Levi crosses the Rubicon

LARVAL SUBJECTS ON CAESAR AND THE RUBICON.

It’s an interesting post, and it’s especially noteworthy that military history was the first example that came to Levi’s mind. One of the reasons I’m fascinated by military history (despite being a non-violent vegetarian who hopes never to so much as touch a gun in his life, let alone fire one) is that military people have to take both human and non-human realities into account. In academia we get in the habit of viewing military people as nothing but a bunch of ignorant thugs, but if you think that way then you’re talking to the wrong military people: there’s a fundamental wisdom and honesty about many of them, precisely because they can’t afford to jerk around with pretentious theories. There are severe consequences if an army chooses the wrong place to cross a river, or has insufficient logistical preparations.

Entities that need to be taken into account in analyzing the Iraq War, for instance, include not just Bush, Blair, and Saddam, but also the precise geography of Iraq, the fact that “sandstorm season was coming” and they didn’t want to postpone any longer, weapons inspectors, world oil supply, religious factions, and so forth. And just as sandstorm season is not a “text,” the proclamations of Bush and Saddam cannot be successfully interpreted as pure ideology, whatever that means. Their proclamations had a certain contact with realities, however twisted that contact may have been.

The best way to see the importance of this is to compare any ANT-type reading of some historical event with a more reductive reading. In the latter case you’ll see histories claiming that “the Crusades were all about economics,” or in the other direction, “Pasteur brought light to the darkness and gave birth to a new, enlightened era of medicine.” In the ANT’ish case, you’ll always find something much more interesting and surprising– actors displaced from their original goals due to chance material obstacles, forced to translate their progress along strange paths that they never intended.