<underfire> RE : J. Armitage Structerd Chaos

Wed Nov 1 05:51:29 EST 2006

FRENCH 
Je découvre tardivement le messge de J Armitage qui
pour une raison  injustifiée m'avait échappé dans le
flot de mon courriel et je comprnds alors une série de
malentendus . Le passage qui a été choisi pour
représenter en quelque sorte "ma pensée"  n'a pas été
choisi par moi et a introduit des contre-sens. Je n'ai
jamais cru moi même à la vision du monde affichée par
G Bush père dans son discours à l'ONU et ma
description d'une vision "bleu layette" aurait du
faire comprendre que je ne prenais pas cette imagerie
de disneyland pour réelle. Même G Bush père n'y
croyait pas sans doute.  
ENGLISH
I am discovering lately the text of J. Armitage which
I missed l for  no reason except the excessive mail
flow at that time. But then I understand better some
misunderstandings.The text selected tyo rtepresent
somehow my "thinking" has not been chose by myself and
introduced some contre-sens. I never believed mysels
to the world "vision" exposed by G Bush Father in his
speech at UNO and my description of a  UNO "Baby blue"
should  have made clear  that I  never did take as
real this image of Disneyland peace.Even G Bush father
did not probably believe in it
FRENCH
Il est clair que les critiques acerbes ou
bienveillantes qui ont surgi pour commenter ma soi
disant ingénuité  n'ont pu venir que de gens qui
n'avaient rien lu de moi , probablment même pas
l'édition en anglais de l'Empire du désordre.moins
encore des articles ou livres en français  C'est de ma
faute car j'ai envoyé un texte amorce qui par malheur
n'est pas parvenu d'emblée par une ratée électronique.
Radall a voulu suppléer à ce manque par un passage
assez synthétique mais dans lequel l'ironie du propos
n'a pas pu passer. J'ai renvoyé ensuite un texte
beaucoup plus explicite mais c'était trop tard. 
ENGLISH
It is clear that all hash or benevolent critics
commenting my supposed ingenuity came after that from
people which had no opportunity to read the whole book
I publisheed in English and less articles in french of
mine . It is may responsability because I sent a first
text which  did not came to underfire for some
electronic misfunctioning Randall intented tu
compensate this failure by quickly proposing a rather 
synthetic text but the ironical stress of the contentl
failed to be understood
FRENCH
Je suis désolé de vous avoir fait perdre du temps et
d'en avoir perdu moi même. Je ne suis pas sûr que la
technioque du blog soir créatrice d'attention et
d'échange autant que peut l'être un échange de
correspondance traditionnel,  sauf que d'après ce que
je vois les malentendus lmulktilatéraux comportent
pmlus d'idées nouvelles que les les consensus
bilatéraux C'est pourquoi je continue à correspondre
au dela de la semaine prévue.
ENGLISH
I'm really sorry of having lost your time and mine. I
am note convinced that the blog technique of
communicatiàon is creating of a new type of care and
exchange and is better than traditionnal exchange of
letters exept that, as I see, even multilateral
misunderstandig includes more new ideas than bliateral
understanding. That is why I commlunicate some more
after the official week time.

ENGLISH ON J. ARMITAGE mail
To come back on the J. Armitage message,  I give
essentially not a "depiction of the XX° century" but a
depiction of the strategic mystifying représentation 
of the world by US political élites and of the  sudden
strrategical "void" which made the US lose its long
term strategical equililbrium based during more than
70 years to the fact they got a world military
political and social ennemy auto designated (except
for 42-45) : The USSR (sice 1917) 
 To maintain the idea that they were the main source
of democracy against tyranny, they had to build a new
discourse. First Clinton maintained the idea by
depicting the post cold war as a triumph of pure
democracy, linked theoreticaly and practically with
the triumph of pure free market economy. Once again I
do not buy this represenjtation but I only decribe it
as a temptative world ideology. Bush represent a more
militaristic variant of this  "vision".  

 -- J Armitage <j.armitage at unn.ac.uk> a écrit :

> Hi all
> 
> Jordan asked me to reply to Alain Joxe's 'structured
> chaos', recently posted
> on under fire - I will do so in two parts, chiefly
> because I have to go
> offline for a day or two right now. Hence, if list
> members do not see any
> replies from me it is not because I am ignoring them
> but because I am
> offline. I shall return to answer any questions and
> present part two of my
> reply on Friday. The first part of my reply is
> interspersed with passages
> from my recent work and relevant images are attached
> from Caleb. Here goes:
> 
> Joxe's depiction of the twentieth century, of a
> 'free world' and a
> 'communist world' with 'each obeying its laws, its
> images, its lies and its
> idols, and a 'Third World' which attempted to
> separate itself from the two
> others thanks to its size and despite its weakness'
> seems eminently sensible
> - on first reading.
>           The problems, however, at least for me,
> begin with the idea that
> 'the tripartite world of bipolar nuclear stand-off
> seemed to disappear with
> the end of the Cold War' and that it was 'it was
> believed that the earth
> would finally become peaceful, or at least conform
> to the order outlined in
> the UN charter'. I suppose I wanted to know who it
> was that believed the
> Earth would finally become peaceful. Or orderly?
> Moreover, since when has
> the UN Charter been taken seriously, even by itself?
> This week, for
> instance, sees Hungary commemorating the 50th
> anniversary of its 1956
> uprising against the Soviet Union, which ordered
> tanks into Budapest to
> crush it. Budapest's public buildings are still
> pockmarked by bullet holes.
> Yet where was the UN Charter or the UN itself when
> this national trauma was
> unfolding, when the Hungarian revolution was being
> brutally put down, and
> when, for two dramatic weeks Hungarians tried to
> resist their Soviet
> jailers? The Hungarians failed, of course, but they
> failed in large part
> because the UN stood by as the tragedy unfolded and
> the radio stations, the
> only means of communication, were shut down, one by
> one, by the Soviet
> Union, and at the cost of over 3,000 lives in the
> streets of Budapest.
>           Nor was I clear how much courage the US
> and its allies needed to
> attack a weak Iraqi dictator after his invasion of
> Kuwait or, more recently,
> in the Iraq War.  As I wrote in a recent article,
> 'The Elite War on Utopia':
> 
> "U.S. military casualties would indisputably have
> been larger and the move
> forward to Baghdad slower if the Iraqi armed forces
> had been in a serious
> position to wage a twenty-first century war.
> However, the Gulf War of 1991
> and the post-1991 U.S./UK no-fly zone over northern
> and southern Iraq both
> added significantly to the disintegration and
> growing incompetence of the
> Iraqi military. Even before the Iraq war, Iraq's
> armed forces were ill
> disciplined, disordered, badly taught, and weak.
> Most of the Iraqi
> military's equipment was obsolete. It is hardly
> surprising that Iraq's
> military commanders made no determined preparations
> to protect Baghdad. In a
> nutshell, Iraq's armed forces were unable to adjust
> to a battleground
> wherein the U.S. military would move at near light
> speed with terrifying
> lethality before they could even decide to fire a
> shot. Saddam Hussein's
> 60,000 strong "elite" Republican Guard was
> confronted with the prospect of
> fighting a war against the American armed forces
> without maintained or up to
> date equipment, spare parts, or new information and
> communications
> technologies. Additionally, a large number of
> Republican Guard officers had
> been chosen for their allegiance to Saddam's regime
> rather than for their
> military expertise, or were on the brink of
> desertion"
> 
>           Much of Joxe's commentary is then the
> commentary of 'military
> humanism', of the leading nations allying themselves
> against weak dictators
> from Saddam to Milosevic.
>           Equally troubling, it seems to me is
> Joxe's notion that the 'World
> has by definition retained its shape' in the
> post-Cold War era. I remain
> unconvinced, since, for me at any rate, the world is
> currently losing its
> shape as hypermodern America's postindustrialized
> cyberwar shifts from
> derealization to geopolitical deterritorialization,
> to the virtualization of
> both its military and society. For whilst the
> American military increasingly
> bases itself on the supposed legitimacy of
> virtualization, of airpower,
> American society increasingly bases itself on the
> absence of any attachment
> to its own grounding, to its own physical territory.
>  Here, then, we shift
> from the derealization of the combat zone, from its
> deterritorialization, to
> its aerialization or what Virilio (Virilio and
> Armitage, 2001a; 171) calls
> 'orbital space', a space that is currently the site
> of an extraordinary
> cybernetic, accelerated, strategic, and political
> revolution. Or, as I put
> it in a recent paper, 'Virilio Over Hypermodern
> America: Notes on the Art of
> War', 
> 
> 'We can say, therefore, that the increasingly
> delirium-inducing merger of
> military-strategic thought with the aerialized new
> media of destruction and
> action involving, for example, automated cruise
> missile air strikes against
> Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kosovo, amounts to a
> new, hypermodern,
> understanding of America's founding principles. For
> what we are witnessing
> here is the emergence of hypermodern American
> _astropolitics_, of a
> geopolitics that dwarfs that of Hardt and Negri's
> (2000) _Empire_, of the
> globe, since it is centred on the _stars_, on the
> stars and stripes in outer
> space.'
> 
> Thus, for me, whilst the UN 'must bow before the
> whims of its leader', what
> Joxe does not seem to realize is that the leader has
> already left for the
> stars. To some extent, then, it is a question of
> coming to terms with the
> fact that the US no longer exists as a physical
> terrain, yet is determined
> to shape outer space in its own image. This too is a
> space united by certain
> principles. However, I suspect, there is a kind of
> structure to this
> disorder, to this manufactured astral chaos.
> Granted, it is no orderly
> French garden but a disorderly battlefield. In
> addition, this is a project
> that is taking shape right now, above our heads, but
> also within the US,
> which certainly assumes that the space of the earth
> is already its own, to
> do with what it will. But, of course, what is often
> left out of this sort of
> debate is the developments that are taking place
> within the US. So, whilst
> the US military assumes geopolitical responsibility
> for the planet on the
> one hand, of much more interest to me is not so much
> Southern Command, here:
> 
> http://www.southcom.mil/home/default.htm
> 
> But Northern Command or Northcom, here:
> 
> http://www.northcom.mil/
> 
> As I put it in 'The Elite War on Utopia':
> 
> 'Northcom acts to undermine the Posse Comitatus Act.
> This process has been
> in train since at least the 1980s in America when
> internal duties were
> allocated to the armed forces as part of the
> disastrous "War on Drugs." Now
> some want the Department of Defense (DoD) to be
> handed 
=== message truncated ===> À: 
> Objet: 
> Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 22:33:45 +0100
> 
> 
> 
---------------------------------
Hi John,Attached are images as requested.  The best
thing would be for you to attach the ones that you
like to your email message and then I will post on the
website.  How does that sound?
thanks,
c

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 caleb waldorf
calebw at ucsd.edu
www.calebwaldorf.net
(858) 405-1658

On Oct 24, 2006, at 4:22 AM, J Armitage wrote:

Hi both

Okay, I have read the Joxe piece and can do something
with it.

Jordan, I will write a sort of reply but will
intersperse it with passages from my own recent
articles and interviews - I think this will work well.

Caleb, on the images, I will mention: 

Hungarian Uprising 1956

Northcom and Southcom - Southcom's website is here:

http://www.southcom.mil/home/default.htm

If you can get some pictures from this that would be
good.

I will also mention the militarization of knowledge. I
did a paper about a year ago which has an image in it
of the kind of thing universities are helping to
produce these days  - a TUGV - maybe we could use
that? The proofs of the paper are attached. 

Lastly, I will try to do it this evening and send it
off to the list. Jordan, if you recall, I have to go
to the University of Leicester tomorrow - Wednesday -
and will not be back on line until Thursday afternoon
at the latest.

Best to both.

Good luck with the project!!

John

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<Beyond Hypermodern Militarized Knowledge
Factories.pdf>

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> 16 October - 10 December 2006
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REPONDEZ A CE MAIL A MON ADRESSE HABITUELLE :
joxe at ehess.fr

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