Although war and globalization have always been dynamic partners in expansion and innovation, the... more Although war and globalization have always been dynamic partners in expansion and innovation, the beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a kind of phase shift in which the diversity of actors, capabilities, locations, durations, and lethalities of war are multiplying and speciating, rather than converging or diffusing. Therefore, the fights over whether there is ‘more’ or ‘less’ war after the Cold War, is, I believe, the wrong question, not because the frequency or lethality of war is not morally or strategically significant, but because the question itself lacks the conceptual rigor to describe the complexity of the empirical world. Rather than being a measurable, discrete phenomena, war in the age of late globalization should be a problematic, that is, a site for investigation and research about the shifting terrain of politics, violence, mobility, technology, and commerce.
Historical narratives matter and the conspicuous absence of North America from the literature on ... more Historical narratives matter and the conspicuous absence of North America from the literature on counter-insurgency is an essential component of restoring the practice to the innocuous status of a mere tactic, rather than as the cornerstone of the settler colonialism that built one of the most powerful and destructive nation-states in history. If the architect of the post-World War II international order is the United States, then the architecture of order and security was invented on the Western Plains, and the victims of these experiments had names like Sitting Bull and Geronimo. Given the pivotal role of the U.S. in the history of the 20th century, any genealogy of the social or the domestic that starts and ends in Europe will be missing core components of what distinguishes settler colonial statecraft from colonial statecraft.
IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks
in 2012. In that time,... more IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates why something as low-tech as an improvised bomb is so significant to contemporary warfare. The article contends that, contrary to the effort to “beat” the IED by the US Department of Defense, the IED is not a thing. The IED, I argue, is a condition of possibility present in almost all of contemporary life. IEDs are native inhabitants of a world of global relations and things that hover on the edge between tool and weapon. IEDs are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life. IEDs are ambient, integrated, and distributed by methods that make it difficult to detect and combat. Unlike precision weapons, IEDs are neither smart nor dumb. They are, I argue, environmentally aware.
Aphorisms from forthcoming book Savage Ecology: Geopolitics at the End of the World.
Inhumanity... more Aphorisms from forthcoming book Savage Ecology: Geopolitics at the End of the World.
Inhumanity When we see the inhuman in something, for instance in a great white shark, it is only because we can't help but feel a connection; a connection we are apt to call human. A good example of the horror of inhumanity is the narrative of dehumanization, or othering. This is the idea that there is some practice or historical tendency or character of difference in certain broken humans—inhumans—responsible for genocide, abuse, violence, etc. In the fourth section of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that this explanation is in fact not accurate. We are able to commit genocide without any othering, and those discourses of dehumanization that follow are in some sense coping mechanisms or opportunities for bad faith to ignore what many people were capable of to begin with. Rather than the zombie scenario, whereby a deficit, disease, or supernatural event diminishes our humanity, true horror is that no deficit was needed in the first place. To think of it differently, perhaps that deficit has always been there. Genocide is fully human, and requires no deficit. Moral tragedy would be seeing the refugees lying on the beach and being unable to do anything to act, being too late. Moral failure would be seeing the bodies and not being able to recognize them as 'one of us,' and therefore being uncompelled to act. Moral horror, the horror of the inhuman as human, is that we could have done something, we did recognize them as one of us, and did nothing anyway. We live in a horrifying world, not a tragic one. Dehumanization is a lullaby we sing to each other, rather than face the horror that the suffering of others fails to awaken anything inside of us. Monstrosity The transition to something else is almost always monstrous, precisely because of its weirdness to what it is we think we are. How do we think through horror as a genre of political thought rather than as a cinematic or fictional construction? What is the real of horror, rather than the Lacanian cop-out of the horror of the real? Government programs like torture and enhanced interrogation exceed the normal feedbacks and boundaries of our consensus reality. This is not a metaphor. The gap between reality and perception of that reality is a phenomenological difference that makes the appreciation and observation of events surreal. They can only be understood as other genres, but other genres of reality. Sci-fi and horror are conceptual and phenomenological necessities, rather than 'representational styles' or modes of writing. Unlike the often violent flaying of the personality from the pre-personal body found in neuro-torture techniques, exploring the genres of reality holds on to the personality of the artist or thinker sufficient to the task of dilating the modes of perception to let in a little more of the real, rather than being torn asunder. Taking Liberties It turns out freedom-as-liberty is an ecological doomsday device. The enlightenment, for all of its self-congratulatory bravado, may in fact end the species. In the realm of downsides, that is a pretty big one. That the freedom experiment is turning out to be a catastrophic failure ought to demand of us something quite dramatic in the revaluation of humanities, economics, politics and the most basic conceptions of the good. Still waiting. 33
What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable n... more What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable not because of the loss of life but because of the loss of difference. Who and what will be left of Earth to inspire and ally with us in our creative advance is what is uncertain. If the future is dominated by those who seek to establish the survival of the human species through technological mastery, then whatever human “we” manages to persist will likely live on or near a mean and lonely planet.
A condensed article version of a book chapter by the same name. Part of a special issue on Willia... more A condensed article version of a book chapter by the same name. Part of a special issue on William E. Connolly's new book the Fragility of Things.
This semester will be dedicated to the drivers of future relations. What kinds of ecosystems, eco... more This semester will be dedicated to the drivers of future relations. What kinds of ecosystems, economies, global relations, forms-of-life, technological relations, and species relations will define the next 100 years. Furthermore, where are the fault lines, exploits, and chokepoints for making the future otherwise than what is being engineered by the geopolitical designers of the last century? What are the forms of mediation, economy, mobility, belonging, and violence that will come to define the relational worlds of the 22nd century. Will it be the death sciences all the way down or can other forms-of-life craft worlds less cruel and less catastrophic? The readings will draw from new work on relational cosmologies, media theory, indigenous politics, black theory, political economy, comparative religion, animal studies, artificial intelligence , and political theory. POLS 673 Spring 2020 Grove Class Expectations: This will be a writing intensive course designed to improve your ability to do textual analysis and theoretical explanation. Three 4 to 5 page concept papers will be written over the course of the semester. The goal is to help you prepare for comprehensive exams and the kind of theoretical writing that many of you will need to do for the theory chapter of your dissertation. The papers will be do every four weeks and should reflect the development of a single concept drawn from the readings you have been doing in class.
The goal of this class is to take this problem more seriously than those who think mocking thinke... more The goal of this class is to take this problem more seriously than those who think mocking thinkers as ‘pseduo-intellectual’ or ‘irrational’ is sufficient to defeat the rise of dark theory. Instead, we need to understand the logic behind such arguments, and dissect and dismantle them to see not just how they work, but what affects, sympathies, and repressed resentments fuel why they work. To do so, we will engage some earlier dissenting texts such as those that glorified war as a way of life in the early part of the 20th century, those still Enlightenment-committed but contra-liberal thinkers like Schmitt and Strauss, then go on begin the descent into the anti-enlightenment thinking of contemporary ethnonationalist and authoritarian thinkers. Along the way we will take breaks to read things that may shed some light on what structures the desire for repression and sadism. Why do so many desire their own repression, and why do so many, when in the depths of misery, thrive on the torment of others? One semester is much too short to cover all of the different conservative thinkers through time. However, much good work has been done on Burke, the Chicago school, even Ayn Rand. The goal of this class is to explore a number of ignored or obscure thinkers that are, in many ways, not conservative at all, but nonetheless animate resurgent atavisms throughout Europe and North America.
Many have declared the end of Modern civilization in the past few years. These apocalyptic exalta... more Many have declared the end of Modern civilization in the past few years. These apocalyptic exaltations come in a few varieties. Marxists see in the unraveling of global order capitalism falling prey to its own contradictions. Ecologically minded thinkers see in global warming and species loss a brittle human habitat unlikely to support a projected ten billion humans. Those with a taste for technology foretell the end as a transition away from the meat suit of homo sapiens in favor of post-organic life. In all of these narratives of the end there is the presumption of a sudden break or transformation. In this year's Politics of the Future seminar we will explore the shortcomings of viewing the future as a single possibility and consider what hybrid futures of partial and incomplete transformations might look like. In particular, we will add a healthy dose of skepticism to images of the Anthropocene/geoengineering or post-natural future, neuropolitical futures of artificial intelligence and augmented cognition, and techno-optimist forecasts of the future. The last five weeks will be spent investigating alternative approaches to the future that consider the Black Radical Tradition, multi-species politics, Afro-pessimist theories of affirmative failure, and the return to armed insurrection as alternatives to contemporary politics.
Although war and globalization have always been dynamic partners in expansion and innovation, the... more Although war and globalization have always been dynamic partners in expansion and innovation, the beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a kind of phase shift in which the diversity of actors, capabilities, locations, durations, and lethalities of war are multiplying and speciating, rather than converging or diffusing. Therefore, the fights over whether there is ‘more’ or ‘less’ war after the Cold War, is, I believe, the wrong question, not because the frequency or lethality of war is not morally or strategically significant, but because the question itself lacks the conceptual rigor to describe the complexity of the empirical world. Rather than being a measurable, discrete phenomena, war in the age of late globalization should be a problematic, that is, a site for investigation and research about the shifting terrain of politics, violence, mobility, technology, and commerce.
Historical narratives matter and the conspicuous absence of North America from the literature on ... more Historical narratives matter and the conspicuous absence of North America from the literature on counter-insurgency is an essential component of restoring the practice to the innocuous status of a mere tactic, rather than as the cornerstone of the settler colonialism that built one of the most powerful and destructive nation-states in history. If the architect of the post-World War II international order is the United States, then the architecture of order and security was invented on the Western Plains, and the victims of these experiments had names like Sitting Bull and Geronimo. Given the pivotal role of the U.S. in the history of the 20th century, any genealogy of the social or the domestic that starts and ends in Europe will be missing core components of what distinguishes settler colonial statecraft from colonial statecraft.
IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks
in 2012. In that time,... more IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates why something as low-tech as an improvised bomb is so significant to contemporary warfare. The article contends that, contrary to the effort to “beat” the IED by the US Department of Defense, the IED is not a thing. The IED, I argue, is a condition of possibility present in almost all of contemporary life. IEDs are native inhabitants of a world of global relations and things that hover on the edge between tool and weapon. IEDs are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life. IEDs are ambient, integrated, and distributed by methods that make it difficult to detect and combat. Unlike precision weapons, IEDs are neither smart nor dumb. They are, I argue, environmentally aware.
Aphorisms from forthcoming book Savage Ecology: Geopolitics at the End of the World.
Inhumanity... more Aphorisms from forthcoming book Savage Ecology: Geopolitics at the End of the World.
Inhumanity When we see the inhuman in something, for instance in a great white shark, it is only because we can't help but feel a connection; a connection we are apt to call human. A good example of the horror of inhumanity is the narrative of dehumanization, or othering. This is the idea that there is some practice or historical tendency or character of difference in certain broken humans—inhumans—responsible for genocide, abuse, violence, etc. In the fourth section of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that this explanation is in fact not accurate. We are able to commit genocide without any othering, and those discourses of dehumanization that follow are in some sense coping mechanisms or opportunities for bad faith to ignore what many people were capable of to begin with. Rather than the zombie scenario, whereby a deficit, disease, or supernatural event diminishes our humanity, true horror is that no deficit was needed in the first place. To think of it differently, perhaps that deficit has always been there. Genocide is fully human, and requires no deficit. Moral tragedy would be seeing the refugees lying on the beach and being unable to do anything to act, being too late. Moral failure would be seeing the bodies and not being able to recognize them as 'one of us,' and therefore being uncompelled to act. Moral horror, the horror of the inhuman as human, is that we could have done something, we did recognize them as one of us, and did nothing anyway. We live in a horrifying world, not a tragic one. Dehumanization is a lullaby we sing to each other, rather than face the horror that the suffering of others fails to awaken anything inside of us. Monstrosity The transition to something else is almost always monstrous, precisely because of its weirdness to what it is we think we are. How do we think through horror as a genre of political thought rather than as a cinematic or fictional construction? What is the real of horror, rather than the Lacanian cop-out of the horror of the real? Government programs like torture and enhanced interrogation exceed the normal feedbacks and boundaries of our consensus reality. This is not a metaphor. The gap between reality and perception of that reality is a phenomenological difference that makes the appreciation and observation of events surreal. They can only be understood as other genres, but other genres of reality. Sci-fi and horror are conceptual and phenomenological necessities, rather than 'representational styles' or modes of writing. Unlike the often violent flaying of the personality from the pre-personal body found in neuro-torture techniques, exploring the genres of reality holds on to the personality of the artist or thinker sufficient to the task of dilating the modes of perception to let in a little more of the real, rather than being torn asunder. Taking Liberties It turns out freedom-as-liberty is an ecological doomsday device. The enlightenment, for all of its self-congratulatory bravado, may in fact end the species. In the realm of downsides, that is a pretty big one. That the freedom experiment is turning out to be a catastrophic failure ought to demand of us something quite dramatic in the revaluation of humanities, economics, politics and the most basic conceptions of the good. Still waiting. 33
What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable n... more What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable not because of the loss of life but because of the loss of difference. Who and what will be left of Earth to inspire and ally with us in our creative advance is what is uncertain. If the future is dominated by those who seek to establish the survival of the human species through technological mastery, then whatever human “we” manages to persist will likely live on or near a mean and lonely planet.
A condensed article version of a book chapter by the same name. Part of a special issue on Willia... more A condensed article version of a book chapter by the same name. Part of a special issue on William E. Connolly's new book the Fragility of Things.
This semester will be dedicated to the drivers of future relations. What kinds of ecosystems, eco... more This semester will be dedicated to the drivers of future relations. What kinds of ecosystems, economies, global relations, forms-of-life, technological relations, and species relations will define the next 100 years. Furthermore, where are the fault lines, exploits, and chokepoints for making the future otherwise than what is being engineered by the geopolitical designers of the last century? What are the forms of mediation, economy, mobility, belonging, and violence that will come to define the relational worlds of the 22nd century. Will it be the death sciences all the way down or can other forms-of-life craft worlds less cruel and less catastrophic? The readings will draw from new work on relational cosmologies, media theory, indigenous politics, black theory, political economy, comparative religion, animal studies, artificial intelligence , and political theory. POLS 673 Spring 2020 Grove Class Expectations: This will be a writing intensive course designed to improve your ability to do textual analysis and theoretical explanation. Three 4 to 5 page concept papers will be written over the course of the semester. The goal is to help you prepare for comprehensive exams and the kind of theoretical writing that many of you will need to do for the theory chapter of your dissertation. The papers will be do every four weeks and should reflect the development of a single concept drawn from the readings you have been doing in class.
The goal of this class is to take this problem more seriously than those who think mocking thinke... more The goal of this class is to take this problem more seriously than those who think mocking thinkers as ‘pseduo-intellectual’ or ‘irrational’ is sufficient to defeat the rise of dark theory. Instead, we need to understand the logic behind such arguments, and dissect and dismantle them to see not just how they work, but what affects, sympathies, and repressed resentments fuel why they work. To do so, we will engage some earlier dissenting texts such as those that glorified war as a way of life in the early part of the 20th century, those still Enlightenment-committed but contra-liberal thinkers like Schmitt and Strauss, then go on begin the descent into the anti-enlightenment thinking of contemporary ethnonationalist and authoritarian thinkers. Along the way we will take breaks to read things that may shed some light on what structures the desire for repression and sadism. Why do so many desire their own repression, and why do so many, when in the depths of misery, thrive on the torment of others? One semester is much too short to cover all of the different conservative thinkers through time. However, much good work has been done on Burke, the Chicago school, even Ayn Rand. The goal of this class is to explore a number of ignored or obscure thinkers that are, in many ways, not conservative at all, but nonetheless animate resurgent atavisms throughout Europe and North America.
Many have declared the end of Modern civilization in the past few years. These apocalyptic exalta... more Many have declared the end of Modern civilization in the past few years. These apocalyptic exaltations come in a few varieties. Marxists see in the unraveling of global order capitalism falling prey to its own contradictions. Ecologically minded thinkers see in global warming and species loss a brittle human habitat unlikely to support a projected ten billion humans. Those with a taste for technology foretell the end as a transition away from the meat suit of homo sapiens in favor of post-organic life. In all of these narratives of the end there is the presumption of a sudden break or transformation. In this year's Politics of the Future seminar we will explore the shortcomings of viewing the future as a single possibility and consider what hybrid futures of partial and incomplete transformations might look like. In particular, we will add a healthy dose of skepticism to images of the Anthropocene/geoengineering or post-natural future, neuropolitical futures of artificial intelligence and augmented cognition, and techno-optimist forecasts of the future. The last five weeks will be spent investigating alternative approaches to the future that consider the Black Radical Tradition, multi-species politics, Afro-pessimist theories of affirmative failure, and the return to armed insurrection as alternatives to contemporary politics.
Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ... more Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.
Video trailer for Savage Ecology: War and Politics at the End of the World, Duke University Press... more Video trailer for Savage Ecology: War and Politics at the End of the World, Duke University Press, 2019
This talk starts from the presumption that the quantum challenge, as a set of philosophical quest... more This talk starts from the presumption that the quantum challenge, as a set of philosophical questions, was a dialogue far beyond the discipline of physics. Quantum sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, amongst others, were active participants in the debates over causality, time, and action at a distance, as well as the grander metaphysical questions about life raised by Bohr and Schrödinger in particular. Following Bohr and Tarde, I argue that quantum phenomena are not constrained to the subatomic, but in fact are essential components of human social and political relations. Mostly ignored until recently, the panpsychist traditions that emerged from these early interdisciplinary debates over quantum are essential to understanding the character of contemporary terrorism, and more broadly global politics in an age of non-scalable events. By non-scalable I mean that the measurement of the brute materiality of an event does not in any predictable way translate into its effect. In our age, apocalyptic crises barely register, and statistically insignificant events shake the entire international order. In fact, International Relations theory has, from its beginning, endeavored to explain ‘spooky action at a distance’, as the relations of the international are by definition both in a no-space of the international, and habituated into the local practices and places of diplomacy, deterrence, and war. While the entangled and non-locality of global politics has always been true, I argue that media and quantum savvy organizations like ISIS succeed precisely because of their ability to leverage this characteristic of global life. Given the difficulty of theorizing such events, it is necessary to revise Benedict Anderson’s model of the imagined community as an imaginary space of shared continuity and simultaneity in favor of a quantum-inflected notion of virtual entanglement. Here, the ‘community’ is created by the non-spatial but still real acceleration of distrust for the world, and those bearing the marks of racialized difference. Events like those that erupted in Paris, France and San Bernardino, California are only the most recent examples. The latter event had no explicit connection to ISIS, and yet this spectacular violence is an undeniable asset to the atmosphere of terror that ISIS requires to increase its international significance. In fact, no amount of discourse about the non-connection of San Bernardino to ISIS was sufficient to disentangle them. Events such as those in France and California do not operate in a three dimensional space in which we can measure something like speed or mass. Instead, contemporary terrorism takes place in an affective dimension where space/time is often irrelevant to the intensity of the consequences of an event. When a pineapple soda can becomes a ‘bomb’ and takes down a Russian airliner, the everyday objects around us provoke a sense of metaphysical doubt or skepticism most commonly known as horror. Therefore, International Relations needs a quantum turn so that we can understand the very real consequences of events and things whose capacities defy both physical and casual explanation, but far exceed constructivist concepts of discourse or ideas. Link to talk https://youtu.be/-71newlDkhI?t=13m17s
Uploads
Papers by Jairus Grove
in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators
injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in
Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of
all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates
why something as low-tech as an improvised bomb is so significant to
contemporary warfare. The article contends that, contrary to the effort
to “beat” the IED by the US Department of Defense, the IED is not a
thing. The IED, I argue, is a condition of possibility present in almost all
of contemporary life. IEDs are native inhabitants of a world of global relations
and things that hover on the edge between tool and weapon.
IEDs are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus,
violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating
innovation of contemporary global life. IEDs are ambient, integrated,
and distributed by methods that make it difficult to detect and
combat. Unlike precision weapons, IEDs are neither smart nor dumb.
They are, I argue, environmentally aware.
Inhumanity When we see the inhuman in something, for instance in a great white shark, it is only because we can't help but feel a connection; a connection we are apt to call human. A good example of the horror of inhumanity is the narrative of dehumanization, or othering. This is the idea that there is some practice or historical tendency or character of difference in certain broken humans—inhumans—responsible for genocide, abuse, violence, etc. In the fourth section of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that this explanation is in fact not accurate. We are able to commit genocide without any othering, and those discourses of dehumanization that follow are in some sense coping mechanisms or opportunities for bad faith to ignore what many people were capable of to begin with. Rather than the zombie scenario, whereby a deficit, disease, or supernatural event diminishes our humanity, true horror is that no deficit was needed in the first place. To think of it differently, perhaps that deficit has always been there. Genocide is fully human, and requires no deficit. Moral tragedy would be seeing the refugees lying on the beach and being unable to do anything to act, being too late. Moral failure would be seeing the bodies and not being able to recognize them as 'one of us,' and therefore being uncompelled to act. Moral horror, the horror of the inhuman as human, is that we could have done something, we did recognize them as one of us, and did nothing anyway. We live in a horrifying world, not a tragic one. Dehumanization is a lullaby we sing to each other, rather than face the horror that the suffering of others fails to awaken anything inside of us. Monstrosity The transition to something else is almost always monstrous, precisely because of its weirdness to what it is we think we are. How do we think through horror as a genre of political thought rather than as a cinematic or fictional construction? What is the real of horror, rather than the Lacanian cop-out of the horror of the real? Government programs like torture and enhanced interrogation exceed the normal feedbacks and boundaries of our consensus reality. This is not a metaphor. The gap between reality and perception of that reality is a phenomenological difference that makes the appreciation and observation of events surreal. They can only be understood as other genres, but other genres of reality. Sci-fi and horror are conceptual and phenomenological necessities, rather than 'representational styles' or modes of writing. Unlike the often violent flaying of the personality from the pre-personal body found in neuro-torture techniques, exploring the genres of reality holds on to the personality of the artist or thinker sufficient to the task of dilating the modes of perception to let in a little more of the real, rather than being torn asunder. Taking Liberties It turns out freedom-as-liberty is an ecological doomsday device. The enlightenment, for all of its self-congratulatory bravado, may in fact end the species. In the realm of downsides, that is a pretty big one. That the freedom experiment is turning out to be a catastrophic failure ought to demand of us something quite dramatic in the revaluation of humanities, economics, politics and the most basic conceptions of the good. Still waiting. 33
Teaching Documents by Jairus Grove
in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators
injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in
Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of
all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates
why something as low-tech as an improvised bomb is so significant to
contemporary warfare. The article contends that, contrary to the effort
to “beat” the IED by the US Department of Defense, the IED is not a
thing. The IED, I argue, is a condition of possibility present in almost all
of contemporary life. IEDs are native inhabitants of a world of global relations
and things that hover on the edge between tool and weapon.
IEDs are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus,
violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating
innovation of contemporary global life. IEDs are ambient, integrated,
and distributed by methods that make it difficult to detect and
combat. Unlike precision weapons, IEDs are neither smart nor dumb.
They are, I argue, environmentally aware.
Inhumanity When we see the inhuman in something, for instance in a great white shark, it is only because we can't help but feel a connection; a connection we are apt to call human. A good example of the horror of inhumanity is the narrative of dehumanization, or othering. This is the idea that there is some practice or historical tendency or character of difference in certain broken humans—inhumans—responsible for genocide, abuse, violence, etc. In the fourth section of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that this explanation is in fact not accurate. We are able to commit genocide without any othering, and those discourses of dehumanization that follow are in some sense coping mechanisms or opportunities for bad faith to ignore what many people were capable of to begin with. Rather than the zombie scenario, whereby a deficit, disease, or supernatural event diminishes our humanity, true horror is that no deficit was needed in the first place. To think of it differently, perhaps that deficit has always been there. Genocide is fully human, and requires no deficit. Moral tragedy would be seeing the refugees lying on the beach and being unable to do anything to act, being too late. Moral failure would be seeing the bodies and not being able to recognize them as 'one of us,' and therefore being uncompelled to act. Moral horror, the horror of the inhuman as human, is that we could have done something, we did recognize them as one of us, and did nothing anyway. We live in a horrifying world, not a tragic one. Dehumanization is a lullaby we sing to each other, rather than face the horror that the suffering of others fails to awaken anything inside of us. Monstrosity The transition to something else is almost always monstrous, precisely because of its weirdness to what it is we think we are. How do we think through horror as a genre of political thought rather than as a cinematic or fictional construction? What is the real of horror, rather than the Lacanian cop-out of the horror of the real? Government programs like torture and enhanced interrogation exceed the normal feedbacks and boundaries of our consensus reality. This is not a metaphor. The gap between reality and perception of that reality is a phenomenological difference that makes the appreciation and observation of events surreal. They can only be understood as other genres, but other genres of reality. Sci-fi and horror are conceptual and phenomenological necessities, rather than 'representational styles' or modes of writing. Unlike the often violent flaying of the personality from the pre-personal body found in neuro-torture techniques, exploring the genres of reality holds on to the personality of the artist or thinker sufficient to the task of dilating the modes of perception to let in a little more of the real, rather than being torn asunder. Taking Liberties It turns out freedom-as-liberty is an ecological doomsday device. The enlightenment, for all of its self-congratulatory bravado, may in fact end the species. In the realm of downsides, that is a pretty big one. That the freedom experiment is turning out to be a catastrophic failure ought to demand of us something quite dramatic in the revaluation of humanities, economics, politics and the most basic conceptions of the good. Still waiting. 33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFP2m8O2Ex8
Mostly ignored until recently, the panpsychist traditions that emerged from these early interdisciplinary debates over quantum are essential to understanding the character of contemporary terrorism, and more broadly global politics in an age of non-scalable events. By non-scalable I mean that the measurement of the brute materiality of an event does not in any predictable way translate into its effect. In our age, apocalyptic crises barely register, and statistically insignificant events shake the entire international order. In fact, International Relations theory has, from its beginning, endeavored to explain ‘spooky action at a distance’, as the relations of the international are by definition both in a no-space of the international, and habituated into the local practices and places of diplomacy, deterrence, and war. While the entangled and non-locality of global politics has always been true, I argue that media and quantum savvy organizations like ISIS succeed precisely because of their ability to leverage this characteristic of global life.
Given the difficulty of theorizing such events, it is necessary to revise Benedict Anderson’s model of the imagined community as an imaginary space of shared continuity and simultaneity in favor of a quantum-inflected notion of virtual entanglement. Here, the ‘community’ is created by the non-spatial but still real acceleration of distrust for the world, and those bearing the marks of racialized difference. Events like those that erupted in Paris, France and San Bernardino, California are only the most recent examples. The latter event had no explicit connection to ISIS, and yet this spectacular violence is an undeniable asset to the atmosphere of terror that ISIS requires to increase its international significance. In fact, no amount of discourse about the non-connection of San Bernardino to ISIS was sufficient to disentangle them. Events such as those in France and California do not operate in a three dimensional space in which we can measure something like speed or mass. Instead, contemporary terrorism takes place in an affective dimension where space/time is often irrelevant to the intensity of the consequences of an event. When a pineapple soda can becomes a ‘bomb’ and takes down a Russian airliner, the everyday objects around us provoke a sense of metaphysical doubt or skepticism most commonly known as horror. Therefore, International Relations needs a quantum turn so that we can understand the very real consequences of events and things whose capacities defy both physical and casual explanation, but far exceed constructivist concepts of discourse or ideas. Link to talk https://youtu.be/-71newlDkhI?t=13m17s