We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  My Green Machine 2: Clearly technology has something to do with this. We didn’t transform ex nihilo, nor were we shaped from within by some transcendental Idea. What marks modernity (and any prefix positing subsequent epochs) is the change in how we interact with our world: namely, our technology. Yet we must remember that “Technology is . . . no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up for us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.”10 What is the truth of technology? For Marx, it shows us the objectified social relations between humans, the way that we produce ourselves.11 For Heidegger, it is an enframing that separates man from his essence.12 For me, in this investigation and intervention, technology is the war machine—both the quasi-subjects who wield it and the quasi-objects who compose it. For the posthuman soldier, “Technology is our uniform.”13

  War: Beyond the gate, the roads were already thick with traffic and smog. The chaos out there, the crazy fucking hadji writing, lawless traffic, hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death all pressed like a hot wind, and as I stood smoking, waiting for the mission to start, I was suddenly filled with a deep sense of strength and power, of fortitude and righteous fury. I was overtaken by a sudden joy at being a soldier, feeling the charge in my fingertips and neck, so unbelievably just and good to have my rifle in my hands, ten pounds of killer steel, resplendent in the promise of three-round burst. Those fuckers out there, the victims, the insurgents and snipers and fedayeen, the hadjis in their man-dresses and turbans and rags—it might be their land and their city but I was a walking death star. We had full-auto SAWs and two .50 cals, whose rounds could blow chunks out of concrete. We had grenades and rifles and more ammo than we knew what to do with. We had knives and ceramic armored plates and steely, murderous hearts. We had handheld satellite-linked computers and ciphered radios and behind us the whole heaving Empire. We were storm troopers, force made flesh, gods in metal. I ran my palm over the blued metal receiver of my rifle, wanting death to flow from my eyes like magic. This is what I was born to do, I thought, the apotheosis of life itself, the glory and the power.

  Route Map: Our mission is to explore phenomenologically and theoretically the fraught and complex question of the cyborg animal man, the posthuman, through what seems to be the most intense enactment of this all-too-contemporary crisis: modern industrial war. Donna Haraway called modern war “a cyborg orgy,” and Alphonso Lingis recently argued that in our “postindustrial social economy,” the soldier has become “the sole genuine hero, an individual integrally subordinated to order and utility, but at the same time superhuman in the savage and exuberant release of excess energies against a demonic enemy.”14 Both of these contemporary thinkers echo the thoughts of an earlier writer best known for his memoir of World War I: Ernst Jünger. Russell Berman writes in his preface to Jünger’s On Pain that “Jünger’s speculation on the intrusive expansion of technology into the realm of the body clearly anticipates the extensive recent discussion of the blurring between humans and machines.”15 Furthermore, Wolf Kittler suggests “that what Jünger calls ‘organic construction’ comes uncannily close to the man-machine symbiosis which is the basic assumption of cybernetics, the science that studies Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . . .”16 As Jünger himself noted in 1934, “The growing objectification of the individual and its formations seen today is not new.”17

  New or not, our story happens in the present, even if the first “posthumans” were born almost a century past. Our hero is the cyborg soldier. Our setting is Baghdad, Iraq. Our subject is the experience of men at war.

  WARNO: First, war is normal. As the anthropologist Paul Richards notes in his study of contemporary war, we must take as our starting point “an assumption that may at first seem paradoxical—that to understand war we must first deny it special status. War, like peace, is organized by social agents.”18 In her brief but important book on photography and war, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag critiques our contemporary “conviction that war is an aberration . . . That peace is the norm.” She asserts rather that throughout history, “War has been the norm and peace the exception.”19 According to the bioarchaeologist Phillip Walker, “As far as we know, there are no forms of social organization, modes of production, or environmental settings that remain free from interpersonal violence for long.”20 We must begin by taking war as something as essential to humans as any other social activity found in our long historical and prehistorical record. The first clear evidence of mass human violence is almost ten thousand years old; the first evidence of the end of war has yet to be seen.21

  It is also important to resist interpretations of the experience of war that rely too heavily on narratives of trauma and recovery. Much contemporary discussion of war seems to focus on its traumatic aspects, but in many ways this serves only to pathologize and obscure the subject. As Allen Feldman has pointed out, “trauma” itself is a political, historical, and aesthetic concept that often serves to “archaize violence, commodify the past, isolate the ‘traumatized’ from peer communities, and promote short-term cathartic-empathic identification,” and it also risks inducing the “repression of memory” and “compulsive repetition.”22 Relying too heavily on a hermeneutics of trauma not only marginalizes a central human experience and runs the risks Feldman points out, but also betrays the evidence of history. Yuval Noah Harari has worked to historicize the “disillusionment narrative” so central to our understanding of war since 1914 by comparing it with earlier memoirs: “As the case of Renaissance military memoirists clearly indicates, there can be warriors and warrior castes that are intimately familiar with war and all its horrors, yet see it as an acceptable and even a desirable vocation. It all depends on people’s worldview—not on war’s ‘true face.’”23 Glenn Gray puts the problem succinctly: “There are soldiers in the Anglo-Saxon world and perhaps many more in Teutonic and Slavic lands . . . for whom death is a fulfillment. Unless we try to understand the motivation for this kind of soldier, we can make no claim to grasping the full nature of Homo furens.”24

  Normalizing war doesn’t solve all our problems, however, because for most Westerners, war is something they’ve never seen or heard or felt except through a screen. As Sontag puts it:

  “We”—this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put time under fire . . . stubbornly feels. And they are right.25

  Journalists, anthropologists, and participant-observers like myself must face what Ivana Maček identifies as “one of the major methodological problems of the anthropology of war, namely, how to communicate experiences of war, or how to express the existential threat and pain . . .”26 We must work toward understanding war in all its complexity, and we must meet this complexity with all our resources. “This demands a constant sociocultural-emotional engagement from everyone in contact with a war,” writes Maček. “The process calls upon all our creativity to find new ways of understanding each other, new ways of communicating the most important aspects of our experiences.”27

  War has its own logic, a logos we must be willing to hear, a logos characterized by, among other things, fragmentation and transformation.

  Shark Attack: A trailerful of nervous boys sweating under the weight of bags of gear, we flinch in the glare of the opened door and under the howls of sergeants wobble into light—”Doubletime, private!”—two minutes to heave to the drill pad while the sergeants circle and close like sharks—“Too slow! You’re dead, private. You’re dead now!”—the rims of their smokeybears plunge into your face like the razored halos of red devils, their voices hard and loud, and
when you flinch, move, stumble, mutter, blink—Wham!—there’s a fucker screaming in your eyeball like you just raped his mom, and thus our first lesson: movement under fire. In just a handful of the longest hours of my life, mostly spent in pain, we began the sixty-three-day transformation from dirtbags into soldiers. From a gaggle of individuals each doing his own thing, from a motley blend of black, white, brown, Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, city, and country, we’d learn to think, move, and speak as a unit—and by the time we would finally cross the stage in our graduation ceremony, we would have learned to believe deeply in our mechanization. Humming in our sense of accomplishment, each of us tin soldiers would know we’d done something bold and honorable to be stamped and molded so fiercely, to be made into tools of the big green machine.28

  Homo furens: There are many transformations in war. One comes before, transforming a man into a soldier; another comes after, turning a killer back into a citizen. One, on the field of battle, changes a soldier into a fighter: “The soldier who has yielded himself to the fortunes of war . . . is no longer what he was. He becomes in some sense a fighter, whether he wills it or not . . . He must surrender in a measure to the will of others and to superior force. In a real sense he becomes a fighting man, a Homo furens.”29 Another change, into what Jonathan Shay calls the berserk state, turns men into irrational beasts and invincible gods, strewing red-eyed carnage.30 As Jünger describes it, “The fighter, who sees a bloody mist in front of his eyes as he attacks, doesn’t want prisoners; he wants to kill.”31 Transformation is the key to unlocking the enigma of war. Hiding in occupied France in 1940, Simone Weil wrote this in her brilliant study of our oldest war story:

  Herein lies the last secret of war, a secret revealed by the Iliad in its similes, which liken the warriors either to fire, flood, wind, wild beasts, or God knows what blind cause of disaster, or else to frightened animals, trees, water, sand, to anything in nature that is set in motion by the violence of external forces . . . The art of war is simply the art of producing such transformations, and its equipment, its processes, even the casualties it inflicts on the enemy, are only means directed toward this end—its true object is the warrior’s soul.32

  Dogs of War: At first, Basic Training is like living in a kennel. It’s like living in a kennel and knowing it, being conscious of descending to the level of brute animal being—higher brain functions like imagination, thought, empathy, and analysis all shut down. The most you can handle is taking a thirty-inch step, putting one foot in front of the other, moving your feet the way you’re supposed to, and you’re fucking that up too and they’re on you and guess what, you’re doing pushups again. You cannot succeed. You cannot escape. You cannot be free from the noise and hate and constant surveillance. Punished as a group for individual infractions, you learn to watch the others and bully them just like the drill sergeants do—at first to keep your ass from having to push, then later just because you can, because after getting shit on all day, it feels good to fuck with somebody smaller than you. A rough and ready hierarchy forms: the toughest, meanest, and quickest at the top, the weak, compassionate, and slow bullied by all.

  Animal Man: “It is a general principle . . . ,” wrote Freud in his celebrated debate with Einstein on the question of war, “that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men have no business to exclude themselves.”33 What would it mean to consider man an animal, and to ask if the roots of war lie in our animal being?34 The primatologist and anthropologist Richard Wrangham has considered this question by looking at the way chimpanzees, unprovoked, form raiding parties to attack and kill outnumbered male chimpanzees in other troops. He presents a convincing adaptive explanation for why chimpanzees engage in lethal group raids, his “imbalance-of-power hypothesis,” which explains that unprovoked, calculated aggression has been selected for as a trait conducive to both individual and group reproductive success.35 Wrangham uses the imbalance-of-power hypothesis to back up the “chimpanzee violence hypothesis,” which “proposes that human warfare is built on pre-human tendencies.”36

  “A combination of three points . . .” Wrangham writes, “suggests that selection has favored unprovoked intergroup violence in human males: the prevalence of human war raiding, the similarities of chimpanzee and human lethal raiding, and the ability of the imbalance-of-power hypothesis to explain the mammalian distribution of lethal violence.”37 His conclusion implies that violence, both individual and organized, is as much a biological part of human life as are sex and eating, that aggression and the drive for dominance are neither vestigial atavisms nor social maladaptations but rather species traits, and that we have little reason to hope that our long history of war and murder might someday come to end.38

  In fact, what seems to have occurred is not an abatement of violence but its intensification and increase through industrialization, from the meat-grinding cannons, Maxims, and wire of World War I to the apocalyptic annihilation held in reserve in ballistic-missile subs currently prowling lightless depths under Arctic ice. The technological revolution of mass industrialization changed warfare as radically as it has the rest of the world, and it was in the trenches of World War I that this change was seen in its most intense, dramatic, and horrific form. “Under the conditions of technological warfare,” writes Hüppauf, “the destructive elements of modernity were condensed to the extreme and forcefully imprinted on the modern mind.”39

  Steel Helmet: “He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as the denizen of a new and far harsher world . . . The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us . . . Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that you need for fighting.”40

  Warrior Ethos: What kind of man is needed for fighting? An animal become a machine. How do we create such a thing? Through training, institutionalization, the bureaucratization and mechanization of warfare, the objectification of man and his indoctrination through pain: “One immediately notices by every kind of rigorous training how the imposition of firm and impersonal rules and regulations is reflected in the hardening of the face.”41 This is a physical, mental, and even narrative process. It is also a moral process: “The vast and distant military and civilian structure that provides a modern soldier with his orders, arms, ammunition, food, water, information, training, and fire support is ultimately a moral structure, a fiduciary, a trustee holding the life and safety of that soldier.”42 It is, finally, a process that the soldier must learn to accept, internalize, and even come to love. “In highly mechanized armies,” writes Gray, “many a soldier gains a certain fulfillment in serving the machine with which he is entrusted.”43 The soldier learns, in training and in battle, to objectify the world, himself, and others. He learns to repeat after the drill sergeants: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” He learns “to serve a different deity,” a deity concerned “with death and not life, destruction and not construction.”44 He learns to love war, to take pleasure in it, to “delight in destruction,” and to master pain.45 He learns the love of discipline and violence.

  Master of Discipline: His name was Drill Sergeant Krugman. He was a sniper in the light infantry in Alaska, and we hated him with fierce, fierce ardor. He was the ultimate authoritarian, and I still think back fondly sometimes to our first day there, his big black boots shining in my face as he walked up and down the line, the burn in my arms and chest and hips, the puddle of sweat on the floor under my chin. “Down,” he said, and we lowered ourselves to the level of his rippled boot soles. “Up,” he said, and we pushed up past the toe gleaming like a Vulcan mirror, past the ankle where the boot narrowed and up the leather along
the leg where it widened, the laces taut and strong, the hide smooth, to the top of the boot where the snugly bloused trousers slid into the leather like a hand inside a glove. “Three-five, Drill Sergeant,” we gasped, weak and broken. We did not deserve his love. “Down,” he said, and down we went. He smoked us all day long.

  The Art of Pain: “Tell me your relation to pain,” writes Jünger, “and I will tell you who you are!”46 Indeed, not only are we “who we are” in our relation to pain, but in our history and knowledge of it; we are who we are in our scars. “The constitution of memory through coercion and the spectacle of pain is the constitution of the political subject . . .” writes Feldman. “For Nietzsche, as later for Foucault, the body marked by discipline and punition serves as an exemplary site for the coming together of political forces and constitutes a formation of domination, a place where power is ordered and a topos where that ordering attains a certain visibility . . .”47

  If, as Elaine Scarry asserts, “War is relentless for taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body,” then learning the art of war is learning the art of pain.48 According to Jünger,

  The heroic and cultic world presents an entirely different relation to pain than does the world of sensitivity. While in the latter . . . it is a matter of marginalizing pain and sheltering life from it, in the former the point is to integrate pain and organize life in such a way that one is always armed against it . . . Indeed, discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly-ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike-heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel. In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that at any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling. The central question concerning the rank of values can be answered by determining to what extent the body can be treated as an object.49