Deadly Contradictions

The New American Empire and Global Warring

Stephen P. Reyna

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

PART I

---

THEORY

Chapter 1

---

GLOBAL WARRING THEORY

A Critical Structural Realist Approach

A traveler on a journey needs a map to tell her or him where to go. A scientific traveler’s map is a theory, which tells her or him where to go to find the evidence that supports the theory. Of course, mapmakers know there are different methods of making maps, just as theoreticians recognize diverse approaches (paradigms or problematics) for constructing theories. This chapter has two parts. The first presents critical structural realism, an approach to formulating theory. The second then applies this approach to construct global warring theory, which accounts for the New American Empire’s propensity for belligerence. Crucial to the chapter’s intellectual work is the conceptualization of human being in terms of structure and contradiction, with these latter terms reconceptualized in terms of force and power.

Critical Structural Realism

In the early 1970s, Clifford Geertz (1973: 20) suggested that the heart of anthropology should be “ethnographic description.” Actually, anthropological research had utilized such description since Franz Boas, though Boas was careful to encourage the use of other techniques, especially those permitting observation of vast areas over long times. US archeology originated for this reason. But by the mid 1980s, the influential Writing Culture crew (Clifford and Marcus 1986) had taken Geertz’s suggestion to heart, banishing from the discipline anything that was not ethnographic and further decreeing, “Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions” (1986: 6). Then, nearly two decades after the publication of Writing Culture, Marcus (2002: 3) noticed something alarming: ethnographies were “objects of aestheticism and often summary judgment and evaluation” that were “judged quickly,” used “to establish reputation, and, then … often forgotten.” An intellectual discipline whose major production is “often forgotten” is itself in danger of extinction. In what follows, the goal is not to eliminate ethnography but to suggest an additional, more epistemically robust and ontologically macroscopic anthropology based upon critical structural realist foundations to help make anthropology less forgettable.

Realism

Realism is to be distinguished from positivism. Positivism, which occurs in several varieties, is a philosophy of science that in Auguste Comte’s version holds theology and metaphysics to be imperfect epistemologies, compared to science. Deadly Contradictions takes no stand on positivism, though it hardly seems promising to insist theology or metaphysics is a more promising way of knowing reality than science. Realism is equally distinguished from idealism, which holds that being is “dependent upon the existence of some mind” (Fetzer and Almeder 1993: 65). Realism is the belief that reality, or being (the terms are used interchangeably), is ontologically independent of mind (cognitive structures, conceptual schemes, etc.). Scientific realism—supported by Leplin (1984), Niiniluoto (2002), Psillos (2005) and Sokal (2008)—is the view that science has reliable techniques for seeking truth, and that the being explained by scientific approximate truths is the real world, as far as it is knowable.¹

Realism is of interest due to an ontological underpinning based upon the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). This principle is powerful, controversial, and ancient, with expressions in both non-Western and Western thought. PSR assumed its modern, Western form in the work of Spinoza and Leibnitz (Pruss 2006). It states: Everything must have a reason or cause. If ontology is the study of the nature of reality, then what makes the PSR powerful is its conceptual immensity. Everything—all being, all reality—must have a cause. What makes the principle controversial is that there can be complications in answering the imperative “Prove it.” My own support for the PSR comes from the still older principle that ex nihilo, nihil fit (from nothing, comes nothing). Reality is not a universe of nothing: it is full of somethings, and if somethings cannot come from nothing, they must have come from (i.e., be caused by) something else. This suggests that the nature of reality consists in vast structures of somethings connected by causality with other somethings, reaching through all places and all times in all universes. The task of scholars is to seek the approximate truth of this structure of causal couplings. Deadly Contradictions undertakes its journey to explore the structuring of human being. Consider, now, the structure in critical structural realism.

Structure, Force, and Power

It is universally allowed that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it. (Hume [1739] 2003)

In the quotation above David Hume announced the view that material things, including people, are “actuated by a necessary force,” a “cause” that has its “effect.” Actually, the Enlightenment-era Hume (1711–1776) was restating the older view of Hobbes (1588–1679; in Champlain 1971) that human power can be understood as the operation of causality. Understanding power as causality is a useful way to rethink structuralism as a method for analyzing structures as phenomena that are always in motion, always dynamic.² Let us turn to a French Mandarin of structuralism in order to formulate this reconceptualization.

As the structural Marxist mandarin Louis Althusser (1970: 36; emphasis in original) put it, “The real: it is structured,” in the sense that being, including human being, exhibits parts in some relationship to some other parts. This is a realist position. The objects of study in such an ontology are the realities of different sorts of structures. The structures I am interested in are not those imagined by the 1940–1960s French structuralists that, except in the work of the structural Marxists, ultimately concerned structures of the mind.³

Instead, critical structural realism studies “human being.” What is such being? Consider the following event, which took place in the American West but could have happened anywhere. An elderly couple who had been married for more than a half century pulled out of a store’s parking lot onto a heavily traveled road. The husband, the driver, did not see that a car was bearing down upon them, and there was a collision. When help arrived at the scene, they found the dying couple holding hands. In all places and in all times, that is what humans do. They hold hands, which is a trope for making connections. In this optic, a connection is doing something together, even if, as in the case of the elderly couple, it is the last thing they do.

“Human being” is a sector of reality—that of humanity, where humans reach out to connect with others. Structures are connected parts. They may be small and intimate—a dying couple reaching out to hold each other’s hands—or vast and impersonal, like transnational corporations’ thrusting of their hands into profit-making in all corners of the globe. In this reality of human being it is force that has the power to make connection. Force and power are discussed at greater length below; for the moment, understand “reaching out” as the force that has the effect—the power—of “holding hands,” and consider the sorts of connections humans make.

A “social form” is any organization of connections in human being. It is heuristically understood to include practices, institutions, systems, and social beings. Persons using their force to do things in some sequence will be termed “actors” with regard to the things they do, the powers they create. Actors are the atomic parts of social forms. Actors in motion interacting with other actors, doing things, achieving particular forces and powers, will be understood as “practices” (as in surgical or dental practices). “Institutions” are co-occurring, interrelated practices (as in the institution of medicine). “Systems” are actions articulated into practices that are part of institutions connected with other institutions (as in political or economic systems). “Social beings” are the most complex forms of human being. They are articulated systems, whose connections may be within or between state social forms..

The different social forms in human being are generally “open” in that, in some way and at certain times, they interact with other structural units in human being, as well as animate and inanimate structures beyond it. They are also generally “autopoetic” in the sense that they are capable of reproducing and maintaining the social being. Finally, they are “reflexive,” that is, capable of reflecting upon events and altering actions and practices in accord with the information provided by reflection, to effect reproduction.⁴ Human reflexivity is social, a point developed further later in the chapter.

Agency: Human actors and the structures they operate exhibit agency, here understood as a particular human faculty that attains power. Power is discussed more fully later; it can be provisionally understood here as outcomes, things done. Human power structures are composed of material things: people, living objects, and nonliving objects. A rock is a thing. In the absence of people it just sits there. Rocks do not plan what to do with themselves—to pop in on Granny, or do some shopping. People plan. They scheme—as in, “Let’s throw that rock!”—because they have a type of structure (the brains) that allows them to do this. Things like rocks lack brains and are plotless. Plotting is people’s use of the brain in order to use other materialities—people and things—to do something, that is, to have powers. Reality consists of things with brains and things without them, and it is useful to conceptualize their differences. Agency, a term whose function is to clarify this difference, is the use of the brain to combine different material objects and humans to create a force that leads to an outcome, a power. Brainless objects lack agency.⁵

Bruno Latour insists that “Objects Too Have Agency” (2005: 63); for him, the domain of objects includes nonliving physical ones. Objectively, this is questionable (at least regarding the nonliving physical objects): by giving such objects agency Latour conflates them with people, obscuring that humans have brains and can plot, whereas nonliving objects lack brains and cannot. A conceptualization of being that eliminates existing difference is not especially accurate. Critically, Latour confuses influence with agency. “Influence” is a more general term; it is any force that can have, or contribute to having, an outcome. Agency is a particular type of influence: force that involves human plotting to achieve its power.

Humans use their agency in choreographing regular and repeated relationships with other people and things. The key term “choreographing” is generalized from its meaning in dance to denote the designing of sequences of movements in which motion of objects, including human objects, is specified in time and space. For example, first I pick up the stone, then I throw it. My relationship to the stone is a structure consisting of two parts (me and my stone) and might be thought of as a force that has an outcome: the power of a stone thrown. Now imagine that I am in some occupied territory amongst oppressed people. Somebody says, “Throw stones at the police.” When this is communicated from one brain to the others, a larger structure and force is created, that of a number of people practicing stoning the police. Objectively put, “agency” is working of human brains to choreograph other actors and their objects together in different spaces, doing different things at different times to achieve some force with some power. Human agency so understood is a condition of human being.

E-Space, I-Space, and Hobbes: In this ontology of human being composed of power structures, there are two structural domains: one based upon structures found in “E-space” (often termed the objective), including structures human and otherwise external to persons; and the other found in structures observed in “I-space” (alternatively the subjective) including biological forms internal to individuals, importantly the nervous system (Reyna 2002a). Though E- and I-space are indeed two structural domains, these domains are something of a monad. This is true because the brain is in the body and the body is out and about in the external world of social forms.

Component structures in this monad can be represented by conceptualization of empirical and theoretical realms of analysis. At the “empirical” level, structural realities are described in terms of what is observed to happen, when in time, and where in space. For example, it might be perceived that in the summer a builder bought two tons of cement, a ton of bricks, and three workers working forty days to construct a house he sold at three hundred thousand dollars in the fall. At the “theoretical” level, more general and abstract terms should be induced or deduced from happenings observed on the concrete level. One way this can be done with the previous example is to recognize more abstractly that the builder’s action can be explained in terms of capital and labor investments made to achieve a profit. Concepts regarding large amounts of space and time in E-space of an entire social being are macro-regions; those representing individual actors within a social being are meso-regions, and ones concerning what happens within individuals’ I-space represent micro-regions. Deadly Contradictions is largely interested in how macro-and meso-regions influence each other.

E- and I-space monads are organizations of force and power. Now it is time to bring Hume’s predecessor, Thomas Hobbes, more fully into the picture to present his view of power (Reyna 2001, 2003b). Hobbes (1651) saw power as the flow of causality in reality, with causes being forces having the capacity to produce effects, powers. An important rejection of such an approach is said to come from postmodernists, many of whom discard causality (Rosenau 1992). However, this was not the case for Michel Foucault, who broke away from Althusser to become essential in creating postmodernism. He claimed in 1975 that “in fact, power produces” and that among other things, “it produces reality” ([1975] 1991: 194). If something produces something else, then it can be said to cause it; and power, in Foucault’s view, “produces” something vast, “reality.” Foucault’s position was shared by the philosopher of science Wesley Salmon (1998: 298), for whom causal events “are the means by which structure and order are propagated … from one space-time region … to other times and places.”

Thus, reality is structured (according to Althusser). The structuring is the work of causality (according to Hobbes, Hume, Foucault, and Salmon). Earlier (Reyna 2002a), I argued that in this ontology relationships can be established between cause/effect and force/power. Force (cause) in an antecedent time and space has power (effect) in a subsequent time and space. This is a first property of causality, one that Hume long ago called “constant conjunction” (1739: 657). How is constant conjunction possible? One answer is that what connects cause to effect is something that intervenes between them and has the effect of “producing” (Bunge 1959: 46–48) the conjunction. The ontological significance of the preceding warrants further examination of force and power.

Force

Force, as I use the term, is not necessarily solely physical coercion or violence; rather, it is employed in a more general sense, as cause. But cause, as I here imagine it, contains within itself those materialities that do the “producing” of conjunction, connecting antecedent causes with subsequent effects.⁶ These materialities are “force resources”: in causes what connects with effects. There are five varieties of resources whose utilizations are “exercises of force.” The first involves “instruments”—tools, monies (capital), technologies, and so on—things individuals have devised that, when used, make things happen. The second force resource is “land,” the raw materials that people use when they make things happen. A third force resource is “actors,” individuals performing practical or discursive action. “Discursive” action is use of the body to write or speak. “Practical” action is use of the body, usually with tools, to get something done. Labor, of course, has been a particularly important sort of practical action in economic groups. Actors using instruments on land can make things happen, if they have the fourth and fifth force resources, that is, cultural and authoritative resources, which are discussed next.

Culture and Hermeneutic Puzzles

“Culture,” a fourth force resource, involves signs of the times learned and shared by people. Such signs are representations of being, or representations of representations that may or may not be about being. Humans lacking culture may experience reality but they don’t know it, and what they do not know they cannot communicate to others. Consider, for example, the case of Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. On one occasion in the 2008 campaign,

members of her traveling party met Palin at the Ritz-Carlton near Reagan airport, in Pentagon City, Virginia—and found that, although she’d made some progress with her memorization and studies, her grasp of rudimentary facts and concepts was minimal. Palin couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations. She didn’t know what the Fed did. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein. And asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, she drew a blank. (R. Adams 2010)

The purpose of this example is not to deride Ms. Palin (many people are ignorant of lots of cultural information), but to recognize that she did not know important aspects of her culture—for example, what the Fed (the most important financial institution in the US) does, or who attacked on 9/11 (it being difficult to oppose an enemy if you do not know who it is). The problem with not knowing one’s culture, or parts of it, is that one does not have information about being—of what is or what to do about it.

A distinction (Reyna 2002a) has been made between “neuronal” (I-space) and “discursive” (E-space) culture: the former is “enculturated” (some now prefer “embodied”), that is, learned and stored in cortical memory networks; and the latter externalized, contained in speech or writing. Further, “perceptual” is distinct from “procedural” forms of neuronal and discursive culture, the former being information about what is and the latter being information about what to do about it. Cultural sign...