Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America
296
Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822372806 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/19/2017 |
| Series: | Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Biomedicine-War Nexus
National security, warfare, and biomedical logics form a nexus in which deliberate violence — war — is bound up with far-reaching aspirations about improving life. Biomedical logics associate medicine with an ethic of care. As such, when they are mobilized in domestic policing or in imperial military operations, they function to obscure the causes and effects of violence. This obfuscation accounts for some of the ways attachments to war manifest: an affective investment in care resides at the heart of the biomedicine-war nexus. Discourses of care authorize security measures that divide the beneficial from the deleterious, the healthy from the pathological, and those who deserve security from those who threaten it, at home and in overseas military interventions.
Biomedical logics form part of the nation's arsenal and an integral part of its surveillance apparatus, organized around the tropes of defense and security. They gain considerable momentum when fear, dread, and xenophobic paranoia expand the militarization of everyday life in the name of homeland security. They operate in allegorical renderings in which warfare and mechanisms aimed at ensuring national security are conceived as medical operations. Within these allegories biomedical logics serve as epistemological tools — devices for thinking — used by military strategists to draw up battle plans and to carry out counterinsurgency operations in imperial occupations. They play an important role in the destroy-and-build dynamics through which new disciplinary regimes are imposed upon occupied communities. Military strategists exploit medicine's ethic of care to carry out covert operations that actually undermine the health and security of the very people the operations are claiming to liberate. Biomedical logics rationalize violence and, through their association with an ethic of care, attach people to war.
This chapter begins with a contextualizing account of the militarization of everyday life, arguing that ordinary citizens are attached to war through the mobilization of fear and insecurity. I then examine the various ways that biomedicine has become militarized, particularly in the context of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I review specific biomedical practices that were deployed as instruments of violence and show how clinics were transformed into strategic targets. Militarized biomedicine not only encompasses the enlistment of medical professionals to carry out violence but also manifests in an insidious violence that is couched in military counterinsurgency doctrine that purports to care for compliant inhabitants of occupied regions.
A discursive analysis of counterinsurgency doctrine reveals how the violence of war is obscured and sanitized by metaphors and allegories likening battle and occupation to urgent medical interventions. The invading and occupying force is staged metaphorically as an expert medical team whose main task is to rid the occupied society of a diseased insurgency, transforming the ill patient into a compliant subject of the new occupying regime. Women and children in the occupied regions are the focus of rescue campaigns that seize upon the promise of health care to draw them into counterinsurgency plans. A deadly consequence is that medical facilities become targets of insurgent attacks. Post-invasion policies that radically transformed life in Afghanistan and Iraq focused on eliminating socialized medicine and introducing privatized medical care. Clinics and hospitals were strategic targets exploited not only in counterinsurgency operations but also in neoliberal economic policies that destroyed the existing health care systems and did little to address the catastrophic outcome of this destruction. In the name of care, the occupying forces did much to endanger the lives of the occupied, whose trust in the medical profession eroded substantially as corruption and covert operations threw their communities into chaos.
In the final section I reflect on bio-equality, noting that a politics of life is closely linked with a politics of death in a discursive circuitry whereby some lives are honored as worthy sacrificial heroes while others are calculated to be expendable. An economy of life according to which some bodies are valued and others are disposable underlies a particular kind of attachment to war, one centered on advancement and grounded deeply in a faith and devotion to technological innovation that claims to be humane and thus justifies violence as a necessary condition for human advancement.
MILITARIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: THE HOMELAND
Americans are attached to war through the militarization of everyday life in which the elements that are constitutive of war — enmity, exclusion, existential threat, emergency, the foregrounding of distinctions between "us" and "them," policing tactics, surveillance, and violence — permeate social and political relationships. I define militarization as an ongoing process aimed at the management and disciplining of populations staged in the name of defending society. Combatants are ubiquitous and include not only dangerous people but also biological and computer viruses, toxic assets, virulent proteins, bad attitudes, malfunctioning systems, political dissent, and faulty intelligence information. All around us we hear the message "Be afraid. Be very, very afraid." Tactics of population management are embedded in our institutions, constitutive of who we are, embodied in our physical comportment, performed in our daily lives, and exported to other regions through new modes of colonialism. War tactics and technologies are commanding expectations down to bodies as sites of imposing order through discipline and regulation. We are compelled to police ourselves by being encouraged to police Others, in the name of security. Militarization colonizes minds and bodies as well as spaces near and far.
The University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park anticipated this condition of permanent and pervasive war when he wrote that "psychic warfare" was a central feature of what he called total war societies. Published in the American Journal of Sociology in November 1941, just a month before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and Germany, Park endorsed a vigilant state of psychological preparedness as a necessary dimension of war: "Total war is now an enterprise so colossal that belligerent nations find it necessary not only to mobilize all their resources, material and moral, but also to make present peace little more than a preparation for future war."
Total war society became a term of art for describing the necessary conditions for ensuring modern national defense, a concept used by mid-twentieth-century military and civilian war strategists but with roots dating back to the establishment of mass-conscripted armies in new European nation-states in the late eighteenth century. It is a formation of modern industrialized states with colonies and empires. Total war, thus conceived, is a circumstance in which all significant sectors of society are mobilized for the purposes of defending a nation. Vannevar Bush, Roosevelt's director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, writing at the end of World War II, quoted a joint letter sent to the National Academy of Sciences by the Secretaries of War and the Navy: "This war emphasizes three facts of supreme importance to national security: (1) powerful new tactics of defense and offense are developed around new weapons created by scientific and engineering research; (2) the competitive time element in developing those weapons and tactics may be decisive; (3) war is increasingly total war, in which the armed services must be supplemented by active participation of every element of civilian population."
In total war society, industrial, agricultural, communications, and transportation systems are geared toward the effort. Scientific, medical, technical, and other professional talent is drawn into the duty to defend the nation and support its military. Schools, colleges, laboratories, and media assume important roles in war preparedness. Civil society, religious institutions, and the industry of mass media are absorbed into the venture. Total war is total mobilization and total preparedness. It requires extensive centralized planning and control while also scattering hegemony through distributed circuits of enforcement. It necessitates popular compliance or the means to effectively quell popular dissent. Preparedness and the constant productions it requires in industry, finance, politics, and ideology exist prior to the formal declaration of war and persist past the official pronouncement of a war's conclusion.
Total war's institutional moorings and the economic investments that support it become endemic to the society. Demilitarization is unthinkable because so many industries rely on total war for profit and political influence and because the nation's security is ideologically premised on having a highly armed state. This was one of Dwight D. Eisenhower's concerns, when in 1960 he delivered the last public address of his presidency, warning against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex." But Eisenhower, speaking in the context of the Cold War, regarded it as necessary that the United States have a "permanent armaments industry of vast proportion" to defend against "a hostile ideology — global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. ... This conjunction of an immense military establishment is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, and even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society."
Total war blurs the boundaries between the soldier and the civilian, between security operations and military operations, between the home and the combat zone, between war and peace, and between affective dispositions and military tactics. As Jackie Orr has argued, total war officially drafts the U.S. civilian into being a military combatant who is expected to take an active psychological role in the conduct of successful war. The concept of a total war society further materialized in the vigilance of emergency drills during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, when mutually assured destruction (MAD) was the doctrine through which popular images of world-eviscerating weapons propelled the building of home bomb shelters, the stockpiling of guns and supplies, and suspicion that one's coworkers and neighbors might be spies for the enemy. The specter of nuclear war taught ordinary citizens to incorporate a sense of living constantly under the existential threat of potential obliteration. In this zero-sum game, citizens were compelled to learn how to defend the nation against an apocalyptic fate and to accept nuclear detonation tests, stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, and civil defense drills as necessary and quotidian aspects of life. Discourses of ruination were integral to U.S. nation-building in the age of atomic warfare. The theater of operations was planetary in reach and the time of war indefinite in duration.
By the advent of the Global War on Terror, our total war society had become networked by cybernetic circuits of information technology that cross platforms of war planning, border control, logistics management, financial transactions, media entertainments, and biomedical research. The nation had developed and stockpiled massive weapons systems, implemented a widespread apparatus of surveillance, built scores of laboratories dedicated to research on biodefense and biosecurity, established clinics and hospitals to contain deadly infectious pathogens and the bodies that contain them, and funded university research centers dedicated to projects of prediction and the logistics of security and warfare. Following the suicide and hijacking attacks of 9/11, this far-flung national security apparatus expanded massively, ideologically fulfilling the Cold War state project, creating, as Joseph Masco notes, "an institutional commitment to permanent militarization though an ever-expanding universe of threat and detection."
Security has become a central engine of the economy and an opportunity for employment, profiteering, and financial speculation. Private enterprises pitch product ideas to government agencies, seeking to secure grants and contracts to manufacture stuff that claims to be of service to national security — bombs, vaccines, bullets, surveillance devices, simulation software, prosthetic limbs, business models, to name just a few. Identifying threats is a focus of myriad branches of the state as well as of private enterprises where surveillance, profiling, and targeting reflect a logic that is internalized in individuals as well as built into a diffuse apparatus, or what Foucault called a "disciplinary corpus." Prisons and detention centers proliferate. Guard labor becomes a growing sector of employment. For-profit detention centers extract wealth from the disposable life of "illegals." Technologies of surveillance are packaged into consumer-grade commodities and incorporate acts of spying into daily life routines through mobile phones, global positioning systems, and biomonitoring devices. Hospitals and medical clinics become guarded locations where patients must show proper identification and pass through metal detectors and other surveillance screenings and where armed employees are stationed to apprehend undocumented people or anyone warranting suspicion. In the name of national security, the health of Others is severely compromised.
Meanwhile threats and dangers are also summoned as beneficial. In Bush's 2002 State of the Union address to Congress, he promised that his proposed expansion of homeland security measures would do more than simply stave off enemies: "Homeland security will make America not only stronger, but, in many ways, better. Knowledge gained from bioterrorism research will improve public health. Stronger police and fire departments will mean safer neighborhoods. Stricter border enforcement will help combat illegal drugs. And as government works to better secure our homeland, America will continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens." These new efforts deepened the public's attachments to war in the political grammar of security. Bush tied the geopolitics of border control to the biopolitics of combating illegal drugs. "Alert citizens" were enlisted as unpaid guard labor. And an apocalyptic orientation toward the future coexisted with a promise of being saved by incorporating and putting into routine performance the embedded knowledges developed in the name of security.
Alert citizens enjoy a kind of vigilant sovereignty with which they are encouraged to patrol and apprehend suspicious characters and take violent action against them if necessary, often governed by a disavowed racist logic that validates the targeting of people of color in the United States. The phenomenon was dramatized in the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing an unarmed seventeen-year-old African American, Trayvon Martin, who was visiting his father in a condominium complex in February 2012. In his defense Zimmerman invoked the state of Florida's "stand your ground" law, which permits citizens to use violent force against intruders or anyone who appears to threaten the citizen's safety. A Florida jury acquitted Zimmerman, who never denied shooting Martin, of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the summer of 2013.
The alert citizen is hailed in the "If you see something, say something™" campaign sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and originally developed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City. The campaign's slogan captures this sentiment in its claim of being "a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism and terrorism- related crime to the proper transportation and law authorities." Alert citizens are encouraged to tell the proper authorities about suspicious activity. Within a larger context in which racial profiling is endemic to official policing actions and citizens are warned of the dangerous presence of "loitering youth" and the potential dangers posed by people of Middle Eastern descent or those assumed to be Muslim, suspicious activities can include standing with friends on the street in front of one's home, praying on an airplane, walking or driving in certain parts of town, wearing certain kinds of clothing (head scarves or turbans or hooded sweatshirts, for example), and speaking in certain kinds of accented English.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. The Biomedicine-War Nexus 27
2. Promises of Polytrauma: On Regenerative Medicine 53
3. We Can Enhance You: On Bionic Prosthetics 89
4. Pathogenic Threats: On Pharmaceutical War Profiteering 140
Epilogue 180
Notes 189
Bibliography 217
Index 239
What People are Saying About This
"With exceptionally crisp writing and sparkling erudition, Jennifer Terry paints a complex portrait of the nitty-gritty of American militarism, biomedicine, and bio-inequality. By showing how attachment to salvation underwrites the continued expendability of life, she makes an important intervention that will be felt in American studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and beyond. This book soars."
"This brilliant book is a thoughtful and profoundly original study of how war becomes an object of attachment and support in the United States. Jennifer Terry's discussion of wounding, injury, trauma, and prosthetics is one of the most fascinating, moving, and intensely generative studies I have read about how war is normalized, made everyday, and embedded in practices and beliefs and affect(ion)s of ordinary folks."