5 mins931 words 2 links

Savage Ecology

  • ISBN: 1478004215

Highlights

There is a centuries-long investment in research, development, and deployment of techniques to ensure that survival is only ever a right for some. This right for some, more often than not, is ensured at the expense of the self-determination and continuation of living for the overwhelming majority of the planet’s human population. ^ref-3568

I ask the question of what it would mean to consider warfare as a form of life, that is, an ordinary practice for many people rather than the ways we often characterize war as an anomalous or rare event that suddenly breaks out. ^ref-31793

Climate modeling, for instance, allows researchers to experience scales of time and space that individual embodied humans cannot. Oral traditions similarly compress and extend time across lifetimes but are too often dismissed because of their nonmodern means of informatic storage and retrieval. ^ref-49378

Computers, like archives and books, are vital prosthetics in research. They allow us to encounter things in ways that extend our experience beyond ourselves and our native sensory capabilities. ^ref-12201

How do we get from horror to critique? Rucker recommends that we can “turn off the TV (or now ubiquitous internet), eat something, and go for a walk, with infinitely many thoughts and perceptions mingling with infinitely many inputs.” ^ref-2266

Still, the United States of America continues to follow the advice of “the best and the brightest,” testing the imperial waters, not quite ready to commit out loud to empire but completely unwilling to abandon it. ^ref-45077

escapes the fact that everything can come to a sudden and arbitrary end thanks to the whim of an American drone operator, nuclear catastrophe, or macroeconomic manipulation like sanctions. There are other ways to die and other organized forms of killing outside the control of the United States; however, no other single apparatus can make everyone or anyone die irrespective of citizenship or geographic location. For me, this is the most inescapable philosophical provocation of our moment in time. ^ref-36082

No one is in control, there is no conspiracy, and yet the killing continues. A pessimistic reading of U.S. empire and the geopolitical history that precedes it is neither tragedy nor farce. It is a catastrophic banality lacking in any and all history, a pile of nonevents so suffocating that we often hope for a conspiracy, punctuating event, or villain worthy of the scale of violence. ^ref-34136

What would failed scholarship do? Learn to die, learn to live, learn to listen, learn to be together, and learn to be generous. These virtues are useless in that they do not prevent or manage things. They do not translate into learning objectives or metrics. Virtues of this order are selfsame, nontransferable experiences. They are meaningful but not useful. These are luxurious virtues. Like grieving or joy, they are ends unto themselves. But how will these ideas seek extramural grants, contribute to an outcomes-based education system, or become a policy recommendation? They will not, and that is part of their virtue. ^ref-48663

From the atom bomb to the untold billions of martial artifacts, including shells, planes, and fallen soldiers, the last five hundred years will certainly be characterized by an accelerating rate of organized and disorganized murder and violence. ^ref-8150

To put it a bit more bluntly, politics, colonialism, settlement, capitalism, ecological destruction, racism, and misogynies are not wars by other means—they are war. ^ref-63147

While it is valuable to investigate how leaders can function to amplify conflict, what is striking is how quickly any one leader can be replaced and how little the trajectory of war changes. ^ref-8215

One might take a lesson from the electrification of sound. In order to amplify or magnify a sound and preserve the fidelity of a particular harmonic arrangement, one cannot simply “turn up” the volume. It requires a certain interface between the means of amplification, the ambient qualities of the room, the number of people present, and the resonant capabilities of those people, the furniture, the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Similarly, political decrees or decisions to produce effects must reverberate and interface with complex assemblages of institutions, economies, ethical dispositions, affective discourses, and other machinic operators. ^ref-60986

From an ecological perspective, “wholes” and “singularities” are not ontologically real. Only relations and processes are real; wholes and singularities are at best fleeting and nodal like knots in a string. ^ref-22450

Therefore, the body is charged no less by hate, anger, rage, and fear than it is by joy, pleasure, and generosity. It is just charged differently. ^ref-49145

One’s right to lead among the Gauls came from one’s ability to survive and excel in combat. The leader often actually led, in the physical sense, the troops into battle. The leaders were the front line or tip of the cannae or wedge shape that fighters formed as they raced toward their enemy. The metaphorical meaning of “leading” a battle in which verbal and later cybernetic commands or leadership replaces the physical presence of commanders on the field of battle tracks with the deskilling, depersonalization, and democratization of warfare into a quantitative enterprise.11 The faith in overwhelming force over strategic or limited ends explains a great deal about contemporary practices of combat wreaking havoc with little success around the globe. ^ref-17432

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