The Presence of War: “Here and Elsewhere”1

Abstract

After reviewing conceptual contributions that address the blurred boundary between the war and home fronts and the complexities of contemporary political topologies in general, I turn to a reading of three artistic texts—the photomontages of Martha Rosler, Paul Haggis’s film In the Valley of Elah, and Annie Proulx’s story, “Tits‐Up in a Ditch”—to analyze the war front–home front relationship. I end with some reflections on the analytic contributions of montage techniques in terms of the way they establish equivalences that revalue our perspectives on the locations and actualities (presences) of war.

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

“…The literature on the representation of war and violence typically concerns American and British warfare (e.g. Baudrillard 1995;Butler 2009;Cohn 1987;Shapiro 2011;Simons and Lucaites 2017;Welland 2017;Zehfuss 2009); in theoretical accounts especially, the experiences of the US and the UK have almost come to define the Western experience of violent engagement. Yet, the US has been 'fully assimilated to a war culture', where war is no longer the exception but the rule, even the norm (Lucaites and Simons 2017, 3).…”

“…Previous research uncovers how arrangements of visibility delimit the field of perception, and thus the possibilities for radical reflexivity and critique (e.g. Butler 2009;Gregory 2015;McSorley 2012;Shapiro 2011). For instance, Morrison (2014) notes that though mass communication and the knowledge dissemination of today 'destroys regimes of common sense and reveals the world as it has never been seen before', so many people still 'feel impotent and stateauthority-diminished' (p. 186).…”

“…War's 'presence' in public discourse set the conditions of possibility for critical reflection and 'new' apprehensions (see e.g. Basham 2016;Butler 2009; Shapiro 2011). The changing representations and visibilities of state violence thus need to be examined, argue Martschukat and Niedermeier (2014, 3-5), as violent practices have tended to either be adjusted to historical notions of decency or masked and hidden to sustain their perceived legitimacy.…”

Towards an Embodied Sociology of War

“…Bousquet (2012: 180) argues that ‘sociology in the main inherited one of the most prevalent assumptions of social theorists in the nineteenth century, namely that of the archaic character, and thus increasing irrelevance, of war’ and that as such it assumed that ‘the emerging global order of bourgeois societies, bound by trade and commerce and guided by rational economic self-interest … was inherently pacifistic’. 2 Even when 20th-century history proved that belief to be drastically mistaken, war has nonetheless often been thought of as the exception to normal social and political life (Shaw, 1988), or as a discrete event bounded in space and time (Cuomo, 1996) whose centre of gravity and primary presence has been considered to be ‘elsewhere’ rather than ‘here’ (Shapiro, 2011).…”

Conflict reterritorialisation: Shifting group boundaries in the diaspora during the armed conflict in the ‘homeland’

“…Generally, conflict deterritorialisation is related to the detachment of meanings, symbols, and narratives of the war from its immediate location. The process of conflict deterritorialisation seems to be primarily related to informational flows, which make it possible for the narratives and symbols of the conflict to detach themselves from the geographical location of where it is happening (Bernal, 2006;Shapiro, 2011). For example, the relative availability of the Internet and smartphones allow people in distant places to stream live news or even battles within certain conflicts (Cottle, 2006).…”