89 The phrase ‘clockwork army’ is drawn from Manuel de Landa’s reading of the organisation of the army of Frederick the Great in the middle of the 18th century. Manuel de Landa, W ar in the A ge o f Intelligent M achines (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991), 127. Foucault him self uses the metaphor in Discipline and Punish only once, and then not in reference to the military but to the Lancaster method of teaching. However he does make frequent use of machinic metaphors when describing the military. Foucault,
D iscipline a n d Punish, 162-69. See, also, Azar Gat, A H istory o f M ilitary Thought: From the Enlightenm ent to the Cold W ar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58-61.
becam e largely standardised within armies in the later seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century the central bureaucracy worked out prescribed codes relating to the conduct of war.90
Of particular significance in this new military arrangement was the innovation of the drill, perfected in the armies of Frederick the Great. The drill served the dual purpose o f training m ind and body for battle as well as providing order to the tim e of idle soldiers.
Foucault, through a reading of the military developm ents of this tim e that largely accords with that provided by Duffy, gives an account of the disciplinary m echanism w ithin the m ilitary that tracks the ordering (pow er/know ledge) of the disciplinary m echanism through bodies, th eir relation to each oth er a n d to the w hole, a n d th eir p o sitio n in g in tim e. This thoroughly spatial account of the military apparatus provides a num ber o f key insights into the lim its o f possibility for the exercise of violence. Firstly, it em phasises that violence results from e v e r y d a y p ra c tic e s of pow er/know ledge that can be far removed from the battlefield (as it then was). This insight is particularly useful in the context of the m icro-study that form s the
substantive core of this thesis, where everyday practices of the military seem to bear little relation to the activity o f killing, and nonetheless thoroughly im bue the
(experim ental) quality of violence. This insight is extended in the following section, w here Lefebvre’s conception of the ‘unfolding’ o f the unexpected from the everyday is intim ately bound up in his conception of the tem porality of space.?1 This ‘unfolding’ or becom ing is extended in the following through the work of Deleuze. Secondly, Foucault’s analysis illustrates a number of different spatial trajectories that can be
90 Christopher Duffy, The M ilitary Experience in the A ge o f Reason (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1987), 15.
91 The importance of the everyday in the work of Henri Lefebvre is often overlooked in commentaries emphasising his spatiality. Yet Lefebvre’s final, and perhaps most insightful, book on space has also been considered to be the fourth volume in his occasional series on everyday life. See, Henri Lefebvre,
im plicated in the organisation of violence by pow er/know ledge. This provides the beginnings of a vocabulary for describing the relation between violence and spatialising practices.
Foucault identifies the disciplinary m echanism as inscribing the individual in relations along four trajectories of pow er/know ledge/space. Firstly, he identifies the im portance o f the spatial distribution of bodies according to a cellular, segm ented pattern. Foucault refers to this as the “individuality-cell,” and its significance lies in the w ay it individualises the body while m aintaining it as part of a coherent w hole.92 Foucault argues that this pattern finds its particular form in the military through the system of rank, an individualising and yet totalising practice. Far from being a sim ple ‘m ental’ or ‘ideological’ construct, rank is also a material and spatial distribution.93 It is rank that determ ines the spatial distribution of bodies when it com es to living arrangem ents, to the drill, as well as in battle. Crucially, rank establishes the body in relation to others.
Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations.94
This, then, is one key trajectory along which violence can be organised. H ow are bodies treated? Are they taken as individuals or en masse? If they are taken as individuals, how are they then held in relation to each other? For the 18th century military, individuals were held in constant relation to one another through hierarchical rank. W hile hierarchical rank is still an important aspect of
92 Foucault, Discipline an d Punish, 161, also 141-49*
93 As English participants on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War discovered when fighting for the revolutionary militias; George Orwell s reaction, in particular, is a wonderful testament to the ambiguity he felt in having to rely on class solidarity rather than rank to ensure action was taken. George Orwell, H om age to Catalonia (San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1969), 27-29.
contem porary military experience, as we shall see there is presently a decentralising ten dency in the US military that does not hold fixed the network that keeps (ranked) bodies circulating in relation to each other. In contemporary doctrine, the im portance o f bodies often varies according to the contingency o f their circum stance — who is closest, w ho can act, who has weapons still loaded.95
Secondly, Foucault identifies a particular ‘kind’ of body being disciplined: it is a body w hose natural m ovem ents have an efficiency that can be harnessed by the disciplinary im pulse, a body that Foucault refers to as the “individuality-organism .”96 The know ledge of ‘natural’ bodily poses enables the power relation of discipline to take as its target the natural efficiency of the m ovem ents of the body, particularly in its use of tools, w hich were treated as organic extensions of that body (see, for exam ple, the new role of the rifle in drill).97 This is particularly significant in light of the im portance o f new technologies to the RMA: the trajectory Foucault is identifying here is not sim ply that of the body’s relation to itself but also its relation to its
techn ologies or weapons.
Thirdly, Foucault identifies a particular tem porality at work, a tem porality in which “m ovem ents are integrated, one upon another, and which is oriented towards a term inal, stable p oint,” what he calls elsewhere the “individuality-genesis.”98 The drill is an exam ple of this tem porality par excellence, being an overall action broken down into segm ents. These segm ents are practised through extensive repetition
individually, and then recom bined in linear tim e.99 This segm entation then re com bination, or re-formation, in linear tim e form s a particular organisation of
95 See the following discussion of swarming, 230-31. 95 Foucault, D iscipline an d Punish, 161, also 149-56. 97 See, also, Duffy, The A ge o f Reason, 104-5.
98 Foucault, Discipline an d Punish, 160,161, also 156-62.
violence that is genetic (in the original sense of the word, as referring to the origins and developm ent o f som ething). As we shall see in the discussion o f Lefebvre, this kind o f linear tem porality is only one of many forms of temporality, all o f which can inflect the organisation and operation of violence.
The significance of tem porality becom es even clearer in the final aspect o f the disciplinary m echanism that Foucault identifies. These are the newly devised m eans o f com posing the forces of these bodies (‘cellularised,’ ‘organicised,’ and ‘geneticised’) into a greater whole, an “art o f constructing ... in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated com bination.”100 This art of com bination, em erging in the self-consciously scientific expression of the art of tactics at the tim e, has various im plications for the 18th century military, particularly for the practice of com m and. Duffy, for example, notes that the careful com position of linear form ations and decisions regarding the deploym ent of troops at that tim e were m ade on the basis o f calculations laid down by philosophers of war.101 This is highly significant: if the force o f an army is seen to derive from its own internal organisation, and not from the intake o f energy from the outside, say, then the organisation of violence is
substantially different: violence m ay well inscribe itself across the landscape in ways that ignore the particularity of battle.102 Indeed, in the 18th century, despite the chaos that ensued once battle had begun, engaging in battle required a careful dance
betw een forces, the steps of which were known by all. Further, it was the ‘light forces,’ not inculcated in the contemporary discipline of the drill (such as the wild Cossacks, pressed into service by different nations at various points), who were treated with
100 Foucault, D iscipline an d Punish, 167, also 162-69. 101 Duffy, The A ge o f Reason, 189-91.
102 One has to wonder if this is not a part of what happened in those bloody and immobile early years of World War I. Certainly command and control practices emphasising the maintenance of an offensive posture over the knowledge of ground conditions have been implicated in the extraordinarily high mortality rate o f British troops. See, Peter Doyle and Matthew R. Bennett, "Military Geography: Terrain Evaluation and the British Western Front 1914-1918," The G eographic Journal 163, no. 1 (1997): 23.
som ething akin to fear by their own comm anders, who distrusted their wanton ability to take circum scribed battles to the level of wide-spread slaughter, destroying
intended targets of com m and and plunder.1^
H ere, then, is a thoroughly spatial account of the disciplinary m echanism , and, through this, o f the organisation o f violence in the 18th century. The everyday organisation o f the military inflects directly the organisation o f violence, although Foucault shies from exam ining the m om ent of battle him self. He does, however, note that thanks to this (spatialised) disciplinary relation, when it com es to battle, the soldier becom es “a fragment of m obile space, before he is courage or honour.”104 The spatial relations that the military took onto the battlefield were cellular, organic, g e n e tic and c o m b in a to ry (in the m echanical sense o f the addition of forces, and not in the contem porary sense of the alteration o f existing forces through mixture). Spatial relations on the 18th century battlefield consisted neither of the interconnected and m utually recursive relations that make up the ‘networked’ and contingent
spatiality of today; nor did they consist of the chaotic mixture of two entities releasing their pent-up violence en m asse. Violence was released in a relatively ordered fashion.
The expression of violence was circumscribed as a result of discipline (violence is organised m ore peaceably, perhaps?) but in Foucault’s account this is not (merely) through the exercise of discourse but (also) through the spatiality of bodies:
The ‘m ilita ire’- the military institution, military science, the m ilitaire himself, so different from what was formerly characterized by the term ‘hom m e de gu erre’ - was specified, during this period,
1 0 3 Duffy, The A ge o f Reason, 12-13, 268-73. Duffy notes that in some conflicts, particularly in the
American War of Independence, irregular forces were commonplace, undermining the historically sweeping nature of the claims o f Foucault regarding the disciplinary nature of the armies of the 18 century.
at the point of junction between war and the noise of battle on the one hand, and order and silence, subservient to peace, on the other. 10s
Im plicit of course in this is the prospect that the m ilita ire will at som e point be unable to balance the noise o f battle and the silence o f peace: spatiality is by no m eans certain, discipline fails. This is one of the advantages of trying to understand how violence is expressed spatially, because spatial relations show confusion and resistance - like the aphasiac, perhaps, som e generals attempt to im pose their version of order on a spatiality that resists.
At points, Foucault’s work even alerts us to the difficulty of pulling spatial relations into these, and not different, forms. The work of creating and im plem enting drills; the work o f enforcing discipline in the face o f food shortages or the anarchy- inducing properties of over-abundant alcohol rations; the persuasive work of expounding this philosophy (this ‘science’) of war over other, more established accounts; not to m ention the unspoken work of boots in mud, and steel on steel - in all of th ese the spatial relations established are only partly determ ined by the spatial ordering identified. In a particularly com pelling example, Duffy notes that even the best-disciplin ed units were good for one or two campaigns at the most: casualties, and m ore importantly, fe a r , got in the way of a unit ever fighting as a well-oiled m achine again.106 Material arrangements created the relationships which ordered violence, but also opened routes for different spatial orderings, or for no discernable order altogether. And it is not sim ply a matter of materiality m essing things up: Foucault particularly alerts us to the contem poraneous coexistence of other spatial orderings, including the very orderings that this arrangement was attem pting to replace.
105 Foucault, Discipline an d Punish, 168.
106 Duffy, The A ge o f Reason, 245-50. The ‘passions’ as an influence on the creative evolution of violence is discussed with respect to Deleuze, below.
Spatial orderings offer a com pelling insight into the way in which
pow er/know ledge operates. It is an insight of ten den cy — that is, a tendency to
circum scribe violence within these lim its, and not those. Foucault identifies a num ber o f trajectories along which we might differentiate particular organisations of
pow er/know ledge/sp ace: in particular, he identifies the relationship of the body to the whole; the ‘kind’ of relationship the body has with itself and with its tools or weapons; the tem porality in which spatial relations are implicated; and the m ode of com bination o f different forces. These facets are all explored in som e way in the follow ing chapters in relation to the contemporary battlespace, allowing insight into the particular nature of US military violence in Iraq.
However, where Foucault fails (and this is not least because violence was not the target of h is analysis) is in exploring the creative and experimental properties of violence once ‘unleashed.’ By shying from the m om ent o f combat, Foucault conducts an analysis that gives away too much to space and too little to tim e.
Rhythm analysis: the em ergence o f novelty in the everyday
Foucault provides an account of spatial orderings that explores the way in which violence is organised on the battlefield through specific kinds of relations. However, despite the usefulness o f this account in accounting for the everyday nature of the organisation o f violence, there is still little room for the openness, or the productivity, o f violence. The everyday is a little too everyday — a little too repetitive. If violence is a force in Foucault’s account, it is a force like any other, one which is lim ited by
p ow er/know ledge/sp ace in its expression. In fact Foucault does not even grant violence the capacity to be a force in this sense. As Deleuze puts it, in Foucault.
Violence expresses well the effect of a force on something, som e object or being. But it does not express the power relation, that is to say the relations between fo rce a n d force, ‘an action upon action.’10?
This is perhaps why he chooses to focus on the org a n isa tio n o f the army, as though the violence that followed would be instrum ental (precisely the argument that this th esis resists).108
Foucault’s lim iting reading of violence is hardly fatal to using his spatial orderings to understand the organisation of violence: it is certainly true that p ow er/k n ow led ge/sp ace play an important role in establishing everyday practices that construct a particular form of violence (a particular style of battle, for exam ple). H owever, to open space for the exploration of the productiveness of violence it is n ecessa iy to discuss the tem porality of the space in which it takes place, for it is in
tim e that violence unfolds its differentiating powers. As Feldman argues:
Sites of legitimation and authorization suppress historicity through linear, teleological,
eschatological, or progressive temporalities. Action, however, unfolds tim e as difference and as radical h eterogen eity.109
It is in this context that the epigraph to this chapter was chosen, and bears repeating prior to engaging Lefebvre’s work on emergence and space:
Violence itself both reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as som ething to be m ade.110
107 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Continuum, 1 9 9 9). 25 (emphasis original).
108 This is certainly the conclusion drawn by Julian Reid, who discusses Foucault s attempts to codify the relationship between war and politics.” Julian Reid, Deleuze s War Machine. Nomadism Against the State," M illennium: Journal o f International Studies 32, no. 1 (2002). 61.
109 Feldman, Form ations o f Violence, 2 (emphasis added).
Lefebvre seeks to understand the linkage between the everyday (and the everyday production of space) and the emergence of difference. This section begins by