Introduction: Black Swans and Pop-up Militias: War and the "Re-rolling" of Imagination

Moral elements . . . establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force. . . . Unfortunately, they will not yield to academic wisdom. They cannot be classified or counted . . . but have to be seen or felt. . . . Next to nothing can be said about these things in books [but] they can no more be omitted from the theory of the art of war than can any of the other components of war.

—Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Key Strokes and Key Strikes

The key strokes and strikes by which we introduce an open dossier on "war" in its visible and invisible dimensions will also, clearly, be those of the typographic "key"—of the writing of tele-polemeology codes, war machines, and in the wars latent in critical impasses today, as a certain mutation has begun for which the global credit collapse may be, at once, mere catalyst and symptom. War, today, involves writing, encoding, the technesis of perception, the stupefaction of citizenry, the apparently suicidal orders of hyperconsumption and so on. This riff within the visible as well as between it and its others seems to assign a double discourse to that of "war" today—an account of the military vision and strategies of always past and future wars, and the logics by which this new, totalizing order, appears installed aesthetically, mnemonically, archivally. Hence two typographic dossiers, inter(in)dependent, not to say at war with one another or themselves (italics, here, will do to shade this switching of voice). In the present collection the topos of "war" plays a conceptually viral rather than descriptive role. It seems, in the twenty first century, the "global" exists simultaneously with three other realities: first, a post-global order has become too visible which is the underbelly of what now looks like a twentieth -century chapter of geopolitical and hyperindustrial culture; second, a retreat from the anthropic models and humanism that attended that episode before the mutations of climate change, global warming, extinction events, etc.; and third, a bizarre relation to futurity, in which diverse geomorphic consequences for current and past depredations appear calculable, some cataclysmic in implications. It is a recently suppressed report by the US Department of Defense on "climate change," after all, that predicts water and resource wars, some local and nuclear in nature, in tandem with a regression to more or less feudal techno-states.¹ In this environment, war has morphed into strangely totalizing forms. Having moved beyond war with an enemy, with anthropomorphic doubles (including, however faceless, the "terrorist") one now hears in credible tones of a war against animals, or against "life" itself that has become inertial, driven by mediacracies and hyperfinance.

Once one opens that gate, one may easily address implicit wars against disappearing futures (or on behalf of the unborn), autogenic wars (in America), and wars against and within the "autos," the species, or oneself. All of these participate in representational histories and writing modes, all today imply wars within and between archival programs in a state of mutation—epistemological wars. It is the last wars, as if over the primary inscriptions that human cultures and histories have organized themselves around (the "Western," the "Chinese"), that suffuse the more literal or lethal ones. Today, the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan; the narco-wars in the global south (surging in Mexico and beyond), cannot be dissociated from the intra-psychic wars waged by media streams or the corporate wars against addressing global warming or food crises. This buckling of times, these time wars, lead us nonetheless back to Clausewitz.

By admitting "moral" elements to what he hopes will be a "revolutionary theory of war," Clausewitz wants to highlight the more elusive "components" of a complex tapestry of organized violence.² As in the epigram above, the emphasis here is on the intangible, indeed invisible, qualities of force and power that are all the more decisive for animating the "whole mass of force" because of their imperceptibility. This complex force-arrangement that Clausewitz must simply call the "mass" remains incalculable...