Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting,
Washington, April 14-18, 2010
The Affects and Emotions of War/Security
Organised by Peter Adey and Ben Anderson
How are different affects and emotions part of the geographies of war and security? And how can the theoretical insights of recent work on affect and emotion be brought to bear on questions of war and security?
Both war and security have, of course, long been considered to be matters of affect and emotion. From Clauswitz to Shell-Shock and PTSD, affects and emotions are objects woven into war’s strategic objectives. They are conceived as the silver-bullet to discipline and morale and the frustrating emergent properties of time in combat. Konrad Lorenz’s classic study on aggression details the ‘shiver’ felt ‘down the back’ and ‘along the arms’ of the fighter, the ‘tone of the entire striated musculature is raised’, ‘the facial muscles mime the ‘hero face’. Yet the emotional and affective surges Lorenz describes are also the problem and object of security. Early and present day modes of security depend upon intuitive and practical routines as well as more formal and calculative intelligence to construct targets of gendered and often racialised emotions and affects, expressed outwardly as signals of possible hostility and consequent insecurity. Emotions/affects are fed into the urgencies and enthusiasms for security too, gathering action to meet the fear of uncertainties and indefinite threats.
Work has begun to unfold the affective and emotional geographies of war and security; unpacking both tacit and formal knowledge – ranging from neuroscience to cybernetics - that strive to know affective/emotional life so as to kill or secure. It has described the techniques of damage and destruction that aim to mobilize and impede affects such as morale or panic, and the affective geographies of trauma, loss and suffering once those
techniques are encountered, lived, witnessed and resisted. And it has shown how the legitimisation and rationalisation of war and security depends upon mobilising a fear in relation to some form of threat and hope. Across all this work is an attempt to understand the relation between war/security and forms of power that work on individuals as affective beings and publics as affect structures.
What we want to do in the session is to take forward this body of research. Our aim is to draw together empirical and theoretical work that pays close attention to the specific affective or emotional geographies of war and security. We are open to work from any theoretical perspective on affect and emotion (Feminism, psychoanalysis, phenomenological and post-Phenomenological, Deleuzian, and so on) and in relation to any form of war or security.
Indicative topics:
1. The relation between the spatial syntax of war/security and affectivity e.g. forms of ‘hybrid war’, ‘postmodern war’, ‘Total War’ and so on.
2. Techniques of damage and destruction and the targeting of affective life (morale, panic) – from aerial bombing to information operations, counterinsurgency to airport screening.
3. The deployment of knowledges of affective life in forms of war and security, from Cold War attempts to measure morale and panic to recent attempts to know hostile intentions by reference to autonomic bodily responses.
4. Habitual address of the affects of war and security in cultures of practice, training and play. This could include software, gaming and design in the context of war/security.
5. The rationalisation and legitimation of war and security and the enactment of threat – including different enactments of the enemy and forms of enmity.
6. The politics of gender and gendered affects/emotions. This could include investigations of the denial or suppression of affects such as shame or fear.
7. New forms of intimate publics and the mediatisation of modern war.
8. Witnessing, testimony and the experiential geographies of war.
9. The ‘minor affects’ of waging war (boredom, aggression and so on) and doing security (the affects of bureaucracy).
10. The major affects of war and doing security, from public shame, humiliation and disappointment, to vengeance and reprisals.
11. Race, affect, war/security.
12. Anticipatory affects and anticipatory logics (precaution, preemption,
preparedness).
13. War economies and finance capitalism.
14. The everyday life of militarisation and securitisation.
15. Protesting war and security.
Please send abstracts to both Peter Adey ([log in to unmask]) and Ben Anderson([log in to unmask]) by October 15th 2009. We would also welcome initial expressions of interest.