“Strengthening Cultural War Studies”
Introduction to Culture, Trauma and Conflict: Cultural Studies Perspectives on War (Cambridge Scholars Publishing)
by Nico Carpentier
An excerpt of Nico Carpentier’s essay appears below.
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About the Author

Nico Carpentier is an assistant professor at the Communication Studies Departments of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels—VUB) and the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel (Catholic University of Brussels - KUB).

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Construction of the Enemy: Although each war has its own history, wars are nevertheless built on remarkably similar ideological mappings. The series of events that compose a war appear to be highly elusive; but the core ideological models that structures war tend to be stable. As Keen put it: “In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death, and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them.”

Both sides present their violent practices as well-considered, unavoidable, and necessary. The construction of the Enemy is accompanied by the construction of the Self as antagonistic to the Enemy's identity. Not only is the radical otherness of the Enemy emphasized, but also the Enemy is presented as a threat to “our own” identity. Ironically, the identity of the Enemy as a constitutive outside is indispensable to the construction of the identity of the Self, as the evilness of the Enemy is a necessary condition for the articulation of the goodness of the Self.

The Victim is intrinsically linked to the identity of the Self and the Enemy, as its being victimized contributes to the construction of the evilness of the Enemy. The Self’s goodness emanates not only from the willingness to fight this evilness, but also from the attempts to rescue the Victim. These three discursive positions – Self, Enemy and Victim – together form the core structure of the ideological model of war.

The ideological model of war

War, i.e. armed conflict between organized political groups, is still an omnipresent phenomenon. In the meantime, though, despite the fact it has been “the universal norm in human history” (Michael Howard 2001), its highly disruptive and destructive nature has strongly decreased its social respectability and acceptability.

Despite a theoretical and ethical consensus surrounding the desirability of structural peace, its implementation has proven difficult—witness the high number and horrible intensity of armed conflicts and genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries. The principled repulsion of war seems to become easily translated into a discourse about the acceptability of war in the last instance. It is precisely this paradox between the consensus surrounding the desirability of structural peace—and the apparent unavoidability of armed conflict that legitimizes its continued analysis.

The societal impact of war is not restricted to (semi-)military personnel; entire nations become symbolically engaged in this process of de-civilization. The loss of humanity is not confined to the actual battlefield sites; war tends to cannibalize on the social and absorb it. War touches the core of our politics, economics and cultures.

As Aeschylus put it, the suspension of democracy and human rights often follows quite rapidly. In the War and the media collection, Aijaz Ahmad (2005) for instance points to what he calls the domestic dimension of the “war on terrorism”, which takes surveillance “to new extremes in an otherwise democratic country.” In addition, the economic and financial structure of a nation is affected.

During wartime, and especially during prolonged periods of conflict, the importance of the already important industrial-military complex increases–weighing heavily on the public purse.
And finally, war affects the cultures of the warring parties. The edges of imagined communities at war, which are blurred in more normal circumstances, become impenetrable frontiers between “us” and “them”, between the Self and the Enemy. All eyes become strongly focused on the (political) center, and citizen-soldiers voluntarily subject themselves to the leadership of a small political-military elite.

There is little room for internal differences, as illustrated in the famous words of the German Emperor Wilhelm, in claiming during the First World War that he no longer wanted to hear of different political parties, only of Germans. U.S. President, George Bush, used an updated version of this dictum in his address to the Joint Session of Congress and the American People on September 20, 2001, when he said: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

These examples show the crucial role that ideology—defined as sets of ideas that dominate a social formation—plays in generating internal cohesion and in turning an adversary into the Enemy. This transformation is supported by a set of discourses, articulating the identities of all parties involved. Together they form an ideological model that has structured most of the interstate wars in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Although each war has its own history and context which makes it unique, wars are nevertheless built on remarkably similar ideological mappings. So, on the one hand, the complex series of events that compose a war appear to be highly elusive and impossible to represent in their entirety; but on the other hand, the core ideological models that have structured wars in past decades tend to be fairly stable and compatible.

This ideological model of war is crucial to understanding modern warfare, as its core structure allows us to better understand (and counteract) the discourses, rhetorics and narrations of war. As Keen (1986) put it: “in the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them.”

This of course does not imply that the processes of mediation and representation completely overtake the practices and materiality of war (and of killing). But in the (20th and) 21st century, interstate war in particular has become a political transgression which requires a discursive build-up to legitimize the use of extreme military violence, all of which makes it necessary to (re)construct this ideological model of war.

For this (re)construction, we first turn to Galtung (see, for instance, Galtung and Vincent 1992) who, from a Peace Studies perspective, has pointed to the dichotomized nature of these discourses, grounded by the key binary opposition of good and evil. The variations of the good/evil dichotomy that structure the identities of both Self and Enemy are manifold: just/unjust, innocent/guilty, rational/irrational, civilized/barbaric, organized/chaotic, superior to technology/part of technology, human/animal-machine, united/fragmented, heroic/cowardly and determined/insecure.

Both sides present their violent practices as focused, well-considered, purposeful, unavoidable, and necessary. Both sides construct their own (inversed) ideological model of war. The construction of the Enemy is accompanied by the construction of the identity of the Self as clearly antagonistic to the Enemy's identity. In this process, not only is the radical otherness of the Enemy emphasized, but also the Enemy is presented as a threat to “our own” identity. Ironically, the identity of the Enemy as a constitutive outside is indispensable to the construction of the identity of the Self, as the evilness of the Enemy is a necessary condition for the articulation of the goodness of the Self.

Apart from the identities of the Self and the Enemy, there is a third discursive position—that of the Victim—which is crucial to the ideological model of war. Here it is important to keep LaCapra’s words in mind: “‘Victim’ is not a psychological category. It is, in variable ways, a social, political, and ethical category.”

The identity of the Victim may range from abstract notions, such as world peace or world security, to more concrete notions, such as a people, a minority, or another nation. In some cases the Self becomes conflated with the Victim, for instance when the Self is being attacked by the Enemy. For instance, in the case of the Cyprus conflict, where Turkey invaded the island in 1974 and occupied more than one third of the island’s territory, the Greek Cypriot Self is often articulated as Victim of this invasion.

In other instances the Victim is detached from the Enemy, when a regime is seen to (preferably brutally) oppress its “own” people, or when in intra-state or civil wars the nation or people become divided into warring factions. An example here is the 2003 Iraqi War, where the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the ruling Ba’ath party was defined as victimizing the Iraqi people (and especially the Shiites and Kurds), and was simultaneously seen as a threat to world security because of its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The Victim is intrinsically linked to the identity of the Self and the Enemy, as its being victimized contributes to the construction of the evilness of the Enemy. The Self’s goodness emanates not only from the willingness to fight this evilness, but also from the attempts to rescue the Victim. These three discursive positions—Self, Enemy and Victim —together form the core structure of the ideological model of war. In this model, the Self and the Enemy are juxtaposed, and encircled by the dichotomies that structure their identities in an intimate relationship with the Victim.

As war is considered to be a very specific condition, threatening the existence of numerous human beings and possibly even the survival of the state itself, it is not sufficient to legitimate the war as such. Next to military victory, mobilization of support from the “home front” (national unity) is a primary political objective legitimating hegemonic policies.

In addition to censorship, which aims to restrict the circulation of discourses, an instrument that is widely used for the purpose of hegemonization is, of course, propaganda. Characteristically, it is planned by organized groups, which can range from a small number of special advisors to large bureaucratic organizations responsible for propaganda and counter-propaganda efforts.

This distinguishes it from hegemony, which is the relatively rigid but ultimately unstable result of a negotiative societal process determining the horizon of our thought within a specific social and temporal setting. Although propaganda can be instrumental in establishing hegemony, the societal construction of the collective will to fight a war transcends all propaganda efforts.

More neutral definitions of ideology—as a set of ideas that dominate a social formation—allow for an approach that defines propaganda as a persuasive act with a more complex relationship towards truthfulness. Taylor (1995) defines propaganda as the use of communication “to convey a message, an idea, an ideology that is designed primarily to serve the self-interests of the person or people doing the communicating.”

Recognizing pain, memory and trauma

The focus on ideology and representation has no ambition to ignore the materiality of war. War impacts on human bodies with almost unimaginable force. It destroys or mutilates them. It causes pain to them, and traumatizes them. The (individual) trauma is not only physical, but also psychological, well exemplified in the phenomenon of shell shock. Erikson (1976) defines this individual trauma as “a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal forces that one cannot react to it efficiently.”

But the impact of war does not end here. War does not start with the onset of actual hostilities. First the Enemy-Other needs to be created, which in principle requires painful detachment of that Enemy from the global Self (in other words from humanity), and in which ideology provides the anesthesia that blocks the pain of detachment. This preparation also has a material component. Preparing for war requires a specific mindset, which is generated through a series of rituals. For soldiers this is achieved through military training, but civilians also engage in the performance of “homeland security” rituals.

Such (self-) disciplining practices are strongly reminiscent of Foucault’s (1978) descriptions in Discipline and Punish, as the rituals involved act directly on the bodies of the soldiers and the civilians. The soldiers in particular are molded to become the docile killing bodies that will carry out the actual elimination of the Enemy.

War does not end when hostilities cease. The damaged and mutilated bodies remain. Memories of the disappeared bodies also remain, in some cases fed by institutionalized hope. War is a dislocation that disrupts social and cultural structures, and that continues to do so after the violence ends. It is “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality”.