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Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everydayness

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Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everydayness OFF-BASE: RETHINKING NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES AND MILITARY EVERYDAYNESS Josh Smicker A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication Studies Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Lawrence Grossberg Rich Cante Tim Lenoir John Pickles Della Pollock Sarah Sharma © 2014 Josh Smicker ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Josh Smicker: Off-Base: Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everydayness (Under the direction of Lawrence Grossberg) Off-Base: Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everdayness, provides an alternative account of contemporary military transformations, particularly in their relation to new media technologies and formations. While many academic discussions of contemporary militarization focus on its more general impacts, and the new types of weapons and warfare it deploys and makes possible, this work provides an account of some of the seemingly banal deployments of new military technologies and techniques, particularly the ways in which they construct different modes of military embodiment and military space—for example, the way new media technologies and mobile health platforms reconfigure understandings of military health or wellness, or the ways in which affectively charged robots or animals are used to change understandings of soldiering or military families. It draws on a diverse archive of policy documents, media texts, and new technologies to provide an account of how notions like resilience, wellness, and post-traumatic growth are increasingly central to military culture, and are envisioned as being desirable and achievable through a combination of new forms of governmentality and new media technologies (like PTSD mobile applications, immersive virtual environments, etc.) This dissertation develops an account of the technologies of military iii everydayness, to be placed in conversation with some of the more developed discourses and accounts of the militarization of everyday life. iv To Allison Schlobohm, my constant star. v ACKNOWLDEGMENTS Writing a dissertation is a wonderful and terrible prospect, and would have been utterly impossible without the help of so many people along the way. I would like to thank all my committee members, as well as Jeremy Packer, Kara Keeling, and James Hay for their guidance, patience, and assistance with this often arduous project, you provided invaluable support and insight. I would particularly like to thank Lawrence Grossberg for being a great friend and mentor, who always pushed me to my maximum potential, even when I didn’t want to reach it. To Lisa Calvente, Lupe Garcia, Mark Hayward, and Sindhu Zagoren, your intellectual rigor and comradeship is only surpassed by the generosity and depth of your friendship, this would literally have been impossible without you. To my family, who have been there for me even though they weren’t always sure what they were there for. To all my non-academic friends, particularly Amanda Stevens, Lena Kyman, and Navarre Megali, who, beyond being wonderful, provided necessary perspective and sanity. To Scott Rafferty and the Rafferties, all you need is love. And most importantly to my partner Allison Schlobohm, you have supported me in every way possible, I love you completely, and can’t wait for the bigger and brighter. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Everdayness of Military Life……………………………………….....1 Chapter 1: From Battle Buddies to Daddybots: Affective Technologies of/and Military Familialism……………………………………………………………..28 Chapter 2: Notes on Biomilitarization, Part 1: Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, Flexible Militarization and Resilient Subjects…………………………………………….86 Chapter 3: Notes on Biomilitarization, Part 2: Unfit Soldiers, Wounded Warriors and the American Body Politic………………………………………………………….132 Chapter 4: Drone Wars and Atmospheric Militarization: Reterritorializing Popular Militarism……………………………………………………………………….209 Conclusion: Life After Wartime?....................................................................................265 References………………………………………………………………………………270 vii Introduction: The Everydayness of Military Life In this dissertation, I attempt to carry out a Foucauldian genealogy of the more quotidian elements of the discursive formation1 constructed around the idea of a contemporary ‘revolution in military affairs’ (which I will refer to below as the RMA formation) as a way into exploring, expanding, complicating and challenging discussions of the militarization of everyday life, and the relationships between new modes of militarization and new media within a U.S. context. In brief, I am interested in mapping out the ways in which a fractious and contested discourse that has been only partially and imperfectly realized (at best) has largely been taken up as a coherent and already- accomplished reconfiguration of the US military in the vast majority of popular representations of the military, political discussion and debate, and critical academic responses to contemporary forms of militarization, in a way that often focuses on only a relatively small part of that formation, particularly new weapon technologies. I am interested in tracing the emergence and dissemination of the more everyday elements of this discourse, attempting to map out the contexts and problem spaces to which it is responding, and critically examining how adequate (or inadequate) it is as a description of the post-9/11 U.S. military formation. 1 My understanding of Foucault’s discursive formation is heavily inflected by Gilles Deleuze’s commentaries on the term, which suggests that discursive formations are always connected to non- discursive formations via “diagonal movements…[where] discursive relations become associated with non- discursive milieux” (Deleuze 10). In Deleuzean terms, this is described as the articulation of “machinic assemblages of desire” and “collective assemblages of enunciation” as two poles or tendencies that are distinct but functionally linked. This reading of discursive formations has the advantage of underscoring the material effectivities of these organizations. 1 Within the space of my dissertation, my way into these broader concerns will be through two interrelated questions: ‘What media and technological imaginaries do the quotidian elements of the RMA rely on, develop, and circulate at a theoretical or ‘expert’ level?’ and “How do these imaginaries get represented, enacted, or produced on the level of everyday practices and popular culture (if at all)?” The focus on everyday media technologies (such as military blogs, web videos, recruitment websites, video games, etc.) is important for me, since the majority of works dealing with new media and militarization tends to focus on more spectacular examples. While the spectacular and the everyday forms and uses of new media are not completely distinct, I am more interested in looking at the more quotidian deployments of new media technologies in imagining, enacting, supporting, and challenging the ongoing RMA. While many academic discussions of the RMA talk about its more general impacts, and the new types of weapons and warfare it deploys and makes possible, I am more interested in providing an account of some of the seemingly banal deployments of new military technologies and techniques, particularly the ways in which they construct different modes of military embodiment—the way new media technologies and mobile health platforms reconfigure understandings of military health or wellness, or the ways in which affectively charged robots or animals are used to change understandings of soldiering or military families. What I am attempting to develop here is an account of the technologies of military everydayness, to be placed in conversation with some of the more developed discourses and accounts of the militarization of everyday life. These questions are especially vital in providing an adequate account of contemporary changes within the military, as well as the reorganization of the military’s 2 relationships with the nation-state, policing and security apparatuses, information and entertainment industries, and corporate contractors (private military firms, etc.). Critical discourses about these changes, academic and otherwise, often reduce this tremendously complex process to one or two key elements culled from the RMA formation, such as acceleration (Paul Virilio), automation (Manuel deLanda), securitization (Randy Martin), or privatization and the diminution of the nation-state within a neoliberal regime of power (the governmentality perspective of Henry Giroux, and most of the essays included in the Homeland Insecurities special issue of Cultural Studies). While all of these authors make important contributions to (re)thinking new modalities of militarization, I think what is often an unproblematized over-reliance on the narratives and images provided by the military apparatus they are critiquing sometimes skews their analysis, and prevents a more thorough, sensitive, and nuanced engagement both with the RMA formation and what’s actually going on with the contemporary US military. In exploring these questions, my focus will be on the ways in which particular imaginaries of new media structure this formation, and the ways in which new media have been involved in representing, circulating, and normalizing imaginaries of the RMA formation. In mapping out this formation, I will examine three interconnected
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