James Der Derian

Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War

A case for a poststructuralist approach intelligence theory and surveillance practice the intertextual power of international intrigue reading the national security culture and terrorism the terrorist discourse - signs, states and systems of global political violence the (s)pace of international relations S/N - international theory, Balkanization and the New World Order Cyberwar, videogames and the Gulf War syndrome.

The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed

Against the neorealist claim that the “reflectivist” or postmodernist approach is a dead-end unless it merges with the “rationalist” conception of research programs, this essay argues that new technological and representational practices in world politics require not synthesis but theoretical heterogeneity to comprehend the rise of chronopolitics over geopolitics. The theoretical approaches of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Virilio are drawn upon to investigate three global forces in particular: simulation, surveillance, and speed. They have eluded the traditional and re-formed delimitations of the international relations field—the geopolitics of realism, structural political economy of neorealism, and neoliberal institutionalism—because their power is more “real” in time than space, it comes from an exchange of signs rather than goods, and it is transparent and diffuse rather than material and discrete. This essay offers an alternative, poststructuralist map to plot how these and other new forces are transforming the traditional boundaries in international relations between self and other, domestic and international, war and peace.

Virtuous War/Virtual Theory

Strategic discourse and the use of force in the twentieth century have become increasingly virtual. Leading the way, as the dominant actor in global politics, is the United States, whose diplomatic and military policies are now based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compellence that could best be described as virtuous war. At the cyborg heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance—with no or minimal casualties. Using networked information and virtual technologies to bring ‘there’ here in real time and with near-verisimilitude, virtuous war exercized a comparative as well as a strategic advantage for the digitally advanced. It has already become the ‘fifth dimension’ of US global hegemony, with a very real gap opening between technological capability and strategic value on the one side, and theoretical understanding and ethical awareness on the other. There is a clear and present need to develop a virtual theory that can assess the perils and promises of this intimate relationship between modes of representation and violence.

Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos

As verb, code and historical method, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolically intimidating and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal, political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaning of terrorism has proven more elusive. After the Cold War terror mutated from a logic of deterrence based on a nuclear balance of terror into a new imbalance of terror based on a mimetic fear and an asymmetrical willingness and capacity to destroy the other without the formalities of war. This imbalance is furthered by the multiple media, which transmit powerful images as well as triggering pathological responses to the terrorist event. Thanks to the immediacy of television, the internet and other networked information technology, we see terrorism everywhere in real time, all the time. In turn, terrorism has taken on an iconic, fetishised and, most significantly, highly optical character.As verb, code and historical method, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolically intimidating and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal, political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaning of terrorism has proven more elusive. After the Cold War terror mutated from a logic of deterrence based on a nuclear balance of terror into a new imbalance of terror based on a mimetic fear and an asymmetrical willingness and capacity to destroy the other without the formalities of war. This imbalance is furthered by the multiple media, which transmit powerful images as well as triggering pathological responses to the terrorist event. Thanks to the immediacy of television, the internet and other networked information technology, we see terrorism everywhere in real time, all the time. In turn, terrorism has taken on an iconic, fetishised and, most significantly, highly o...

The Importance of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory

In oppositions such as meaning/form, soul/body, intuition/ expression, literal/metaphorical, nature/culture, intelligible/ sensible, positive/negative, transcendental/empirical, serious/ nonserious, the superior term belongs to the logos and is a higher presence; the inferior term marks a fall. Logocentrism thus assumes the priority of the first term and conceives the second in relation to it, as a complication, a negation, a manifestation, a disruption of the first.1

Now We Are All Avatars

The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war, depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the informant. Estrangement from and entanglement with the other become key variables for assessing the anti-war impact of a film.The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war, depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the informant. Estrangement from and entanglement with the other become key variables for assessing the anti-war impact of a film.

Global Events, National Security, and Virtual Theory

If Y2K will be remembered as the virtual accident that did not happen, Y2K+1 looks to be the real thing. First there was the domestic accident of the United States (US) presidential election, in which (voting) machines were injudicially deemed to be more competent than (counting) humans. The new administration was almost immediately beset by a series of international accidents. These accidents were distinguished by an accelerated shift from particular incidents into what I call ‘global events’, a state of affairs in which the interaction of multiple state actors, complex military systems, and networked information technologies produce the image of a security crisis. A short list of these recent global events would include: a US submarine executes an emergency surfacing drill off the coast of Hawaii and a Japanese fishing trawler is sunk. A US EP-3E Aries II aircraft on a routine reconnaissance flight is in a mid-air collision with a Chinese fighter plane; the Chinese pilot dies and the 24 US crewmembers are detained for eleven days after an emergency landing on the Chinese island of Hainan. A CIA-contracted surveillance plane

9/11 and Its Consequences for the Discipline

During my preparation for this essay,1 the second anniversary of the 9/1 1 terrorist attack was being marked across the United States by ceremonies of remembrance, religious services, and 24-hour television programming. This was as it should be, to honor the dead, to tend to the wounded in spirit, and to recognize the need for understanding. But between our desire and our capacity to comprehend a world after 9/11, a vast gulf seems to have opened, and two years later, with global terrorism still a threat and Iraq a deepening quagmire, the gap shows little sign of closing, in the practice as well as in the discipline of international relations. To bridge this abyss, between an unspeakable act and unthinkable consequences, between past terror and the present insecurities, it will take more than memorials and public ceremonies (like New York Citys Mayor Bloombergs »apolitical« decision on 9/11+1 to read only borrowed speeches from the past), loopedviewings of terrorist attacks and military counter-attacks (the mind-numbing option of the major network and cable channels on 9/1 1+2), or a rash of docudramas (like the tendentious, »DC 9/11: Time of Crisis«, in which President Bush declares, »If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me«). It will take more than incarcerating suspected terrorists without public hearings, infringing on the civil liberties of citizens and visitors to America, or preventive military attacks for rooting out future threats. It will take deeper historical investigations, cross-cultural perspectives, and comparative political analyses; in other words, a critical transvaluation of the current national security discourse in the United States. Which, of course, is highly unlikely, for several reasons. First, the perceived exceptionality of the attack quickly became grounds for a reflexive act of patriotic affirmation and intellectual abnegation. Its territory under attack, the US abjured coalition politics and collective action in favor of a unilateral and pre-emptive definition of friend and foe by which the state is refortified and sovereignty is reinscribed. Second, the intellectual reaction or rather the lack of one among social scientists resembled the initial response to the fall of the Berlin wall, a profound event that was notoriously described by some »scientific« scholars as a single data point from which nothing important, that is, nothing verifiable, could be posited; it is always safer to wait for more data. Third, it is important to recognize how trauma

From War 2.0 to quantum war: the superpositionality of global violence

As information networks catalyse local incidents into international crises, as global events appear and disappear on multiple screens at an accelerated pace and as a war of images displaces the image of war, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the rapidly changing nature of global violence within the confines of security studies. Phase-shifting with each media intervention from states to sub-states, local to global, public to private, organised to chaotic and virtual to real—and back again—global violence superpositions into a quantum war that requires new transdisciplinary, transnational and transmedial approaches.As information networks catalyse local incidents into international crises, as global events appear and disappear on multiple screens at an accelerated pace and as a war of images displaces the image of war, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the rapidly changing nature of global violence within the confines of security studies. Phase-shifting with each media intervention from states to sub-states, local to global, public to private, organised to chaotic and virtual to real—and back again—global violence superpositions into a quantum war that requires new transdisciplinary, transnational and transmedial approaches.

The Conceptual Cosmology of Paul Virilio

Virilio constructs concepts as mental images for disturbing conventional, commonsensical views of world events but with the added visual warp of a life lived at the speed of cinema, video, light itself. It is not, then, a criticism (nor, for that matter, an unqualified recommendation) to say that reading Virilio will probably leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but the style of Virilio (helping to account for a dozen books in as many years). In a typical Virilio sentence, which often elongates into a full paragraph, the concepts can spew out like the detritus of a Mir supply-ship. Many get recycled in later books. Some, benefiting from refinement and new empirical settings, stand out like polished gems. But almost all of them provide radically different takes on the social implications of new technological forces, liberating their analysis from the customary academic dullness and expert narrowness.Virilio constructs concepts as mental images for disturbing conventional, commonsensical views of world events but with the added visual warp of a life lived at the speed of cinema, video, light itself. It is not, then, a criticism (nor, for that matter, an unqualified recommendation) to say that reading Virilio will probably leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but the style of Virilio (helping to account for a dozen books in as many years). In a typical Virilio sentence, which often elongates into a full paragraph, the concepts can spew out like the detritus of a Mir supply-ship. Many get recycled in later books. Some, benefiting from refinement and new empirical settings, stand out like polished gems. But almost all of them provide radically different takes on the social implications of new technological forces, liberating their analysis from the customary academic dullness and expert narrowness.