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Review article

New media, new war

SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS

Virtuous war: mapping the military-industrial-media-entertainmentnetwork. By James Der Derian. Oxford, Boulder, CO: Westview. 2001.

272pp. Index. /I8.99. ISBN 0 8133 9794 4.

Degraded capability: the media and the Kosovo crisis. Edited by

Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman. London: Pluto. 2000. 256pp.Index. /45.oo. ISBN O 7453 1631 X. Pb.: /I4.99. ISBN O 7453 1632 8.

Strategy of deception. By Paul Virilio. London: Verso. 2000. I20pp. Index.

Pb.: /Io.oo. ISBN I 85984 301 8.

War isn't what it used to be, or so we're frequently told. Competing coinages-virtual war, virtuous war, information war, net war, humanitarian war,

spectator sport war-strive to capture the essence of the transformation. Does it

reside in new motivations ('war for human rights' as NATO proclaimed in

Kosovo)? In the convergence of technologies through which war is simulated,enacted and represented, confusing what is 'really real' when violence

seemingly becomes dematerialized? Or in the attenuated relationship betweenthose consuming distant violence as spectacle and those experiencing it up-

close? Has war undergonea

revolution,or less drastic cosmetic

surgery?These

volumes adopt distinct positions, though all are concerned with the techno-

logization and mediation of violence-in Kosovo and beyond.This essay seeks to draw out key strands in recent discussions over the

apparent 'virtualization' of war. In particular, it questions the vaunted 'disem-bodiment' of violence in the digital age, from which injury has seeminglydisappeared, along with enemies and civilian capacity to tolerate casualties. It

suggests that we need properly to historicize phenomena whose rootedness inthe representational practices of war-and in modernity itself-can be too easilyunderestimated by overstating both the newness of'new media' and 'new war'alike.

What defines 'the virtual'? For both Paul Virilio andJames Der Derian, con-fusion-between the real and the hyperreal, the world of the palpable and of

International Affairs 77, 3 (200I) 673-681 673



Susan L. Carruthers

the representational-might appear the defining character of war in the age of

simulation, a confusion they mimic, as war games meet word games.I DerDerian's 'road trip into the cyborg heart of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network' is dizzying less for the 'warp-speed' we're promisedthan for the looping route that results when one travels without maps but lets

Baudrillard, Virilio and Deleuze take the wheel. Already road-tested on thereaders of International Affairs, Der Derian's new volume is likely to infuriatethose whom it does not illuminate, leaving 'vampire-hearted' realists and post-dated post-modernists alike to eat dust.2

In Virtuous war we find the IR theorist as war-game tourist, simultaneouslyseeking illumination of war's future and of its toll on the author's past.Travelling from one 'unreal' locale to another-war-gaming in the Mojavedesert, simulated urban anarchy in the San Francisco Bay, with a brief stopover

on the 'outer reaches of Aberystwyth' en route-Der Derian interviews adiverse cast of characters (from Wesley Clark to Virilio himself) and muses over

many unsettling convergences. In an era when entertainment has become thecontinuation of politics by other means-when Hollywood pre-scripts foreignpolicy, its stars adding glamour and subtracting gravitas from electoralconventions-it is only fitting (however unsettling) that Disney animates warsof the future. Digitized, computer-generated simulations anticipate, and

possibly even precipitate, the scenarios of 'real war'. (In July I990, 'ExerciseInternal Look '90' rehearsed a militarized response to an Iraqi invasion of

Kuwait only days before its fictive scenario was re-enacted 'for real' [pp.I5-16].) Yet 'real war'-witnessed by its combatants and spectators alike throughmissile-mounted video in real time-appears indistinguishable from thesimulation. Indeed, conducted in the name of humanitarianism, the newviolence makes a virtue of its apparent bloodlessness. The virtual flaunts its

virtuousness, boasting 'the technical capability and ethical imperative tothreaten and, if necessary, actualise violence from a distance-with no or minimalcasualties' (p. xv). What, after all, could be more just than a clean war?

Given Der Derian's studied stylishness-a Kerouac for the Wired generation,bent on

'separatingthe

hypefrom the

hyperreality'-oneawaits the ironic

deflation of virtuous war's pretentions. The virtuosity can't, surely, be for real?Der Derian is mindful of the 'double-edged' nature of virtuous war, which

promises a technical fix for political problems while generating unanticipatedconsequences that erode the ethical grounds for future action (p. 202). Hereminds us that smart bombs, whatever their promotional claims, fail toeliminate 'collateral damage'. Rather, they defer bodily harm until after themoment of ethical accountability has passed, 'damage' dimly registering as

'higher rates of infant mortality, untreatable diseases, and malnutrition' (p. 147).

By contrast, Michael Ignatieff has suggested that 'virtual' war is distinguished by its transparency-withactions being announced and legitimated in advance: Virtual war: Kosovo and beyond (London: Chatto and

Windus, 2000), p. I95.2 James Der Derian, 'Virtuous war/virtual theory', International Affairs 76: 4, October 2000, pp. 771-88.

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New media, new war

Yet for all the hip futurism, Der Derian's concerns can appear curiouslybackward-looking. Insufficiently sceptical of the 'good intentions' of 'humani-tarian war', Der Derian seems more exercised by what has ostensibly (and onlyrecently) been lost in action-the ability to distinguish 'the reality and virtualityof war':

As the confusion of one for the other grows, we face the danger of a new kind of traumawithout sight, drama without tragedy, where television wars and video war games blur

together. We witness this not only at the international evel, from the Gulf War to theKosovo campaign, but also on the domestic front, where two teenagers predisposed oviolence confused the video game Doom or the high school classroom. p. 1)

Though critical of the binarisms of realist IR, and intermittently reminding us

that war has always been a 'virtual reality' and that reality is invariably inflectedby the virtual, Der Derian's account nevertheless requires its own dichotomies:

virtual/virtuous; reality/virtuality; propaganda/actuality. Disarmed by the

ubiquitous invocation of a new military mantra-'All but war is simulation'-Der Derian hankers for something more solid, palpable and knowable (mostespecially the fact of death in war), even while intermittently celebrating'ambiguity', 'ambivalence' and 'uncertainty' (p. 202).

For Der Derian, one of the more troubling features of virtuous war is

precisely its disembodiment. Today's remotely guided soldier is insulated andattenuated from the business of

inflictingharm-whether

engagedin

gamesthat

place an explicit prohibition on bodily contact (death coming as pre-storedinformation on a digitized card), or dropping bombs from 15,000 feet aboveKosovo. In the future war of signs, enemy soldiers become merely 'electron-

ically signified "target[s] of opportunity"', who are all too easily 'disappeared'(p. 120). Civilian 'spectators', for their part, remotely access sanitized footage,from which the 'material facticity of the dead soldier'-the 'corporal gravitas ofwar'-is absent (p. I66).

Yet these processes of distancing and 'de-realization', though they may beintensified by digital technology, are scarcely new phenomena. For those pilotswho expressed a sense of unreality over their participation in NATO's Kosovo

campaign, one could readily find counterparts from aerial warfare of the past. AGerman pilot brought down after a bombing sortie over Leningrad in February1942 was reported captured, wandering, disoriented, around the city's streets-'he had never thought of Leningrad as a real place but only as a target on a map',related the New York Times.3 Looking further back, one can identify a numberof 'breaks' in the depersonalization of war as significant as the arrival of

airpower. The development of organized warfare itself attenuated the businessof killing by exchanging the personal combat of warriors for the clash of men in

formations. The advent of rifled firearms and cannon enhanced the capacity to

3 New York Times, 26 February 1942, cited in Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: a psychologicalhistory of the Germanfilm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 296.

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Susan L. Carruthers

kill at a distance. Indeed, the most effective killing machine in modern war is

artillery, which since the First World War has generally fired 'indirectly', with

gunners placing their fire on 'impersonal' map coordinates. Sighted thus, the

enemy may well seem every bit as insubstantial as a pixilated 'icon of

opportunity'.But surely the most significant processes in the 'depersonalization' of

warfare, those by which soldiers inflict bodily harm, are less a function of

technology than of psychology. For enemies to seem less than 'real' does not

require modern technology to distance and dehumanize them. It may be

tempting to believe that when fighting was bloody and personal it necessarilyoccasioned greater ethical awareness of war's consequences for human flesh: thecloser the combat, the greater the burden of conscience. That Rwanda's

genocide was inflicted by panga suggests that even intimate contact affords no

guarantee that bodily proximity will reveal an enemy's common humanity.That this genocide occurred in 1994 should remind us that face-to-face killingneither belongs to a distant past nor merits romanticization as a more

'authentic', and ethically engaged, way of war.If organized violence requires (and generates) strategies of dissociation, it is

no surprise that sanitization of war's visual record has been a corollary ofmodem conflict. As Der Derian is well aware, cinematography owes its paternityto military technology: war and cinema awkwardly, inextricably intertwined.For both professional soldiers and photographers, shooting wars depend on the

logistics of perception. Following Virilio, Der Derian proposes that throughoutthe twentieth century 'the military and the movie industry have been in a

technological relay race for seeing and killing the enemy while securing and

seducing the citizen' (p. I66). In wartime, civilians' 'seduction' has typicallydemanded war's disembodiment. Long before war proclaimed itself (at least

putatively) 'casualty free', 'actuality' footage was frequently required to excise

bodily suffering-or at the very least carefully to ration and aestheticize it. Inthe Second World War, it was only late in 1943 that US censors decided toallow limited publication of photographs of injured service personnel, if suitablyand

artfully composed.4 Indeed, representational practicesin wartime America

have customarily demanded obfuscation-both linguistic and imagistic-of war'scentral feature.5 This was the case not only in two 'total wars' but also duringAmerica's war in Vietnam, despite a widespread postwar insistence thattelevision reportage not only was unprecedentedly bloody but even 'lost the

4 On the rationing, and calculated elease, of images depicting war's human toll, see George Roeder, Thecensored ar: American isual xperience f World War Two (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).The excision of bodily suffering was by no means solely an American trategy. The British rade ournal,Newspaper World, amented as late as April 1945 that the War Office 'seems o pursue he policy that noBritish soldier s killed in this war and that t is all a nice neat little affair'; ited in Barbie Zelizer,Remembering oforget: Holocaust emory hrough hecamera's ye (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1998), p. 38.

5 On the obfuscation and 'redescription' f injury n war see Elaine Scarry, The body n pain: the making nd

unmaking f the world New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 2, 'The structure f war'.

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New media, new war

war'.6 As Daniel Hallin has shown, the networks were, pictorially, far from

graphic in most of their coverage and, politically, 'lopsidedly favourable' to thewar effort.7 In this case, as in others, it was only at a temporal remove, once

shooting had stopped, that Hollywood revelled in reinstating with ever greaterverisimilitude (thanks to those same SFX that lend realism to off-screen war

games) what was scrupulously screened from wartime representations.8So what, then, is distinctively new? If not the synergy between Hollywood

and the military, or the body's disappearance, then perhaps the viewer's abilityto adjudicate the authenticity of images in an age when we know all too wellthat the camera can lie? Decrying the tendency of 'information networks [to]collapse representational distinctions between fact and fiction', Der Derianseems to be bemoaning a central facet of modernity itself: that we experiencethe world through representation, suspecting that the 'real' (the original which

finds faithful mimesis) must duly lie behind or beneath the representationalscreen, but perpetually puzzled as to where precisely the demarcation lies.9 Lossof the 'reality principle' has long been a staple of commentators on technology'sdouble-edged social transformations, exemplified by Walter Lippmann's The

phantom public, n which he warned that the media-consuming masses inhabited

'pseudo environments'-similarly bemused as to what was 'real', incapable of

meaningful participation in democratic deliberation, and transformed into 'deaf

spectators'.I0Far from securing Der Derian's place in the vanguard of post-moder IR,

Virtuous war sees his wearied rejection of those bent on 'problematization'-'alittle "po-mo" can go a long way. But it can't take you home' (p. 2Io). Rebuf-

fing realism for its incapacity even to begin comprehending 'the temporal,representational, deterritorial, and potentially dangerous powers of virtualism'

(p. 209), he sets out to spin a new 'virtual theory' ('both software and hard-

ware')-more conjurer than cartographer of the 'no place of cyberspace'. Butcan this take us home, or does it ultimately return us to rather familiar terrain-with a warning against our stupefaction in the face of virtualizing technologies?

Now thedanger

ies in the media'spower

to 'substitute' ealities. With theappearanceof the global view comes the disappearance f the viewer-subject: n the immediacy of

perception, our eyes become indistinguishable rom the camera's optics, and criticalconsciousness, long with the body, goes missing. (p. 2I5)

6Perhaps he classic tatement of the case was provided by Robert Elegant, How to lose a war', Encounter57: ii, I98I, pp. 73-89.

7 Daniel Hallin, The 'uncensored ar': he media nd Vietnam Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,I989).

8 Susan L. Carruthers, The media t war: communication nd conflict n the twentieth entury Basingstoke:Macmillan, 2000), pp. 278-9.

9 This facet of modernity s particularly ell illuminated by Timothy Mitchell in Colonising gypt

(Berkeley,CA:

Universityof California Press, 1991).

0IWalter Lippmann, The phantom ublic New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925). For further examples of earlycritics of the 'virtualization' f the public sphere n an age of mass circulation of newspapers ndtelegraphy, ee Stuart Ewen, PR! A social istory fspin New York: Basic Books, 1996), ch. 4, 'Controllingchaos'.

677



Susan L. Carruthers

The problem here is surely not that virtual theory rejects 'reality'-as DerDerian fears 'crude realists' will insist-but rather that it still seems to posit a

distinction between reality and virtuality, one which the author discerns but

which may elude more gullible others. This perceptual impoverishment also

animates Virilio: 'with the "liberation of information" on the Web, what ismost lacking is meaning or, in other words, a context nto which Internet userscould put the facts and hence distinguish truth fromfalsehood. On the Web,where, as everyone knows, the terrorist temptation is constant and where the

depredations of hackers are committed with impunity in a strange state of legalindeterminacy, the difference between (true) information and (false) deceptionfades a little more each day' (p. 78). Together, they sound less like 'post-post-modem men' than thoroughly modern men.

Yet despite Virilio's concerns, the Internet may in some ways serve to

rematerialize 'virtual war'-putting bodies back into the frame by allowingthose on the receiving end of 'humanitarian war' to alert on-line audiences

(admittedly with a prior interest) to their plight. As Goran Gocic points out in

Hammond and Herman's collection, during the Kosovo campaign, the

'Internet had its own war heroes, such as Monk Sava from Decani monastery in

Kosovo' (p. 9I). For Virilio, information warfare strives to effect the 'remote

guidance of confusion' (p. 49). Yet in Kosovo, NATO's strategy of confusion-

whether a blizzard of information to member-state citizens or the purposive

bombing of Serbian television-scarcely seemed to leave Serb civilians in a state

of bewildered submission. Indeed, as Gocic points out, while NATO resortedto the decidedly antiquated medium of aerial leaflet-drops over Serbia, Serbian

anti-war protestors demonstrated greater chutzpah in their own improvisations:'Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible', read placards after an American F-I I7Awas shot down.

Were Serbian protestors-flaunting their bull's-eye t-shirts-'the enemy' as

well as the target? Against whom is 'virtuous war' mounted? For Der Derian

simulation (and the occasional Gulf or Kosovo-style enactment) ultimatelyfunctions as a new system of 'cyberdeterrence'. Wargames' 'imagineers' mayresist

attachingreal names to the

targetsof their simulated scenarios, but they

can no more disguise the identities of such thinly fictive foes than mask the

disciplinary intent of their displays of digitized virtuosity: to keep in check that

shifting cast of reputedly unruly entities 'formerly known as rogues' and secureAmerican supremacy. 'Virtuality', announces Der Derian, has become 'the

"fifth dimension" of US global hegemony' (p. xv).IIThis may be the long-range effect but, in the short term, trumpeting one's

virtue complicates the business of acknowledging an enemy. For some com-

mentators, an age that has compressed distance has also evaporated enmity.Western publics, they claim, are not only loath in the post-military era to

I Virilio's slim volume seeks to substantiate similar laim about the 'globalitarian' S-whose surveilant

mastery over space has transformed he globe into a giant panopticon.

678



New media, new war

sacrifice their own soldiers' lives but display equal squeamishness over sheddingtheir enemies' blood-or refuse even to acknowledge the targets of'smart vio-lence' as an embodied enemy. In this vein, Wesley Clark insists to Der Derianthat in 'a period when there is an increased effort of universalism, [we] see

people as people, not as the "enemy". The Serbs were not the enemy' (p. I96).And of course 'smart violence' intimates that people need not be the target at all,

only infrastructure. Reversing the neutron bomb principle, now it is ostensiblya state's hardware that bombs destroy (and its software that hacking disables),while people remain standing. Thus Jamie Shea's boast on 5 April 1999 that'We're not at war with anybody, and certainly not with the people of Yugo-slavia.'I2

Yet the legitimation of 'humanitarian violence' finds itself in a paradoxicalbind, uncertain whether it can in fact mobilize for bloodless violence without

stirring the passions of war. For Der Derian, the circle is squared by'virtualiz[ing] the enemy until all that is left as the last man is the criminalizeddemon'-individual 'villains' as the personalized targets of animosity (p. ioi).In this way, then, while NATO may have claimed not to have been at war with

anybody, its campaign was most certainly directed against somebody-SlobodanMilosevic. As Mick Hume's contribution to Degraded capability demonstrates,the 'new war' for human rights relied on invocation of an old frame: Milosevicas Hitler, and anti-Albanian abuses as 'Holocaust'. Embarking on a campaign to

expand 'universalism' by force demanded particular efforts to assert NATO's

civility and the enemy's barbarity. And not just to assert it, but to prove it. Thenew violence duly dictated some very conventional, empiricist legitimatorystrategies. Even after the fact of 'humanitarian bombing', as Virilio points out,KFOR made much of the discovery of certain Serb documents in Pristina,which purported to prove the 'meticulous planning of ethnic cleansing by the

Belgrade leaders' (p. 75). This in the same week-lest the analogy be insuffi-

ciently clear-that American media reported the retrieval from a small LA

library of the original text of the Nuremberg Laws, signed by the Fiihrerhimself-the closest approximation to a 'Hitler Order' for the Final Solution as

the Allies could find after the Second World War.With such free and loose talk of'genocide', the claim that liberal violencewas nothing personal lost credibility, and was rejected altogether by some mediacommentators who became enthusiasts for an all-out campaign to raze Serbia.Where some implied that this levelling could be effected without humans

suffering (if they dutifully stepped aside for the duration), others justified the

consequences on the grounds that all Serbs were culpable for the sins ofMilosevic. Thus Thomas Friedman opined in the New York Times: 'Like it or

not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and thestakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decadewe will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want I950? We can do

12 Cited by Ackerman and Naureckas n Hammond and Herman, Degraded apability, . 105.

679



Susan L. Carruthers

I950. You want 1389? We can do 1389' (p. Io6). All of which sounded less like'virtuous war' and more like Vietnam-where another civilizing mission

degenerated into threats of bombing back into the Stone Age, destroyingvillages to save them.

As Seth Ackerman and Jim Naureckas spell out in Degraded capability, one

corollary of NATO's campaign to brand Milosevic as a new Hitler has been thereanimation of old debates about 'collective responsibility' that marked theSecond World War. During the 'good war' Allied leaders rhetorically insistedthat the enemy was 'militarism': not the German people, nor even the Nazis in

particular. But a rather different interpretation of relations between state andcitizen animated much popular discourse that disputed the existence of the

'good German', advocating a less scrupulous stance towards the enemy. Whenit came to Germany's postwar occupation, the official language of a quarrelagainst militarism itself was dropped, as the Allied scheme to re-educate a nationin the practices of pacificity was premised on the 'collective guilt'of Germans.In like fashion, the aftermath of western intervention in the Former Yugoslaviasaw Daniel Goldhagen (author of the controversial account of Germans' enthu-siastic participation in genocidal anti-Semitism) propose Serbia's occupationand the forcible re-education of its population, since Serbs were, as a New

Republic headline had it, 'Milosevic's Willing Executioners'.I3This enthusiasm for bombing barbarians n order to civilize them suggests

that the 'humanitarian' impulse of virtuous war requires more attention than

Der Derian affords. Lust for collective punishment surely punctures the piousrhetoric that cosmopolitan publics no longer tolerate even enemy casualties: aclaim that finds little substantiation with reference to the Gulf War, whentelevised scenes of the Allied bombing of a shelter at Al-Amiriyah in Baghdaddid more to inspire calls for greater self-censorship on the part of broadcastersthan for a precipitate end to the air campaign.'4 Publics, then, may prefer the

pretence that no one gets hurt by smart bombs, but they scarcely seem incapableof stomaching casualties they don't have to see-at least when they belong tothe other side. The more telling feature of 'virtuous war' is that the values inwhose name violence is mobilized are not deemed sufficient to arouse

publicwillingness to jeopardise our lives. Indeed, the most vociferous dissent againstNATO's Kosovo campaign tended to come from those media commentatorswho feared that the vaunted objectives of the air war-to halt and reverseSerbian 'genocide' against Kosovar Albanians-would necessitate a ground war

which, however just, could scarcely be clean. The 'war for human rights' mayhave been worth killing for, but it wasn't worth dying for.

I3 New Republic ited in ibid, p. 107. Goldhagen's all for Serbia's ccupation and re-education, on thegrounds hat Serbs are now legally and morally ncompetent', was published under the title 'Germanlessons' in The Guardian, 29 April 1999, section 2, pp. 2-3.

I4 Alex Thomson, Smokescreen: he media, hecensors nd the Gu/f(Tunbridge Wells: Labumham &Spellmount, 1992), pp. 238-9. See also David Morrison, Television nd the Gulf War London: ohnLibbey, 1992).

680



New media, new war

For Ignatieff, the moral of Kosovo is that liberals must outgrow 'fables of

righteous invulnerability' and shoulder the burdens of humanitarianism more

boldly: 'Only then can we get our hands dirty. Only then can we do what is

right.'I5 For Der Derian, on the other hand, doing what is right entails a re-

imagining of states as no longer perpetually 'being-between ars'. To this end, weare entreated to embrace virtual theory as 'a powerful search engine for the

pragmatic data that can counter the daily, hourly, permanent media coupd'etat', permitting global politics to be 'imagined and potentially constituted as

becoming-different rom war' (p. 219). Quite how one practises this-or indeed atwhom this injunction is aimed-remains somewhat unclear, since Der Derian

couples a rejoinder against state-espoused techno-fetishism (technology as 'fix'to the political problem of negotiating relations of difference) with a warningthat fascism can ensue when democracies fail 'to understand and harness the

powers of new technologies' (p. I68).The danger, however, may be less a resurgent fascism than a reanimated

imperialist ethos-'humanitarian intervention' as the new White Man's Burden.Der Derian rues the spectacularization of mass-mediated politics, pointing toGoebbels and Riefenstahl as its pioneers. But the spectacularization of warstretches back much further, and has been widely practised by states boastingliberal credentials. As John Mackenzie has pointed out, imperial warfare in

nineteenth-century Britain was presented to its distant consumers in the press as

'spectacular theatre'. 6 The notion that wars have only recently assumed the

properties of 'spectator sport'-superficially engaging the attention and involve-ment of civilian audiences-seems hard to sustain.'7 The advice given, in 1938,

by Evelyn Waugh's fictive press baron to his neophyte war correspondent in

Scoop tellingly illustrates our kinship with previous generations of spectators:'The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few

sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot sideand a colourful entry into the capital. That is The Beast policy for the war.'I8Where Der Derian and Virilio suggest that we have vertiginously partedcompany with the knowable world of the past, perhaps the problem with suchfuturism is its insufficient attentiveness to

preciselyhow rooted in familiar

patterns we remain.

'5 Ignatieff, Virtual war, p. 215.

I6 John MacKenzie, Propaganda nd empire: he manipulation f British ublic pinion, 880-1960 Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1984).

17 See, for example, Ignatieff, Virtual war, p. 191.I8

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, p. 42.

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new media, new war

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