5 - Desert Polemologies

Summary

DEVASTATION, TERRITORY AND THE STATE

Environmental devastation involves a particular kind of violence that is hard to determine. For Heidegger, it is an ontological rather than an ontic violence which doesn't just destroy but ‘blocks all future growth and prevents all building’. For Deleuze and Guattari, the desert of the body without organs petrifies the desiring-machines, the components of world production, but this is necessary for desire to deterritorialise and begin anew. Devastation is not, then, simply destruction of the living. As Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova argue, today's ‘complex devastational forms’ should not be seen merely in terms of an attenuation or diminishment of life and biodiversity. Devastation merges with the reproduction of capitalist society, and thus with life itself. Specific instances of the damage and risks associated with the Anthropocene – species extinction, habitat loss, soil degradation, disturbances in the oxygen and nitrogen cycles, eutrophication, oil spills, the extinguishing of peoples and cultures – fail to capture the kind, and not only the degree, of violence involved. Justin McBrien writes of capitalism's expansion as a generalised necrosis or ‘becoming extinction’. The problem is how to recognise environmental damage as damage once a regime of violence becomes structurally necessary for what we experience as normal or even desirable for the capitalist mode of production. As Heidegger argues, ‘the devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man’. This resonates with what Rob Nixon has called the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, which operates on much larger timescales than those events which we usually code as violent.

We can pursue these problems by considering how the relationships between space, politics and the state entail different forms of violence, and how the desert figures in polemological discourse (the discourse of war). I want to suggest that what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘war machine’ can be considered a devastational form that combats the structural violence of the state. I understand the war machine in this chapter primarily as a set of affects, tied to desert landscapes, which are capable of registering devastation as both a subjective and environmental reality.