Sensate regimes of war: Smell, tracing and violence

Abstract

This article explores the fabrication of ‘sensate regimes of war’, concentrating on the typically under-analysed sense of smell. Smell is a sensory mode capable of apprehending potential threat and enmity in ways that are orthogonal to other ways of sensing. Accordingly, the organization and interpretation of olfactory sensation occupies a distinctive place in war. The article details a particular genealogy of martial olfaction, exploring the olfactory capacities of soldiers and their augmentation through various non-human and technological means in specific milieus of combat. It notes how the distinctive affordances of smell have underpinned numerous wartime practices, from tracing improvised explosive devices to militarized manhunting. These developments supplement and trouble ocularcentric accounts of martial sensation and power that concentrate on the increasingly abstracted co-production of vision and violence in wartime. They highlight rather the significance of an alternative ontology of the signature or trace of enmity, and emphasize how in particular warscapes to smell is to kill. The article concludes by arguing that critical inquiry into war would benefit from a broader theorization of all its sensate regimes right across a sensorium that is itself being continuously transformed through war.

Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism

“…The particular marshalling of the human body, in its somatic, cognitive and affective capacities, is here paramount. Be it via the psychomotricity of the musculoskeletal frame and its nervous system of reflexes, perceptual and neurocognitive faculties, or the affective states of anger, fear and communal bonding, the human organism has been comprehensively enlisted into the war machine (McSorley, 2020). The age-old conduct of military training for instilling discipline and esprit de corps in the new recruit is certainly paradigmatic, with drill exercises persisting today as a chief ritual through which individuals are integrated into the ranks of military organizations (Foucault, 1995; McNeill, 1995).…”

“…Gun sights, night-vision goggles and drone cameras are not so much perceptual extensions to pre-existing subjects as interpolations into the flux of deterritorialized affect from which martial subjectivities emerge. From such points of entry, the primary stuff of war increasingly appears less like an assortment of weapons, drilled bodies and formations than, as per McSorley’s olfactory exploration (2020), a synesthetic congerie of visions, sounds, smells, touches, memories and emotions. The question here is not so much how to make sense of war as how war makes the senses.…”

The Anthropocene stinks! Odor, affect, and the entangled politics of livestock waste in a rural Iowa watershed

“…Still, the dominance of industrial agriculture and its attending discourses permeate the landscapes of everyday life, and efforts to habituate the population of Iowa to the stink of concentrated livestock feces have been both subtle and spectacular, but always extremely effective. Such habituation creates a “sensate regime” of farming in Iowa, where subjects are essentially trained to differentiate between smells, ignoring some while recognizing and valuing others (McSorley, 2020).…”

The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war: toward an embodied ontology of war as experience

“… 12 See Gregory 2018, 2015; Wool 2015; Hockey 2013; MacLeish 2013; Scarry 1985; McSorley 2013, 2014, 2020.…”

“…With the advent of post-modern warfare, Western militaries are moving toward a new operational paradigm whereby soldiers are expected to make sense of complex environments by experiencing them ‘as a whole and living person’ in and through the body that can smell, taste, see, hear, and feel ‘the culture in a way that [makes] it part of [their] own’ (Sookermany 2011, 485). On the sensate regimes of war see McSorley 2020.…”