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so we're talking about the "state of war" or a legal situation.
that'd be fine except..
there's always an except
something strange like the cold war--which i think paul virillio characterized neatly as a war of pure logistics that did not require the messiness of battles etc. to function (politically, economically, socially) as war. but the cold war was a de facto state of affairs, not a de jure one...so would it count for these purposes? same questions basically obtain for the ongoing absurdist "war on terror"....
over the past 60 years or so, the dominant forms of war have been linked to cold war--logistical conflicts--remedies for the old marxian category "crises of over-production" which are endemic to fordist and post-fordist types of production. so if you think about war from a vantagepoint informed by war-as-logistics rather than war-as-series-of-discrete-events (you know, battles and attending whackings and dismemberings), then (a) the boundary war/not-war gets quite blurry (b) the question arises of whether the present capitalist order can function without some kind of de facto state of war that functions to direct production into spaces of waste/expenditure/turnover in products otherwise useless (think cluster bombs. the americans do. tey like cluster bombs. they dont want them regulated.) or problematic (the americans are the world's largest exporter of weapons conventional by a MULTUIPLE of ten--from which a cynical fellow could argue that the central feature of the american GNP after agricultural production is war...)
if that's true, then you might also wonder why it is that folk are so willing to default into arguments from "human nature" to "explain" war--given that they are social agents within a context that relies on war production in order to operate at anything like full production capacity (even this is a bit outmoded terminologically, but i'll leave it) in a range of industrial sectors (in general, those which benefit from state largesse under republican "fiscally responsible" regimes, characteristic of which is hostility to the transfer of wealth in the direction of poor people but support of transfer of wealth toward defense contractors)...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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