Cramped Spaces Without Borders: Globalized Terror and the War Machine
//“If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.”
— Eyal Weizman, “The Art of War”//
//“Except in struggle, there is no beauty”
— F.T. Marinetti//
Eyal Weizman’s 2006 article “The Art of War” details the usage of post-structural thought by the Israeli Defense Force to further and re-conceptualize the way in which wars are fought in the contemporary global village. Reading through the article, however, the careful scholar finds that the Deleuze-o-Guattarian concepts being deployed are merely used as metaphors:
“several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of –˜smooth’ and –˜striated’ space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the –˜war machine’ and the –˜state apparatus’. In the IDF we now often use the term –˜to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as –˜striated’ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on” (Shimon Naveh qtd. in Weizman).
The distinction between the smooth and the striated, for them, becomes a metaphor for thinking through the postmodern city as a medium for war: striated space has the grid of the streets and the IDF now smooth that space out by cutting through the walls of private homes in order to avoid booby traps and snipers. All of that is well and good, assuming it works, but the question that must be asked: is this missing the point?
While it could be easy to document the urban grid as a striated space, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari deploy it, that the IDF must then smooth out, the description of the operation from the Palestinian perspective suggests that not much has ultimately changed within the heart of the Israeli military. As Weizman documents, Palestinians are still forced to deal with military incursions and the threat of random violence at the hands of a malevolent occupying army. I say this not valorize the position of the Palestinian populace, but, instead, to highlight the incomplete assimilation of Deleuze & Guattari into the mind of the IDF assemblage. For the philosophical brigade of the IDF, the smooth and the striated becomes an interpretative hermeneutic in which the military may “read” the urban space, attempting to extract meaning and compete for the Truth of this space. While they acknowledge a link between smooth/striated and war machine/state assemblage, the Israeli soldiers quoted in this article fail to see that they are, ultimately, the forces of the state assemblage, not the nomadic war machine they wish to become as they smooth out the urban landscape of Gaza.
Why mention all of this? I wish to highlight an application of Deleuze & Guattari to military counter-terrorism but to also suggest that it is a faulty one. Having shown this, it seems important to ask if a more thorough application of their thought is possible to the question of global Terror. Can we move beyond the metaphoric/hermeneutic deployment of IDF philosophers? I think this is possible and I would like, specifically, to offer a commentary on the concept of the cramped space within Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature that will not only suggest the true relevance of Deleuze & Guattari to contemporary counter-terrorism but will specifically seek to invert the IDF’s usage of the smooth/striated binary to suggest that, in fact Israel is striated and Palestine may be smooth.
The usage of a book that is seemingly about literature to talk about global terrorism may strike an odd chord, but it seems that this oddness is at the very kernel of Deleuze-o-Guattarian thought. If nothing else, all of their books can be thought of as a puzzling mish-mash of references from across all disciplinary boundaries, so it seems wholly appropriate to use their book about Kafka to talk about contemporary terror. What two things could (seemingly) be further apart? Nonetheless, I wish to discuss, as I stated, the figure of the cramped space as generative of the minor and of creativity that emerges within their discussion of Kafka’s work in order to come to a more nuanced understanding of the problems facing the kind of postmodern warfare being fought by the IDF and the American Military in Iraq.
In the pages of their book on Kafka, Deleuze & Guattari claim the minor author writes within a “cramped space that forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating in it” (17). For D&G, this minor author is positioned within a space full of life but, ultimately, cut off from the lines of flight of the major. More important, though, is the relation between this cramped space and thought itself. D&G point out that this cramping produces a desire for escape that is essential to the creative potential of the minor. For them, Kafka’s literary body marks a desire for escape, for lines of flight, from the cramped conditions of being a Prague Jew. It should be noted that this desire for escape is not the same as freedom. D&G are quick to point this out: “a line of escape, and not freedom. A vital escape and not an attack” (35). For D&G the creative thought forced by the conditions of the burrow, of the cramped space of the minor, is not one of any sort of freedom-centric politics, a nationalism or an identitarian political apparatus. They see, in Kafka, merely the desire for escape: they recognize through his literature that nationalisms of this type are merely a way of re-inscribing the major.
Again, what does this have to do with global Terror? Further, how can the cramped space teach us anything about the world in which we live? This is one of the most interesting and transformative affordances of D&G’s thought. If we are to acknowledge in globalization, we are to see a world in which I can type on a computer made in Singapore while eating Ramen from Korea and wearing a blazer tailored in Jordan. We live in a world that famously asks us “Where Do You Want To Go Today?” and yet we are prisoners in our own homes, afraid of terrorism and the endocolonization of our own urban landscapes in the name of securing the homeland. This is the problematic I wish to charge at: how can we live in a world that valorizes free flows of capital and yet feel increasingly trapped? How do we find ourselves in a cramped space without borders?
In vivisecting the postmodern global ideology of information capital, Paul Virilio has stumbled on to a formation that may begin to suggest a way to think about terrorism as a dramatization of this global cramping:
“The –˜deportees’ in the –˜camps’ of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating, –˜savages’ or even –˜new barbarians.’ In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously almost unknown level of deprivation and human misery. They are waste-products of a military-industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals of the knowledge and skill accumulated over generations and millennia, before a post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, to zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenseless to the exactions of kapos of a new kind (Virilio 62).
For Virilio, this concept of the urban wasteland is the fundamental problematic of our post-industrial world. The above quote illustrates the solution that seems to be occurring throughout much of the world to the problem of what to do with a manufacturing base that is no longer needed: crammed into tenements and regimented into factories, suddenly entire populations are abandoned by global capital. For Virilio, the kapos he speaks of are quite literally criminals (various Third World paramilitary organizations and organized crime gangs), but I wonder what this vision of the wasteland would look like if the kapos were thought of as American-style image capital: the Disney, Coca-Cola, Mc Donalds? lifestyle that is one of our nations most popular exports. In Virilio’s apocalyptic vision, the world is not turning into a village (as Mc Luhan? would have it) but into a slum, with all the random violence such an urban formation entails.
Crammed into slums, the increasing global population of the urban wasteland could be seen as existing within the position of the minor in D&G’s understanding. Being bombarded with images of Western culture that they cannot afford access to and removed from the circuit of value production, it could be suggested that many of the people in the world are cut off from the common modes of expression available within the Western major. As with Kafka, it could be suggested that the desire for escape begins to take shape. What line of flight will it follow?
As Fredric Jameson suggests in “The Dialectics of Disaster,” following the destruction of Middle Eastern Communist movements by the CIA in the 1960s, the only two choices available to the disenfranchised men of that region were American style capitalism and Muslim extremism. As we have previously seen, this Disney vision of life entails real cultural violence, as such mass cultural exportation by the US is commonly tied up with rhetorics of cultural loss or more generally, a loss of specificity. Similarly, by marginalizing much of this region’s population, the costs of access cannot be met. So, as Jameson suggests, the only choice is extremism and the violent resentment and hatred of the West that follows.
By placing this vision of terrorism next to Virilio’s concept of the urban wasteland, we can begin to grasp the applicability of the concept of the cramped space to terrorism. If we buy the argument (made by many scholars of globalization) that American image capital is so repellent to the populations pressed into Virilio’s global slums, we can see how these slums (despite spreading across the planet) represent the violence that Deleuze & Guattari see as generative of the need for escape that becomes a refrain in Kafka.
Further, returning directly to the war on terror, we can see the creativity that generates from this cramped space
WORKS CITED
Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota UP, 1986.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Dialectics of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 297-304.
Virilio, Paul. Strategy of Deception. London: Verso, 2007.
Weizman, Eyal. “The Art of War.” Frieze 99 (2006). 10 Oct 2007. <http:/>.