Well, I’m back at the keyboard, but only for a short time each morning before the NC sun shuts my brain down for the rest of the day. Over the next few AMs. I’ll be throwing out some reflections on two things: my family get-together in Michigan, and a book I finished while I was on that trip. The book was War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, by Miguel De Landa.

Sherry’s parents live outside of Deerfield, Michigan (pop. 3,000), half an hour from Toledo. It’s flat, ramping slowly down into Lake Erie to the East. Agribusiness has contracts with all the local growers; and the landscape is large, big sky, long views out over the fields of corn, cabbages, soy beans, tomatoes. Wind is different in open spaces like this, something both larger and more personal than wind is in tighter, more urban spaces. The open-ness and general quiet-ness of the landscape is deceptively pastoral. I ride Sherry’s mom’s (Judy’s) bike to town one day to stretch out a bit; and I find myself involuntarily inhaling the chemical stench of the latest appilcation — by wide spray wings pulled behind tractors — of some pesticide. It’s everywhere; and I wonder how this affects people who have been breathing this most of their lives. That’s not on anyone’s mind here, though.

Michigan is in very deep financial shit. We all are, but it’s pretty pronounced there right now with soaring unemployment and commercial space going empty everywhere you turn. Deerfield has a lot of vacant small business properties. We were less than an hour from Detroit, but Deerfield is whitefolk country. Desperation now is evolving person by person into something far more bitter than fearful, and dangerous I suspect.

The family get-together will be in a rented house on Pleasant Lake, an hour and a half west of Deerfield, between Jackson and a small town called Munith. Sherry and I, her dad (Larry) and mom (Judy), our daughter-in-law Priscilla and her 11-month old, Alyssia. Sherry’s brothers (Steve and Tim) will be in and out of the house with us over the week, with their clans.

This is how we stay connected in a deracinated society. I have no idea how much fossil energy it takes to maintain relations in a car-centric culture. Parents’ health starts sliding downhill, and we are obliged by custom and affection to spend time with them while we can. Family gets married; family has death; it’s all family. Steve lives in Michigan, near Detroit. Tim lives in Kentucky. Sherry lives in North Carolina.

In December, we’ll visit my family. My mom is 85 this August. My two full-siblings and I are like Sherry’s family, exploded away from a center in Hot Springs, Arkansas. My sister, Celia, is still there. My brother, Glen, is rebuilding his bait camp (after the last hurricane) in Galveston. I’m out here in North Carolina.

Every 4th of July, every Easter, every Thanksgiving and Christmas, millions of us are burning down the highways to make these periodic contacts, these reaffirmations of kinship across impossible distances. Understood as obligation and care and the pleasure of seeing loved ones, this appropriation of time and space is not seen primarily as either necessity or luxury, in the sense that necessity and luxury are often morally counterposed to one another.

Jackson, Michigan is on its heels. Boarded up buildings. Plenty of idle, surly people. And the main economic motor of Jackson appears to be a giant prison complex. Some folks can fill up the beds, others can grab jobs as guards. Between Jackson and Munith there are a lot of gorgeous farms nestled in the rolling hills, where you can spot deer in the fields pretty much any day you make the drive. Many of these farms are for sale.

We arrive at the lake on the 4th of July. Flags all over the lake, even on the jet skis. Many, many party barges, much much alcohol. A couple of boats fly confederate flags right alongside the American flag. These are the banners of an intractable and highly gendered “white” sense of victimhood. Confederate flags. In Michigan.

There was a fireworks display that night on the lake, launched mostly from an island in the center of the lake. Some impressive pyrotechnics with the shapes and colors. It’s a celebration of nationalist militarism. On the trip up from North Carolina we note how many bridges and highways are named after military men, dead ones.

For the rest of the trip, after the 4th, the lake became far more sparsley populated and far more serene. We caught fish.

Bass. Bluegill. Perch.

We caught a lot of fish. Over the next few days, the family landed over 100 eating-sized fish; and with the exception of about ten, I cleaned them all. I like catching fish. I like eating fish. To get from A to B, you have to clean fish, whether you could say you like to or not. Clean 90, and you begin to know why people want other people to clean fish. You also just get a whiff of the work life of a lot of people who do, in fact, clean fish… as wage labor mostly. Money is the way people who don’t want to clean their own fish get other people to clean fish most of their waking lives. Couldn’t resist a money point, could I?

There’s also a cooking phase with the fish, which I did exclusively, and which I enjoy quite a bit. Fried crispy and brown.

Second day at the lake, my gall bladder attacked me, then the third day, too. Best I could do at times was to go upstairs, loaded with anaglesics, and lay down alone. That’s when I picked up the De Landa book I’d been neglecting to finish.

If you decide to read this book — and I recommend it, for what that’s worth — then be aware that it states its own intent to be different enough to be difficult in the reading. De Landa is a philosopher, influenced a great deal in this book by DeLeuze, another philosopher. A key DeLeuzian concept in the book is “the machinic phylum.” In De Landa’s words:

These include all processes in which a group of previously disconnected elements suddenly reaches a critical point at which they begin to “cooperate” to form a higher level entity.

This refers to everything from water changing from liquid to ice to the organization of insect colonies.

The term “machinic phylum” is unfortunate, at least inasmuch as this cognate translates itself onto our everyday notions of machines. The reader has to take some time to intentionally assimilate the DeLeuzian meaning and to concentrate past the dominant culutural impressino each time she encounters the word. This term shares the tendency to confuse with other terms, like “nationalism” in the ocntext of the Black freedom movement, for example, and the marxian term “fetishism,” which conjures up something vaguely sexual for most modern audiences.

The term is doubly unfortunate because De Landa is discussing, at very great length, technological development in the evolution of warfare, which predisposes us to think about machines at the same time that we are obliged to spearate out the meaning of the term “machinic phylum,” that is manifest in many situations where machines have nothing to do with what’s going on (molecular processes, eg). One could even say the same thing about the word “phylum,” since for many readers this category is related to differentiations in biology.

Machinic phylum in the “emergent culture glossary” is described thus:

1: There are two different meanings of the term, in its more general sense, it refers to any process in which order emerges out of chaos as a result of its nonlinear dynamics, and by the other hand is “the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying in singularities.” The machine phylum is not a life-force, since is older than life, and constitutes a form of non-organic life. Nevertheless, the self-organization of chemical clocks, multi-cellular organisms or nest-building insect colonies is deeply related to the Machinic phylum.

2: The speed of the predator relative to the one of its pray is the only that counts, nothing about the absolute velocities of each of them is necessary to understand the animal machinery of the predator-pray system; the coupled rates where the increase in the speed of a predator provokes a response in the prey’s locomotive machinery, represents an important aspect in the development of the biological Machinic phylum. From the moment that the “mouse” appeared as an interface between the user and the computer, it may be said that the “machinic phylum” cross between humans and computers for the very first time. This cross is: interactivity, transforming the screen in the “information space” where humans can see correspondence between the movements of the “mouse” and the pointer displayed in the screen. The Reynolds numbers — dimensionless numbers used to identify singularities in self-organizing processes — have a very intimate connection with the machinic phylum, because this numbers are thresholds of “relative speeds” which reveal relations between regions, across scales and flowing media. A Reynolds number is a ratio of inertial to viscous forces. For ex. “A sperm would go nowhere if it tried to swim like a whale because, given its low Reynolds number, it cannot employ the inertia of the water to propel itself… For similar reasons a gnat cannot glide like an eagle.”

3: “The idea of a “machinic phylum” would then be that, beyond biological lineages, we are also related to non-living creatures (winds and flames, lava and rocks) through common “body-plans” involving similar self-organizing and combinatorial processes. As if one and the same material “phylum” could be “folded and stretched” to yield all the different structures that inhabit our universe”.

De Landa uses complexity/chaos theory — which tracks non-linear dynamical systems through an observable series of events…. turbulence, singularity, self-organization — to observe the temporal cycle of this machinic phylum in the development of warfare in history. He admits that the theory of machinic phylum is demonstrable — for now — only in molecular activity, the lives of cells, insect colonies, etc., and that his adoption of the MP point of view to study war in history is metaphorical, a hermaneutic of analogy, untested by a hermaneutic of suspicion. With this disclaimer, he avoids the accusation that he has been evasive on the subject of power (as Hornborg accused the resilience theorists when they attempt to employ a strictly natural science language to describe social phenomena). In fact, De Landa accuses Baudrillard, at one point, of just this evasion. Machinic phylum, by his own admission, serves as a new lens, not some last word.

For myself, I’m not so sure there is an either-or porposition here; and I suspect neither does De Landa, or he wouldn’t have written an entire book positing the implications of this point-of-view.

Philosophically, his descriptions of the machinic phylum are anti-platonic. Emergent reality does not bend with teleologocial certainty toward some omnipresent ideal; it is “assembled piecemeal,” contingently in time and space. (God is creative, not a watchmaker.)

Enough of this, then, let’s look at De Landa’s references to war.

Page 8:

Critical points in the growth of the urban masses are known to have played a role in triggering wars throughout modern history.

REMARK: Did warfare play a formative premodern role in the initial development of proto-urban concentrations?

FOLLOW UP REMARK: Is war male?

These are both speculative remarks; and I expect the gender question to trigger some reactive anti-essentialism. The former question has gender implications as well, but the question raised by De Landa’s treatment is whether the city developed as defense or offense. Defense of settled land from nomadic raiders, for example. Or as the logisitcal basis for offensive military forays. We can’t know, of course, but considering the possibility of each is pretty interesting. In one recent case, WWII, the sanguine Soviet forced-march into modernity under Stalin in the 20s and 30s was explicitly a preparation for war (though defensive at first, the important thing here is the centrality of logistics).

De Landa analyzes what he identifies as four levels of war: weapons, tactics, strategy, and logistics. Each progresses through greater levels of complexity, and is dependent on its antecedents. I would argue that he skipped the campaign-level, intermediate between tactics (to win battles) and strategy (to win wars), but I don’t want that quibble to hijack a thread.

Because warfare is a form of competitive antagonism, it is under constant competitive pressure to evolve.

De Landa sees “arms race” analogs in nature, and calls this dynamic part of the machinic phylum. In a forest scorched by fire, insectivores feast on the green grasshoppers… until a darker, more well-camouflaged variety evolves in response to this pressure. Measure, counter-measure, counter to the counter-measure. In warfare, the arms race is not metaphorical. An iron stabbing sword stimulates a shield in response. The shield stimulates a steel slashing sword that comes in from the side. Then there is cavalry (a horse is now involved). To defend against cavalry, we see vertical foritfications, which stimulate catapults, then cannons… and so it goes. Arms races are not particularly original material; but De Landa uses his machinic phylum perspective to seek out the singularities in this process — those points at which history pivots decisively, destabilizes the old paradigm, then self-organizes a new paradigm of relative stability. Rifling gun barrels qualifies as a very deep singularity in the development of warfare. Decentralized electronic communications is another. Radar.

My own biases and preoccupations lead me to an “enemy dynamic” in all this: the tendency to see the world as filled with enemies, as well as the corresponding tendency to assume that others are enemies until proven innocent. De Landa reinforces my preoccupations in this book by showing several key ways in which the actual arms-race has been formative of urbanization, generally, and industrial capitalism specifically.

In the sub-chapter “Logistics” (page 105-6), he writes (De, you will jump up and down when you read what he says about militarism and Taylorization):

If we think tactics is the art of assembling men and weapons in order to win battles, and of strategy is the art of assembling battles to win wars, then logistics could be defined as the art of assembling war and the agricultural, economic and industrial resources that make it possible. If a war machine could be said to have a body, then tactics would represent the muscles and strategy the brain, while logistics would be the machine’s digestive and circulatory systems: the procurement and supply networks that distribute resources throughout an army’s body. The nature of the logistic systems varies depending on several factors. Some of them refer to the nature of the tactical and strategic components of the war machine, whether, for instance, the tactical component is assembled as a clockwork, a motor, or a radio-based network. [De Landa cites these warfighting epistemes earlier in the book, showing how these analogies for warfighting organizations were, in fact, ideas that provoked and participated in "singularities" of military evolution. -SG]

Other factors are internal to a logistic system, the kind of “fuel” that it must carry through its circuits, for example. Up to the end of the last century the two main elements circulating through logistic networks were grain and fodder, the fuel for men and their horses. Starting in World War I, the emphasis switched to ammunition and POL (petrol, oil and lubricants), affecting as we will see, the very nature of logistics. But whether what circulates through the war machine’s veins is bread and fodder, or aluminum, plutonium, and electronic chips, it is the logistic network that regulates the transportation of these sources throughout an army’s body.

Several aspects of logistics have already been analyzed. I mentioned, for instance, that the organization of a fortified town under seige constituted a vast logistic enterprise for regulating the traffic and rationing of men and supplies needed to maintain a sustained resistance. Another aspect presented concerned how these logistic needs multiplied as the fortified walls dematerialized in the form of radar curtains, the electronic walls of the continental fortresses. In relation to the problems of weapons procurement, the example was given of the way in which American military engineers, following the lead of their eighteenth century French counterparts introduced standardization and routinization in the production methods of their time [emphasis added]. By establishing and enforcing standards, the Army was able to guarantee a perfect interchangeability of the components of firearms, thus solving a crucial logistic problem: the circulation of spare parts for the maintenance of arsenals in peace and wartime. Another of the logistic problems already presented was a target for the military drive toward uniformity in weapons production: the procurement and supply of human skilled labor. To lessen its dependence on manpower, the military increasingly effected a transference of knowledge from the worker’s body to the hardware of machines and to the software of managment practices. [And so the military, with its disciplinary earnestness, seeks to resolve the problems hiding in Mr. Dunbar's number. -SG]

This was the so-called process of the rationalization of labor, beginning in early nineteenth-century armories and culminating a century later in the time-and-motion studies and scientific management theories of Frederick Taylor, the product of his experiences in U.S. arsenals. The imposition of a command structure on the production process may be seen as an expression of a kind of logistic rationality. And, indeed, if “logistic rationality” is defined as the approach to labor management that maximizes control at the top, at the expense and the degradation of the reservoir of human skills, then Taylorism is the most rational choice. [An idea which entranced Lenin, and sent the Soviet Union on its crash program in "progress", imitating its antagonist's worst practices. -SG] Similarly, if one defines “tactical rationality” as the approach to information management that maximizes certainty at the top [emphasis added], at the expense of trust and morale at the bottom, then centralized command systems are the most rational choice. Finally, if one defines strategic rationality as the approach to crisis management that maximizes unilateral gains at the expense of negotiation and cooperation, then a zero-sum view of nuclear strategy is the most rational choice.

This geneology of Taylorism alone made the book worth the time to read it. There is a lot more, though… a lot of precious stones in there.

Napolean gave critical support to the development of the canned food industry. Steinbeck wrote about it, about sardine canneries. There’s that cleaning-your-own-fish point again.

Galileo, it turns out, made his discoveries regarding inertia and velocities while designing fortification for Padua.

When I wrote Sex & War, and De remembers some of our conversations then, I was not preoccupied at all with the question that Publisher’s Weekly seemed to find at the core of the book:

The notion that war is intrinsic to man’s nature is dealt a powerful setback in Stan Goff’s Sex and War. Goff, a former Special Forces sergeant, argues persuasively that rather than being born that way, men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power.

I actually went to a fair amount of trouble to sideline the nature-nurture dichotomy. The crux was that masculinity, violence, and the military have culturally co-evolved. The gender question was inevitable, and so the nature-nurture fight is never far behind. I am (and was) far more interested in real questions instead of these impossible dichotomies, in particular the question of how it is to be a male in this particular society at this particular time. Radical feminism is a crtitical perspective through which to ask that question, and I used it; but that does not mean it was a book designed to raise debates about radical feminism itself, however one might like to try reducing it. Radical feminism was not afraid to problematize men, and we needed then, as we need now, to be problematized.

In trying to get our heads around something like the co-evolution of masculinity, violence, and the military, another question is raised: Which is the more formative force in this evolution? My own bias is to say that military institutions themselves are the carriers of a uniquely-coded masculinity, and that the material immoveability of the actually-existing military is far more formative in, and reproductive of, our thinking than we’d care to believe.

De Landa’s book actually provides a goodly number of historical examples of military-institution as meme-vector.

De Landa, as might be expected from someone looking into Taylorization, had something to say about deskilling… which goes outside the factory into the army. The process of mechanization, then computerization, etc., of weapons and warfare is seen as a progressive “migration” of decision-making from the human to the technology. The Holy Grail at the end of this quest is, of course, weapons that can “think,” that is, travel, seek out human quarry, and kill them. Without human control. While this might bring to mind the “Terminator” flicks for us (and be laughed off), there are real people with real degrees in real think tanks that work for the real military who study this very idea, operating as if it were possible. This dangerous level of abstraction is connected historically to the development of war-gaming, a subject I will let De Landa handle in depth — with its terrible nulcear risks — when readers check out his book.

DARPA’s fantasists aside, warfare presupposes human decision-makers in an inter-human antagonism… at some level. This paradox hasn’t prevented scientists in the pay of the state — often themselves enthralled with their own God-likeness — from attempting this leap from today’s smart technology (which operates like an idiot-savant) to hermaneutically-armed killer-computers, real thinking machines.

Computers can calculate at every high levels, well beyond human calculation capacity. Yet the attempt to create computers that can do the presumably simple task of interpreting between two languages has not fared well. The complexity of culturally-inscribed signs, and the deeply symbolic character of those signs, are still out of reach. The inability to understand this was central to the failures of Rumsfeld’s military adventures, his metrics equations.

No reactive Luddism here. Under-estimating or under-valuing the savant in computers (and exclusivley focusing on the idiot) is little more than projecting a moral delusion on technology…. the Deuteronomical delusion that what we think is right will automatically be rewarded and what we think is wrong will be punished.

When we drove back from Michigan, we had a GPS on the dashboard. I was born in 1951. To me, that GPS is what we called FM in the army (fuken magic). A four-by-three-inch monitor on the dashboard communicated with sattelites, showed me real-time representations of the route, and gave me voice and text instructions about where to turn. Pictures. Placenames. Over 700 miles of it. That’s not something we should underestimate. (Nor the fact that the technology, like the internet itself — a military creation, can jump beyond centralized control.)

The twin counter-delusion of DARPA God-complexers and many demoralized opposition paranoiacs is that humans can be rendered irrelevant, that absolute power in achievable, and that the substrates of this technological development are some kind of externality. These calculating machines rely — as all things do — on flows of energy and matter that, as flows, are not infinitley available to us.

Thew world’s not ending now, with a bang or a whimper… hopefully.

New singularities are always on the way.

De Landa uses his history of these co-developments as context for explicating modern warfighting, and the warfighting of the immediate future. But because he has taken this intentionally dislocated perspective, he ends up describing a lot more, much for those of us who try to keep adding pieces to the puzzle on this business of agriculture, society, technology, personhood.

Here is my last teaser quote, this one from pages 29-30, on artisans and modernity:

First, there is the question of raw materials. Most metals have resided within the earth for its entire 4.6 billion year history. Yet, if iron or copper had remained locked within the planet’s metallic core or been dispersed throughout its surface, they would not have so decisively affected human history. These metals had to migrate upward and then become concentrated as much as a million times greater than their original distribution. Metal deposits are in a sense created by self-organized refineries: magma flows transport them to the surface where a strong temperature gradient allows them to sort themselves out by their singularities (that is, as each metal crystallizes out following a particular order). Networks of fractures in surface rocks (themselves a prduct of singularity: the bifircation between elastic and plastic states) assist the process of concentration and give the deposits their familiar vein form. The artisan must locate these deposits by deciphering changes in the earth’s surface through such tell-tale signs as the staining of rocks by traces of the brightly colored minerals accompanying some metals. Once located, the artisan follows these veins by tunneling right along them…

… …

…[page 31] In the early nineteenth century, the sensual relationship to matter, so integral a part of the artisan’s craft, was gradually replaced by mechanized production. We are all familiar with the differences between the idiosyncratic form of an object manufactured by hand and the standardized form of a mass-produced object. What is less well known is that the original impetus for this change in production methods was not of civilian, but of military origin. It was in French and American armories that standardization and routinization of manufacturing practices was first introduced… … Behind this drive to uniformity were needs of a logistic nature, involving problems of weapon repair, procurement, and supply.

Agriculture is the very basis of any logistic. That’s something we ought to get our heads way, way around.

I know this is a kind of all-over-the-map commentary, but I’m fishing for more midrashes on the important parts of this book.

Speaking to fellow church-folk, for me, it validates my belief that God is creative, and that our own creativities are reflections (in God’s image) of God in us. In that same cosmology, the universe, Creation, is not dead as many would have it, but very alive right down to the last particle. God’s breath inhabits all matter. DeLanda’s icily detached description only dramatizes the terrible broken-ness of a world inhabited by “enemies”… who we are commanded to care for.

De Landa, at his most clinical, can not avoid problematizing city, empire, civilization.

Good book.

End of the trip was marred by a feverish 11-month old, but we all got through it okay. Everyone safe at home.