April 29 2024
I
War is a hugely overwritten policy palimpsest, where all manner of arguments are glued together from the shards that have pushed through from the sedimented layers of argumentation underneath.
For our purposes here, it’s better to state this point from the other direction and in the form of a question: What has been obscured or effaced about war in the process of this overwriting? How might their resurfacing change current understandings?
This would seem an insurmountable challenge. How do you restore erasures? One answer lies in the really-existing complexity of the war palimpsest itself. Find optics with which to recast the composite arguments being glued together today.
The kinds of complexity I am interested in offer the great virtue of having no one, singly necessary and sufficient starting point. The test of the efficacy is, do an optic’s insights stick?
What follows is a example of one set of such optics. Thereafter, I discuss how this reframes one such war, the current Israel/Palestine conflict. My over-riding interest is to say something useful about Rafah and the looming offensive.
II
What did they expect of our toil and extreme
Hunger – the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?
Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,
Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication?
Out of the heart’s sickness the spirit wrote
For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war’s worst anger,
When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense
Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….
I’d come across a World War I poet I hadn’t read before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” and the above passage..
The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminds me of an anecdote of John Ashbery, the poet:
Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s desiring—his hungering—after a dream in the end produced the perfect drawing. In contrast, Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of a different story, seemingly making the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):
Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’
I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, What can be more perfect than the infallible image that emerges, unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?
Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to both questions: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living–“Somehow together, and find this was life indeed. . .” Since when isn’t war a kind of life?, Gurney seems to ask us.
III
The notion that war is also about the irreducible particularity of living–more formally, the irreducible particularity of sudden contingency and human agency in response–would be banal, were it not for its massive erasure from today’s policy palimpsest of war.
I don’t know about you, but what I find said about Palestine/Israel compiles and stitches together every kind of statement–policy, moral, journalistic, etcetera–except those about the human complexities, individual and collective, in war that are already recorded in many novels, including some mediocre ones.
So what? Are we to wait for the inevitably nuanced novels of October 7, and even if we did, who believes they will have any impact on really-existing policy?
No, we needn’t wait.
IV
Human agency and contingency serve a much more important function than in service to novels. They are in fact a permanent–and as such, inevitable–counternarrative to existing forms of ruling policy and management. They erode anything like the authoritative statement said to hold here, now and regardless.They are, I believe, the key global counternarrative to policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised agency and contingency out of their macro-design narratives and scenarios.
Don’t confuse contingencies and agency for a grand narrative about human survival and persistence. Nor is the fact that humans respond to exogenous surprises and shocks in endogenously surprising and shocking ways a different grand narrative–in this case about there being different kinds of oppressors and oppressed or there being oppressors (oppressed) on some dimensions while oppressed (oppressors) on others. The counternarrative complications for policy and management go beyond that of any insider/outsider pluralism–actually beyond any creed and -ism.
V
How so?
Here we have a global counternarrative that humans insist on human agency even if (precisely because) their formal and informal authorities deny intervening contingencies entail doing otherwise. This entails Palestinians being in variable tension with Hamas. This entails IDF personnel being in variable tension with Israeli politicians and publics. This means that going no further than the terms Palestinians, Hamas, IDF, Israeli and like is unhelpful, probably harmful. Why? Because the analytic priority follows from the global context that the counternarrative imposes on all forms of authority.
This means that what happens in Rafah is global precisely because the granular levels at which really-existing practices of resistance and negotiation evolve there are among the practices that drive modifications of this planet-wide counternarrative. How could Rafah not be a global issue for any person whose living is war and whose war is living?
Note in conclusion that the preceding is not some a priori universal but rather decidedly empirical generalization.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 