallywomen's sexuality and women's
bodies and reproductive rights.This now becomes privacy turned
outward, but in this way that istotally subjected to vigilante
forms of justice, let's justsay, which is just another way
to talk about, not just another,is another way to talk about the

(41:23):
militarization of the humanbeing per se or the citizen soul
soldier. I think it might bepossible to synthesize some of
the other and thank you so muchfor for such a meticulous and
and and thoughtful way todescribe the book. In your
reading of it, I I really likedwhat you said about the heroes
and villains switching placessometimes.

(41:43):
And that fluidity maybe isexactly what happens in the fog
of war when you start to thinkin network centric terms rather
than in terms of strict dualismsand opposition. And when you
talk about dualisms in in thesecond part of your response,
the other part of Clausewitz,since he's come up before,
right, is his definition of waras politics by their means, or

(42:05):
he says a dualism carried out ona mass scale. Right? That is the
duality and dualisms is sort ofall part of an earlier paradigm
of war. Large armies, massmobilization, people in
uniforms, citizens at leasttheoretically, you know,
distinguished from enemycombatants.
But if we can just draw down onthat question of duality itself,

(42:29):
and maybe this is a way I canexplain about, something about
my experiences at Parris Island.The duality in play, at least as
I arrived, was at leastsuperficially one of researcher,
professor, let's hope thinker insome way, and clearly not
somebody who is going to be atleast, at the onset arriving

(42:52):
with a predisposition to reallydig what I'm about to do. You
know, it was I went there withsuspicion and cynicism and, you
know, all kinds of ofcarefulness about supping with
the devil or the devil dogs asthe crevice puts it. And yet,
you mentioned before someexperience with this, people
that you're close to or that youknow, part of the making of

(43:15):
marines is the unmaking of thecivilian. I experienced
something there, and I don'twanna go on too much about my
own experience, but it had todeal with that unmaking.
By the when I arrived, I wasdistant. When I left, I was
seduced to some degree. That is,the subject positions started to

(43:35):
get a little bit fluid. And thethinker, the outside of war, the
professor, we're distanced fromthat. I'm gonna analyze.
I'm gonna write about it. I'mnot a participant. I'm just an
observer. My object ofobservation suddenly moved into
a zone of proximity where Ibecame a little more intimate
with it than I might have liked.Same thing happened when I spent

(43:57):
time with the neofascists in anearlier work and with the
promise keepers.
That is there's a way in whichafter weeks of immersion, you
know, a kind of and and also thephysical duress and the
screaming and the sand fleas andthe early hours and the
exhaustion just wears you down.But as it wears you down,

(44:18):
something else gets built up.And I don't know what that is,
but it's a very seductive espritde corps, you know, sort of
feeling of collective purpose.It only seems possible outside
of civil society relations too.Because once you enter into that
sphere, you're subject to thecode of military justice.
That is to say, you have no moreconstitutional rights. You have

(44:40):
to be civilianized to becomethat kind of comrade in a way.
And so there was a really weirdsort of fluidity, I suppose,
where that duality question cameinto play just at least for me
at the experiential level. Theother term I mentioned, and
maybe this gets to the thequestion a little bit more
directly of of the what can't besaid, which is the last thing

(45:02):
that you mentioned. And this wasa term I thought about too when
Warren was talking, and thenI'll try to open shut up it up
for the floor a little bit.
And I mentioned this before,autogenic war. That is at the
same time you're trying tosecure something, the thing
you're trying to secure becomesmore insecure for your having
tried to secure it. You are acitizen, and for me to secure

(45:23):
you fully, I have to identifyyou as a suspect. You might also
be a terrorist. Everyone's apotential terrorist, remember,
under the new Patriot Act andall the data dumps that we're
subject to and all of the restof it.
Everybody's under surveillanceall the time. There's no no need
for a warrant, you know, oranything like that. Right?

(45:44):
That's what it can be autogenicwar. The distinction between war
and peace, the spatialdemarcations between battle
zones and zones of peace are nolonger there in any absolute
sense.
Right? And technology, at leastin some sense, enables that to
happen. The what goes unsaid, Ithink, has to do with that

(46:04):
question that you raised. And Ithink it is that takes us right
back to the question of genderand sexuality. Have we ever been
civilians?
I think the answer is absolutelynot. War has always been, as my
friend Chris Hedges says, theforce that gives us meaning if

(46:24):
The Us is the nation state thatpresumes to keep its citizens
outside war. The US has been atwar in one form or another since
its founding over 90% of itsexistence, and that excludes all
of the CIA backed assassinationsof democratically elected
leaders in countries we, quote,unquote, don't particularly

(46:47):
like. Right? So war has not onlybeen proximate, it's been
foundational.
To admit that, right, as part ofthe civil society story is to to
introduce that no. Another wayto introduce that no is to
recover what's been silenced,and that is the history of
political insurrection in thiscountry or in other countries.

(47:10):
That is to say within the fog ofwar when the people no longer
becomes a people in the sense ofmaintaining that individual
domestic sphere, civil society,state, coequivalence. But when
the people decide to do whatKant says you can't do, which is
not only to argue, but also todisobey, to take to the streets,

(47:31):
to engage in forms of civildisobedience, to break the law
on purpose. Right?
To become militant in the smallm sense of that word for
purposes of political change ofone form or another. It seems to
me that the state has alreadymade those assumptions. Let's
say, for example, the folks inGeorgia now protesting, Cop

(47:53):
City, and they're doing it in onenvironmental grounds. You were
kind enough to mention the nextinstallment of this book, which
will be on the weaponization ofecology. Whereas this was the
weaponization of the human, thenext will be the weaponization
of things.
They're now being, held underterrorism charges. Right? Not
for breaking the law in thistraditional sense of trespassing
or private property issues, thethings that when I was at

(48:15):
Humboldt State University, thetree sitters were incarcerated
for, which was, oh, you're onprivate property, you know,
protecting the redwoods and thatkind of thing. Well, now they're
called terrorists. They're gonnabe prosecuted accordingly, and
that's that's true on the foreof the right as well as the
left.
I mean, the state is is openingup, you know, a whole zone of
criminal prosecution to a moremilitarized, right,

(48:36):
insurrectionary state violencesort of way of thinking. And so
that ground seems to me alreadycleared by the Petraeus doctrine
or the Gates doctrine, therevolution of military affairs.
And this just seems to me, thedomestic application of that. So
I think that part of thatsilence of the history of a
radically feminist rethinking ofcivil society and especially the

(48:59):
private public split, and thenthe re the rethinking of that
split and the reintegration ofthis under the heading of a more
fully weaponized way of lookingat, at the world, that that is
also a silence that needs to berendered speakable. And so to
answer that question at the end,I think one way to do it is just
to connect with the earlierparts of of your comments, you

(49:22):
know, the slippage between theself and the object, the
slippage between the thinker andthe combatant, to me, is
absolutely connected to theslippage around family and
privacy and reproductive rightsand and gender identity, and it
is a motivator for that familypanic, you know, that that you
mentioned.
So I I'm so grateful, to Robinfor for putting that out there.

Robyn Marasco (49:45):
Maybe I could steer us in a somewhat different
direction and ask you to reflecton the ways that this book, I
think, invites us to rethink andreconsider what has come to be
diagnosed as the crisis in thehumanities. It's precisely the
scholar soldier who embodies thefusion of humanistic, sort of,

(50:10):
civilizing education and themost sophisticated conduct of
postmodern, late modern war. Onthe one hand, you could say this
is an old story. You know, I'mhoused in a political science
department. The story ofpolitical science in America's
long collaboration with themilitary industrial complex, the

(50:35):
state department, USintelligence.
You know, you could say, like,international relations itself
is sort of birthed, as anintelligence op. Right? So
there's a a few questions here.I mean, one question is, like,
what is new, you know, with thetechnologies that you want and

(50:55):
the science that you know, thebirth of sciences that you wanna
tell us have kind of shiftedthings in a substantial way. Not
only what's new, but in somesense, what the kind of popular
conversation around the crisisof the humanities actually masks
and obscures.

(51:16):
Right? So what kinds of silencesdoes it participate in? And I
think we're used to nowappreciating the way that that
talk obscures the role,especially of financialization
and finance capital in theuniversity. But I think you're
telling this much more elaboratekind of everything everywhere

(51:38):
story in which the universityreally sits right at the center
of it, and not just theuniversity as corporate engine,
right, or as investmentapparatus, but, like, actually
humanities. The sort ofhumanities talk in the
university is, like, right inthe thick of it.

(51:59):
And I think it invites us all tothink very differently about how
we've come almost reflexively,and I think this includes on the
left, reflexively to sort ofthink about and talk about the
crisis of the humanities, toimagine that they are in crisis
as opposed to what I think youdo quite well, which is to show

(52:22):
actually how hegemonic some ofour ideas, which we imagine to
be dissident ideas, are. Itturns out that the US military
has integrated the insights ofBadu maybe more powerfully than
most English departments andmost philosophy departments. And
that, to me, is a reallyremarkable thing, and it's

(52:44):
something that, you know, acertain kind of hand waving is
insufficient to address. Like, acertain kind of, like, what are
you guys doing is insufficient.It turns out that these people
might be the most serious,sophisticated, and advanced
readers of our traditions.

Mike Hill (53:06):
Yeah. I wanna ask Warren to talk about this too
because I know Warren has, for avery long time, worked on the
question of humanism andtheoretical antihumanism for a
long time, and I've alwaysadmired his work on that. But
the interesting thing that youbring up about trying to
imagine, you know, this is acrisis and then suggesting that,
well, the crisis of thehumanities may only be apparent

(53:29):
to people within the humanitieswho think that there was once
upon a time this very stable anddetached and disinterested and
humanist way of doing things,which many of us know not to be
true. I'll say that what you sayabout that you assimilation into
the epistemomilitary arts, ifyou wanna use that term that I
kick around in the book, isliterally true. I mean, that's

(53:51):
not just a theoreticalobservation.
I mean, they they do read theDuluth at West Point. I I was
there, conference in the onetime and, found myself just jaw
droppingly, you know, impressedby a young cadet's interest in
the idea of the Rizome as a wayto rethink the battlefield. And,
of course, this has been used ina lot of poststructural French

(54:14):
theory has been used veryexplicitly in a lot of
counterinsurgency theory, whichwe could we could point to. But
to circle back to the thehumanities as it currently
exists, I mean, I am as much ofa participant observer who feels
both attracted to and alienatedby the university humanity
system as I was when I was withthe US Marines. I'm still, I

(54:36):
suppose, in my own mind,somewhat of an imposter.
My father didn't go to collegeand graduated from high school.
Parents were very reluctant tosee me leave the construction
field and and and do somethingas audacious and maybe even
emasculating, to go back to yourearlier point, as getting a
degree in English. It's alwaysbeen a crisis situation of one
form or another, and I'msurprised every day that I'm

(54:58):
still here. The other thing I'msurprised about is the
conservatism that passes on theprogressive left. And I mean, in
terms of just, you know, hey.
We're losing majors. We'rebecoming defunded. It's time to
go back to the basics and reallydig in and protect the home
turf. And and what the basicsmean is to go back and protect a
canon, to think in reallytraditional terms of human

(55:21):
genius and imagination and anindependent autonomous
expression and, all of thosethings that are connected to the
old notion of the human being inthe humanities, which is a a
detachment really from politicalreality and and especially
political realities, you know,having to do with ways in which
the the global economy haschanged and then what it demands

(55:41):
of the university. It no longerneeds to produce the same kinds
of workers or afford theprivilege of non workers, if you
wanna think about humanitiesprofessors, that it used to.
Everything's become privatized.I mean, our our own university
no longer, has the SUNY acronymin the front because the state
has pretty much pulled out, youknow, as you as you know, Robin,

(56:03):
of the support of publicresearch universities and
everything here has become moreor less privatized. But my
disappointment in the responseto that has been a kind of
retrograde, it seems to me,reverse guard, you know, turning
back to some notion of thecreative and autonomous self or
some notion of the universitythat has a kind of pristinely

(56:24):
detached civic orientation as aalternatively, one that is
engaged with the kinds ofrealities that we've been
talking about. I'll say one morequick thing. It just and, again,
it comes out of my own positionin an English department, which
is not terribly comfortable as aperson who doesn't write a whole
lot on literature.
But we have a new college and anew major called the College of

(56:46):
Homeland Security andCybersecurity, and it's quickly
become the most powerful,important college on campus. It
went from a handful of majorswhen I was department chair, and
we had a thousand majors inEnglish at the time. We now have
about 280 something, and they'vegot about a thousand something.
So, you know, it's almostproportionally inverted in terms

(57:07):
of the popularity of of at leastthat humanities discipline, and
English was once one of the morepopular humanities discipline
to, you know, reorientation ofwork, of university work, right,
along the lines of the securityapparatus. And I go over there
sometimes too, and I'm a littlebit perverse in that way.
And knock on people's doors andtalk to them or go to TOCs and

(57:29):
try to raise my hand and say,will you be my friend? And they
say, no. It's you're in thehumanities. Go over there. You
don't belong in politics.
You know? Anyway, or I knowWarren wants to get to get in
there. I hope he doesn't even.

Warren Montag (57:41):
Well, yeah, I think if you look at English, I
think that it's absolutely rightto, point out that there was
never some unopposed traditionthat was very hegemonic for most
of the century until the evilFrench theory and, other things
happen. And people forget almostcompletely that the new
criticism emerged in reaction toMarxism. And the theory that you

(58:06):
look at a literary textcompletely separate from history
is a testimony to that. And, youknow, we see very similar things
happening today, like, surfacereading and other, maybe the new
formalism, etcetera. But I thinkit's also important to keep in
mind that every one of these is,is a field of contestation.
We don't have the good theoryand the bad theory because as

(58:29):
Robin was saying, even the goodtheory today can very quickly
become the bad theory. I mean,what I was thinking about as you
were speaking was about big dataapproaches to literature. And I,
I'm not in any way opposed tothem. And I think that in many
cases very, very interesting andvery helpful. But you could see
how easily that would be foldedinto an enlarged, portray a

(58:54):
strategy of creating informationthat is useful for purposes of
domination, etcetera.
And, you know, also in a certainway, depending on how it's used,
could be depoliticized and madeto appear completely innocent.
And I think that, as you weresaying, Robin, that Kantian
statement about philosophershelping but silently, secretly,

(59:18):
in English, it's typically thatway, that there's a not
everybody, but I mean, there's ageneralized denial on nearly
everyone's part of the politicaleffects, even if it has anything
to do with their intentions. Butit's the effects of what they're
doing, the history of whatthey're doing, and they don't
wanna think about that. Theycan't stand to bring in. I mean,

(59:40):
it's it's a taboo to even bringpolitics into it many ways.
And I think that that's whatAlthusser referred to as kind of
objective alliance betweentheories and positions that
otherwise are antithetical orantagonistic. But depending on
the situation, they can enterinto a kind of alliance that has
nothing to do with theirintentions, but their effects

(01:00:01):
that, serves the the verydynamics that we're talking
about, you know, in differentways. I mean, surface reading
says let's never talk aboutpolitics. It's crap, etcetera.
And then you have big data,which also, in the guise of a
kind of statistical rigor, alsoevacuates politics.
The big data theory, I think, isnot lost or it's not destined to

(01:00:25):
be something completelyreactionary, but it's very
difficult to create anawareness. People don't look at
the effects of their theirtheoretical work. And, you know,
that's part of the humanistictradition. It's not what I
wanted to do. It's not what Iintend to do, and therefore, I'm
innocent of the effects,etcetera.
And I think that's a it's a verybad habit, and it depoliticizes

(01:00:47):
things in a way that favors thepowers that be and the
tendencies that we're looking atnow. So I think that it's
absolutely true that there aremyths and most exercises in
literary theory or practice ofliterary theory just is silent
about it. It's silent about itsown contributions to what's
going on. And also, you know,maybe it is silent to itself in

(01:01:10):
that way that people don't seewhat's going on. I think it's
right, and I think it's veryimportant for us to raise those
issues.

Mike Hill (01:01:17):
Here's a just a quick point too, that gets us back to
the history of the of the human,which is the only reason for
using the post, just to indicatethat there's a temporality to
this and historical specificityto it. But there's a historical
specificity to the discipline ofEnglish as well. And this is all
worth pointing out, not justbecause it's concurrent with the
history of the ideals ofcivilian life and all of those

(01:01:41):
false oppositions specificallybetween domestic and public and
public and state and so on thatwe've been talking about. It
also plays a really importantrole in that. So if you think
about the history of literaturewith a capital l, right, which
of course before the eighteenthcentury would have meant
anything written down.
You were a good writer. You didliterature. You could be in a

(01:02:01):
lawyer or whatever else you youwere, a philosopher, etcetera.
The idea of, you know,literature, literary studies,
English departments, you know,as a specifically autonomous
realm of imaginative thinkingwhere you trans transcend, you
know, your material conditionsand all the things that that
you're supposed to forget andsilence when you are in that
realm of of spontaneous overflowof powerful feeling as as

(01:02:24):
Wordsworth says. Right?
It's very specific to thisperiod that we're talking about
and this way we're trying tothink about change. The first
literature departments, right,were colonial enterprises, India
for one, English and and andScotland was the other one,
right, where the idea was toinvent Englishness so that at
the periphery, there could be anidentification with the
subordinator. It was also aquestion of of scale, you know,

(01:02:48):
of bigness, of largeness. Soit's not just a data problem now
when we do surface reading andwe think about how to create
algorithms to search forpatterns that we might not see
and therefore and divorce itfrom politics. I mean, the scale
of print production in theeighteenth century was
absolutely massive compared toanything that had happened

(01:03:09):
before the lapse of thelicensing act in around sixteen
ninety something.
And so when you get thesetechnological revolutions like
steam driven press and cheap inkfrom India and cheap paper from
the The Americas or what haveyou, right, you get another
media revolution. And that mediarevolution is part and parcel of
the of the invention of thecivil society. And the way that

(01:03:29):
it's dealt with is in a reallyinteresting way because it's
revealing about the kinds offalse universalities that we're
trying to describe. Right? Thatis the ones that seem to be
superficially apparent, thehuman being per se, or how
wonderful that's supposed to bewhen we know that in reality
such a thing was invented by asmall minority of people to
benefit a small minority ofpeople.

(01:03:50):
Right? Even with thatuniversality of the few. It's
almost as if a kind of epistemicversion of that ontological
switcheroo took place inhistory, the discipline. So
you've got this massive amountof print, whether it's
broadsides or satirical balladsor subversive writing from
workers who are revoltingagainst the early forms of

(01:04:10):
industrialization. And what youdo is you invent a discipline to
create that universality of thefew.
That is, you take a fewrepresentative texts and you
say, this is now this thingwe're going to invent called the
canon. So the history of theEnglish literature doesn't begin
with Beowulf and then go forwardthrough Brontes de Brecht. You
know? It begins in theeighteenth century and goes

(01:04:32):
backwards and forwardssimultaneously, And it creates
this false sense of continuityand historical, sameness that
also values a small group oftexts a large amount. Okay?
Instead of valuing a large groupof texts a large amount. And so
if you were to do that, youwould be involved in some of the

(01:04:53):
archival recovery that wouldspeak to your other question
about women specifically and thehistory of the discipline in
writing. Right? I mean, look atthe traditional canon, and you
have the philosophy of science,which I've been reading a bunch
of lately. And so you can readand should, of course, you know,
Bacon and Newton and Hooke andall the rest.

(01:05:15):
But my god, there's some amazingstuff like Margaret Cavendish.
It's just brilliant things goingon in there with what's
happening in her work. These aresilent figures in the history of
the discipline. And so the waythat that media revolution was
dealt with was through that samekind of sleight of hand, you
know, a reduction and expansion.Reduce the number of texts.

(01:05:37):
We'll pretend it expands out toeverybody. But the everybody is
an absolutely empty, idealizedzone of, you know, delusion, I
suppose you could say. But youwould have to be thinking about
the opposite of delusion asother than that which is
superficially there. In otherwords, you'd have to look with
the within those silences forwhat's repressed and what what

(01:05:59):
is spoken about allusively, inthe same way that that political
violence within the history ofcivil society is there
allusively, you know, silencedby the official histories, that
we write. But one other quickthing, I'm reading a bunch of,
climate change science fictionright now, and I'm trying to
tinker with this idea because somuch of them are about war.

(01:06:20):
Right? I mean, so much of themare about it's like ecological
revenge against the pollutersand a lot of this stuff. At war,
there's usually these insurgentgroups like the children of Cali
from India in the Kim StanleyRobinson novel. But what I'm
noticing, and I'm teaching thisclass in climate change science
fiction, and this goes back evento Octavia Butler's parable of

(01:06:40):
the sower, which is aninsurgence text, you know, lots
of environmental insurgencytexts. And it may just be a
coincidence, but almost all ofthe, go back to the hero villain
thing, the heroes are almost allwomen.
In that, Vander Darian series,I'm noticing it in, you know, as
I just said, the the Robinsonthing. There just seems to be

(01:07:01):
with these more militantlyactivated ecological revenge
texts where women are playingthis really important role. And
I don't know if you've comeacross that or if you've seen
that at all.

Robyn Marasco (01:07:13):
Well, I'm I'm thinking about some film
examples where, you know, youcould think about, like,
Terminator two as, like, thebeginning of of this. Now what's
interesting there is you get thewoman who I think has a critique
of the war apparatus, which is,like, you men, all you know how

(01:07:34):
to do is make war. Right?Whereas I give life. So it's
like the woman as, like, fertilebearer of life juxtaposed
against, you know, the maledestroyer of life.
But, of course, like, what wasso riveting about that film was

(01:07:54):
the way that she did it in this,like, martial, militarized
aesthetic. It was all about, youknow, her essentially, like,
combat training as a prisonerand her sort of readiness for
war. So I'm constantly drawnback to that film as, like, a

(01:08:16):
transitional film, you know,that, like, really opens to this
kind of scrambling of gender.You could say this like post
Title IX world where women canbe soldiers, and, you know,
where the Citadel is beingreorganized on the basis of a

(01:08:40):
claim to legal equality. Right?
So, like, the way that that thennot only impacts the military,
but, like, impacts culture atthe time. So we get Terminator
two and we get GI Jane. I mean,what's striking about Terminator
two is that it's so wrapped upin an environmental, ecological
catastrophe as well. Then theother thing that you're making

(01:09:03):
me think is the way war hascolonized the imagination. This
became really clear for me inthe neuroscience chapter.
Like, part of it really is aboutthe activation of the brain as
terrain. But the flip side of itseemed to be also about, like,
the absence of other ways of,like, thinking about what this

(01:09:30):
discovery could be. In somesense, the colonization of like
a kind of martial war project onthe human sciences. So that
there's this like really noother way that we can talk about
the brain except in this. Andthat for me is the other part of

(01:09:50):
the story here in the context ofenvironmental crisis and climate
change.
It's like part of the task isthe imaginary task. Like, what
will the future be? And thenit's like, well, war has really
just come in and colonized thatwhole domain, which is, like,
the domain of politicalimagination. This is, I think, a

(01:10:12):
story about Hollywood. It's astory about cinema.
It's a story about the actualconduct of war, but like your
book, I think also wants to likesit in that place, which is the
place where not only our ways ofthinking, but our modes of
imagination get colonized bythis particular discursive

(01:10:40):
project.

Mike Hill (01:10:42):
Yeah. You know, there's a epigram somewhere in
the book that says, you mightnot be interested in war, but
war is interested in you. And,there is a sense in which we're
using all familiar terminterpolated within a war
imaginary without necessarilyknowing it. But the interesting
part of what you just said thatbrings me beyond that is the way

(01:11:03):
in which alternative kinds ofpropositions might be held
forth. I mean, what I often hearfrom people is, oh, man.
This is so bleak, and everythingis war, and war is everywhere.
Well, even thinking is war now.And, man, there's just no way
out. The hell with it. Liquor'scheaper.

(01:11:23):
You know? So, I mean, you know,it just becomes a kind of a
cynical spin. I really regretthat writing that led to that
meeting, I suppose. You couldsay because, you know, I mean, I
think the ecological part of itis perhaps maybe a possibility
for a flip side that doesn'tgive up on net centrism, that
doesn't give up on collectivistways of thinking about identity

(01:11:47):
fluidity, but it would have tobe, by definition, beyond the
human. That's the premise of onposthuman war.
But maybe it it also is aninvitation to tap into other
forms of agency that arenonhuman, but are somehow also
political in ways we haven'tquite thought through.
Certainly, they would not becommodified. They would have to

(01:12:08):
absolutely not be commodifiedforms of nonhuman agency. That
would be, by definition, areduction in relationality.
Right?
That that has to do with erasingand making absence, you know,
those big important realrelations that we call labor.
But even beyond that, maybe tothink about something that once
again, to give it away a littlebit, the next book, the the

(01:12:29):
military is already doing. It'sit was in around 02/2010 that
they decided in the midst of allof the climate science denial
that they were going to beginwar gaming, a world enriched
environmental degradation waswhat they call a force
multiplier. When culture becamea force multiplier and identity

(01:12:50):
infiltration and and ontologicaloperational superiority became a
thing that they were interested,they were already two or three
steps ahead of the the game, andthat's where the next question
of terrain leads. It's not thetraining of the human being per
se, but something like thehumanization of terrain, but
without the human being per se.

(01:13:11):
They're really thinking in waysthat Warren already pointed out
are incredibly dangerous interms of the way they fail
about, you know, the moment atwhich it's going to be really
easy to move battleships acrossthe North Pole. Right? Because
it won't be ice getting in theway. You know? And and things
like that.
And, you know, GE was cloudseeding here in the Hudson

(01:13:34):
Valley in the nineteen fifties.There's a whole history of
environmental modification goingback to trying to flood out the
Ho Chi Minh Trail, to Nixonwanting to bomb the dams, to
flood out, you know, theinsurgency, and that was
rendered at least theoreticallyillegal by the UN in the late

(01:13:54):
seventies, early eighties. Butthat was environmental
modification by design. In otherwords, you stick enough iodine
in the air or whatever it wasthey were putting to try to make
it rain, and that was thoughtabout as a new military weapon.
The idea was to be able tocreate artificial rain clouds to
be able to, you know, producebad weather for your combatants.
It's not just environmentalmodification by design, which

(01:14:15):
the UN has explicitly said isnot allowable for what that's
worth, but it's environmentalmodification by default. We've
talked a long time. I don'tknow. Yeah. I just wanna thank
you guys again so much.
I appreciate it even more afterhearing what you all had to say,
and relearned a lot from yourcomments, both of you.

Narrator (01:14:35):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book onPosthuman War, Computation and
Military Violence is availablefrom University of Minnesota
Press. Minnesota Press. Thankyou for listening.