Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

Right, but I'm asking why, which is what I meant by the "democratic demand" - what is it about democracy that censors warfare?

You say that democracy demands that "everything is awesome" geopolitically, and I wonder why. Is it because democracy has no room for heroes, ideologically speaking - i.e. that democratic subjects can't, or shouldn't, be heroic, and so warfare (as breeding grounds for heroism) must be censored? Or is it because democratic values conflict with those of warfare? Obviously these two possibilities could overlap; and there could certainly be more than two possibilities.

 

[tagradh]

I'm struggling to see how someone can argue that warfare is no longer in the public eye. It's all over the internet, TV and the papers. People are better positioned to view it than they've ever been. That many countries increasingly rely upon special forces doesn't alter this fact and I don't buy the argument that having smaller conventional forces than we did 50 years ago makes a country like the UK significantly less safe. Were the UK's standing army twice its current size, it'd make next to no difference to the level of threat the UK faces from extremists. The security services of a 'liberal "equalist" democracy' like the UK today are massively superior to those we had in the past. That's the kind of thing that makes a difference.

 

[Einherjar86]

I was planning on getting to that point eventually. I'm also curious about the publicity, or lack thereof, of warfare. I mean, the Gulf War was arguably the most televised war ever, although that was over twenty years ago now.

Since then, however, I also feel that coverage of overseas warfare has expanded, especially considering (as you say) the rise of the internet.

 

[Dak]

@tagradh: Warfare may be more "visible", but it's far more distant, and increasingly so.

Right, but I'm asking why, which is what I meant by the "democratic demand" - what is it about democracy that censors warfare?

You say that democracy demands that "everything is awesome" geopolitically, and I wonder why. Is it because democracy has no room for heroes, ideologically speaking - i.e. that democratic subjects can't, or shouldn't, be heroic, and so warfare (as breeding grounds for heroism) must be censored? Or is it because democratic values conflict with those of warfare? Obviously these two possibilities could overlap; and there could certainly be more than two possibilities.

The article is saying both I think, but it's not democracy per se. Democracy as a desirable form of political organization is supported philosophically by the raising of Equality as the summum bonum. When a culture is oriented in such a way, it creates problems for the open promulgation of warfare, as well as for performances in the extreme. Warfare must be something done by Others, or kept out of site (It's no longer war, but "operations", "conflicts", etc. We no longer put "boots on the ground" even if we do, secret drone warfare, supporting rebels via monetary and technology transfer and "advisors", etc). Extreme performances/performers must be presented as contrived "programming" (media stars), or presented in such a way so that the performer is really just "one of us, and not really that different". Simone Biles might be 10000x better at gymnastics than [you] could ever be (especially with your sedentary lifestyle and all) due to a unique combination of work ethic and physical makeup, but the important thing is that she's just a young girl crushing just like you on the same guy you crush on.

 

[tagradh]

@tagradh: Warfare may be more "visible", but it's far more distant, and increasingly so.

What exactly do you mean by distant? And which countries are you referring to? Whether you're using the word literally or more figuratively the distance from warfare of various Western countries (compare, say, the US, the UK, Germany, Croatia and Ukraine) varies greatly.

 

[Dak]

What exactly do you mean by distant? And which countries are you referring to? Whether you're using the word literally or more figuratively the distance from warfare of various Western countries (compare, say, the US, the UK, Germany, Croatia and Ukraine) varies greatly.

Figuratively.

 

[tagradh]

Figuratively.

Then how far back do we have to go to find a time where war wasn't so distant? Unless we count The Troubles, the last time any meaningful percentage of people in the UK were really exposed to war (as in knowing soldiers, casualties, etc.) was WW2. For the US I guess it would be Vietnam. But given the way everyone is hooked up to the internet now I'd have thought more people have exposure to the realities of the past two Gulf Wars than they did to Vietnam or The Falklands War.

I guess I could buy some of the argument if it focused on countries like Germany and Japan as opposed to all 'western liberal democracies'. I don't think it holds up with regards to the US or the UK though.

 

[Dak]

Then how far back do we have to go to find a time where war wasn't so distant? Unless we count The Troubles, the last time any meaningful percentage of people in the UK were really exposed to war (as in knowing soldiers, casualties, etc.) was WW2. For the US I guess it would be Vietnam. But given the way everyone is hooked up to the internet now I'd have thought more people have exposure to the realities of the past two Gulf Wars than they did to Vietnam or The Falklands War.

I guess I could buy some of the argument if it focused on countries like Germany and Japan as opposed to all 'western liberal democracies'. I don't think it holds up with regards to the US or the UK though.

Potentialities of exposure doesn't make something less Other, and I see more of an exponential curve rather than a linear progression as well. From the US perspective Vietnam involved far, far more troops than Desert Storm/Desert Shield ,and this desert "conflict" potentially distinguishes the point where Western warfighting tilted towards remote viewing and "Smart" weapons. The 90s were full of "peace missions" and "humanitarian missions". The Global War on Terror saw a lot of boots on the ground, but overall is known as a "Drone War", and the drones remain even after the boots left. Much of the manpower in the GWoT was not involved in any "combat" so-to-speak anyway. As the public grew weary of even a relatively minimal amount of "boots on the ground", the "conflicts" shift to funded local fighters with both manned and unmanned air support.

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the crux of what Dak is attempting to get at is that though war may technically be more visually accessible to people, there's a wall of apathy in terms of the public's disposition towards it. People may see it in passing on CNN, but how much do they care? They see it, but do they see it in a manner that makes them notice, or impacts them, or makes them say, "Hey, what's going on?", "What's this?", etc. I could probably articulate this in more lucid terms, but I just want to see whether this is Dak's position or not, nothing more or less really.

 

[Dak]

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the crux of what Dak is attempting to get at is that though war may technically be more visually accessible to people, there's a wall of apathy in terms of the public's disposition towards it. People may see it in passing on CNN, but how much do they care? They see it, but do they see it in a manner that makes them notice, or impacts them, or makes them say, "Hey, what's going on?", "What's this?", etc. I could probably articulate this in more lucid terms, but I just want to see whether this is Dak's position or not, nothing more or less really.

Sort of. I'm not sure apathy is the right word though, unless purely on grounds of "activism" maybe. There's plenty of people with an opinion at least on warfare. Maybe this example might capture what I'm talking about. If it were suddenly thrown in people's faces that the DoD has rooms worth of planning documents for potential operations against a variety of countries and scenarios, would the reaction within the US population or by allied populations (as it pertains to NATO operations against Russia etc) be positive or negative?

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

Sort of. I'm not sure apathy is the right word though, unless purely on grounds of "activism" maybe. There's plenty of people with an opinion at least on warfare. Maybe this example might capture what I'm talking about. If it were suddenly thrown in people's faces that the DoD has rooms worth of planning documents for potential operations against a variety of countries and scenarios, would the reaction within the US population or by allied populations (as it pertains to NATO operations against Russia etc) be positive or negative?

I see. I dunno, seeing as that's entirely hypothetical, it'd be hard to answer. Like a lot of things that have transpired in this Internet age, I'd assume people would simply express a fervent and extensive outpouring of indignance online for a while, but ultimately never act upon it. Like the NSA or even the DNC leaks. Especially the professional campus activist fags, and all the "AMERICA IS THE IMPERIALISTIC PERSONIFICATION OF SATAN" fruits. Although the foreign nations the plans are levied against might feel and react in a little more of an actionable and reactive way.

 

[Dak]

But why should anyone be indignant or potentially even surprised about such a simple and necessary matter of fact?

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

But why should anyone be indignant or potentially even surprised about such a simple and necessary matter of fact?

It beats me, but in my estimation, it's surely something that would flare nostrils and tempers in all likelihood. Anyone who knows anything about the way a global military power, whether it be France, America, Russia, the UK or another has to operate to secure and maintain its power wouldn't be shocked by it I don't think. Sadly, irrespective of this, I feel people oft go in search of outrage, even, or perhaps particularly where they know to expect it.

 

[CiG]

Today we're inundated with stories, entertainment and other distractions due to advancement in media tech (which leads to the 'make a comment online and move on' phenomenon that HP alludes to), in the past warfare news was the talk of the town and because we had less media distractions it really was quite central to the common interest and conversation, go even further back and the draft deepens people's observation of warfare because it meant people had family likely serving.

Simply put, we're closer today to warfare in terms of ability to observe, but we're more distant due to scattered interests, exemption of mandatory military service and general media distraction.

 

[H.P. Lovecraft]

Splendidly proffered. I'd add that the advancement of military technology is what has made warfare seem so physically distant from the big first world nations who can afford it like Britain, America, China, (yes, I know China is technically second world, but you get it) etc. Plus warfare is on a general statistical decline anyhow due to increasing worldwide tech and economic prosperity. It presented more of an immediate danger to even the great nations and empires in the days of yore. Now, Obama or Putin or Xi Jingping can just press a button and whatever threat may be goes kablooey.

 

[Einherjar86]

I find most of this agreeable, especially CIG's comments on the modern media.

A lot of this has been previously illuminated by leftist critics such as Baudrillard (many of whom probably wouldn't describe themselves as democrats). In a chapter on Apocalypse Now from his book Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes that "it is necessary for us to believe in this:

the war in Vietnam "in itself" perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm, which completes the mass spectacle of this war.

No real distance, no critical sense, no desire for "raising consciousness" in relation to the war: and in a sense this is the brutal quality of this film - not being rotten with the moral psychology of war.

Baudrillard gets at the central premise back in 1981, at least from the perspective that CIG helpfully highlights. But he isn't suggesting that the Vietnam War (or the Gulf War, as he will write a little more than a decade later) actually didn't happen - he's suggesting that in the era of late modernity, late-20thc techno-globalism (i.e. democratic neoliberalism), mass media and the spectacle of film permit its audiences the fantasy of believing that it somehow never happened, that they can view the film, or observe it, and yet somehow isolate themselves from its visceral occurrence.

This is also a version of what Žižek gets at when he writes that the 9/11 attacks were available to most people - to a "popular audience," so to speak - as a film spectacle. We watched the towers fall down and thought: "This is like something out of a movie."

Thomas Pynchon also toys with a similar notion in Gravity's Rainbow when he imagines the entirety of World War Two as a film at the end of the novel - readers discover that they have in fact been sitting in the theater watching a movie unfold.

So, tl;dr, I agree with CIG that modern media and film play a big role in the distance we (or many of us) experience from war.

 

[Dak]

Excellent points, and I think supportive of the PJMedia piece, even if "Democracy qua Democracy" is a singular culprit.

 

[Einherjar86]

Bakker is a systems theorist, even if he doesn't want to admit it...

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/myth-as-meth/

A post-intentional theory of meaning focuses on the continuity of semantic practices and nature, and views any theoretical perspective entailing the discontinuity of those practices and nature as spurious artifacts of the application of heuristic modes of cognition to theoretical issues. A post-intentional theory of meaning, in other worlds,views culture as a natural phenomenon, and not some arcane artifact of something empirically inexplicable. Signification is wholly material on this account, with all the messiness that comes with it.

Cognitive systems optimize effectiveness by reaching out only as far into nature as they need to. If they can solve distal systems via proximal signals possessing reliable systematic relationships to those systems, they will do so. Humans, like all other species possessing nervous systems, are shallow information consumers in what might be calleddeep information environments.

 

[Dak]

I think when it comes to intersectionality between our respective interests, this might hit right in the center:

https://aeon.co/essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together

Watts via Land.

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, I read this back when Aeon originally published it. Really good piece. I feel like Watts possesses an admirable mixture of scientific practicality and respect for the experience of subjectivity.