DEC
WAR: the EDITORIAL
2011
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In the way of dictionaries, war is the deliberate, organised and large scale use of force with the objective of destroying or otherwise neutralising a perceived enemy. The word war evolved from a Germanic root denoting a state of confusion or disorganisation, in modern German: das Wirre. At its abstract core, war happens when - reciprocally - one organisation acts to bring about the disorganisation of the other organisation. As the leading edge of our thinking about war and peace - and we maintain: before good or evil can be brought in - we propose to think first about the ways of organisation and disorganisation.

Along these ways we encounter paradox. For example, two parties interlocked in war are engaged in forms of organised disorganisation. This is not a wordplay, as I will explain below. The warring organisation fundamentally risks disorganisation to remain itself organised. Wars and enemies, or at least the spectre of wars, are needed for the survival of the warring organisation as organisation. In this lies a source of tragedy, of the fated individual caught up in the steamrolling dynamics of faceless military organisation. Paradox also lives in the confused figure of the militant pacifist or the pacifist militant: peace is used to justify war, in phrases routinely ambushed last night / on TV. Assured mutual destruction is invoked to safeguard peace, in the words of Cicero: sub nomine pacis bellum latet. The presence of such paradox may be experienced as Camusian absurdity or be criticised as political hypocrisy, but it is a sure sign that we are looking in the right direction; for if the ways of war and peace were without paradox, laid out on rail tracks, we would all happily shunt them correctly and be on the turnpike to paradise.

An organisation is an entity that has as sole purpose and as sole cause the maintenance of its very organisation, whence its perseverance. In this, there is tautology: the organisation is maintained by its organisation, and it maintains it. The chicken and the egg are one and the same. We have no need here to distinguish between whether something either is or has organisation. Being and having can remain undifferentiated and tautological, and so can the concepts of cause and purpose. The organisation is caused by and has as sole purpose the maintenance of its very organisation.

The flip side of organisation is disorganisation, that is the chaotic environment which surrounds the organisation and with which the organisation is inevitably in contact and from which it has sprung. Disorganisation is taken here not only in the static sense, to be disorganised, but equally in the dynamic sense of process, to make or become disorganised. We do not distinguish between static and dynamic aspects and also hold them tautological here. This then also applies to the concept of organisation: to be organised and to become organised are held to be the same. We see that an organisation is not made once and then exists for good, literally standing out. For it to be, an organisation needs to keep building and re-building its very organisation dynamically to resist the relentlessly disorganising assaults from the surrounding environment. Such is the inevitable and timeless drama of any ontology of organisation.

It would be a mistake to read this working distinction of organisation versus disorganisation as one of pure opposition. All conceptual absolutes - such as pure opposition - are either strictly useless, because they do not conceive of anything, or else they are oxymora like the change that never changes, or indeed like absolutely not admitting absolutes. For this reason, we must conclude that there is as much an aspect of cooperation as there is one of opposition in the working distinction of organisation and disorganisation. Organisation feeds on disorganisation as much as the latter threatens and assaults the former. This is because organisation selects from the variation offered by disorganisation and is only thereby able to keep organising itself.

We can now see organisation from an alternative perspective: It is an entity that by virtue of its very organisation brings forth and maintains its own distinction from disorganisation, carving itself out from the disorganised environment. There is no third party drawing the distinction of an organisation against the surrounding disorganisation, as if with a knife cutting slices from a cake. For our purposes it suffices to set identical the concepts of appearance and being, of phenomenon and entity; and so we could speak of organisation above interchangeably as an entity or as a phenomenon.

In English, one aspect of the conjoint meaning of entity and phenomenon is captured by the word event, a term that also depicts literally how in fact organisation comes out of the chaotic environment. We can say that organisation is a collection of organised events that together set out and mark a distinction. The German translation of event is Ereignis, where something happens that establishes property or identity, that which in German is eigen. Heidegger discovered and used the word Ereignis in precisely this sense. With it, we could say that organisation happens when and where identity happens. And identity happens when as its sole purpose organisation struggles on to keep carving its own distinction from the disorganised environment. This is the very specific understanding of organisation with which we must try and think about war and peace, and now observe where it takes us.

The method of our thinking along this way is radically Ockhamist, looking for the smallest set of concepts and distinctions - closed under the application of these very distinctions - that we can get away with to explain some aspect of the world we are interested in. One of the Ockhamist's key tools is the use of tautology as an instrument, as an anti-scalpel, removing more or less habitual conceptual distinctions that conspire to unfold and flatten out beyond recognition the conceptual core of what we are after. The radical Ockhamist uses distinctions if he has to, and to that extent he is analytical, but he also employs the tautological instrument, and to that extent he is synthetic. This is a method of thinking fit for those who as a matter of principle dismiss all conceptual absolutes.

We take the distinction of organisation and disorganisation, unique in that it is the only distinction that draws itself, and apply it in turn to both organisation or to disorganisation each. We end up finding organised disorganisation and disorganised organisation as the two cross terms, in addition to the two diagonal terms of organised organisation and disorganised disorganisation. If our Ockhamist practice has value, then these four terms must have real significance and be ubiquitous in any world in which the distinction of organisation and disorganisation is fundamentally at work; and it is hard to see in fact how there could be a world without this distinction.

We apply the tautology tool to the diagonal term organised organisation, being identical to organisation itself. This identity says that organisation is characterised by the fact that organisation flows from organisation, telling us again that organisation needs to keep being born again and again from itself in our conjoint sense of at once being and becoming. The generational steps of animals are an example of this. Similarly, we apply the tautology tool to the other diagonal term, setting it identical to disorganisation itself. This identity says also that disorganisation flows from itself, but while organisation flows from organisation through repeated carving out of identities, disorganisation needs no processes of carving itself out from anything. It is the other side; it just flows from itself. Heat and its diffusion are examples.

The cross term organised disorganisation says to the radical Ockhamist that in a world with organisation and disorganisation we find that disorganisation flows from organisation all the time. We think here of the examples of predation and hunting, or of digestion. Conversely, and also all the time, organisation flows from disorganisation in such a world, which is the meaning of the other cross term: disorganised organisation. Heinz von Förster was among the first to have identified this phenomenon and to understand its importance and ubiquity. He referred to it as order from noise. Disorganised organisation describes the central and fundamental role that disorganisation plays in making every organisation possible. In the intelligent design of machines, the engineer banishes disorganisation as much as possible, declaring it to be noise that must be minimised. With organisation, by contrast, disorganisation assists centrally. Organisation is not a machine. Here we meet again our earlier observation that organisation and disorganisation are not in pure opposition. They cooperate, too, and the two cross terms express this cooperation. Naturally, we could have construed our diagonal and cross terms using the present as opposed to past participle, as for example in disorganising organisation as opposed to organised disorganisation. We would - mutatis mutandis - arrive at exactly the same conclusions, as indeed we should in a conceptual world where we have decided to hold cause and effect as tautological.

Organised disorganisation is ubiquitous in any world where organisation happens. By the very act of organising itself, one organisation may end up weakening or destroying another organisation. Cancer cells that evade the controls of the larger host organisation and begin to carve out their own tumorous tissue are an example. In business, some people may decide to leave their established employer and start up a rival business of their own; or a tribe at the fringes of a larger empire may begin organising itself into a socially and linguistically viable community and cease payments of tribute to their overlords. Such forms of organised disorganisation are the source of conflicts, literally of the clashing together of organisations in their very acts of organising themselves and of maintaining or of building their respective identities. Conflicts therefore only arise between organisations, not between organisation and disorganisation, nor between anything under the sun other than organisations. In a world where organisation happens, conflict is organised disorganisation. It is inevitable, logically necessary within the Ockhamist core of our subject matter.

The word conflict points with its first syllable con- to the need for proximity of organisations engaged in clashes. The only way for two organisations to meet is by one organisation, with its identity, to be in the environment of the other organisation, with its separate identity; and vice versa. If there is a conflict, we now see that this can only happen as organised disorganisation through a shared environment that carries such disorganisation. As the poet says, there is a curse in this: neither of the conflicted organisations can escape the shared environment in which they meet; none of the organisations can therefore escape completely the organised disorganisation in that shared environment. There is necessarily a recoil effect on the organisation that is the source of the organised disorganisation. The poet offers the very precise, almost physical analogy of the fever curse, the organised increase in body temperature that destroys a pathogen through the heightened disorganisation caused by the molecular agitation of heat. Eventually, however, the relentlessly disorganising heat may turn on the feverish organisation itself. This is the recoil effect: Cancer cells live only as long the host organism lives, which they have weakened. For a similar reason, virus pandemics are weakened by the increased virulence of the pathogen. The war mongering tribe or nation disrupts its domestic economic and cultural cohesion. The activities of the start-up competitor may lead to an unsustainable price war.

Conflict is not war. For example, predation or a declaration of independence are not cases of war, although they may trigger one. An additional logical step is therefore needed to determine war within the strict confines of our Ockhamist conceptual practice. There is only one possibility. War happens when events, or Ereignisse, of organised disorganisation collectively form their own organisation, with one event of organised disorganisation calling forth, literally provoking, the next such event, round and again. In particular, war itself is an organisation, with the attendant formation of an identity, having as sole purpose its own maintenance. This is why we pointed to the need for reciprocity of organised disorganisation in our definition of war in the opening paragraph. More importantly: while conflict as organised disorganisation is inevitable, war specifically as an organisation - as indeed any organisation - is not inevitable. Here and only here is the door now giving entry to a moral analysis of war.

As I read it, Albert D. Fields' poem lays bare the organising that turns conflicts between people into wars. The layout of the poem stanzas reminds me of the manner in which molecules form tertiary structures or line up by chemical affinity; there is an affinity of meaning along lines in neighbouring stanzas. For example, we read across the same line of two stanzas: WAR ... you three letter word, addressing war with the second personal pronoun as something with an identity, person-like, an organisation in the above sense. Along another two lines we read: all close the ranks ... right. / all talk the fight ... ALL.. We see here the numbed crowds chanting monosyllabically and as a classical choir the right and ALL of total war. Later we hear across two stanzas an echo of the French Marseillaise. In war, minds are being ambushed by thoughts and words, and by the fata morgana of fast victory, when all has been done / with drones and new guns, as when in a famous photograph some grinning German soldiers of WWI scribble onto the cattle wagons taking them to the Western front to meet soon again / [...] in Paris. The organising of war is right in view here, and yet over the next 100 years right up to the Iraq war, the zone q of the title I believe, it fades from view repeatedly as motherboards [...] overwrite / the memories, opening the possibility again and again for war to return to its anagrammatical raw edge. The organising of war among people exploits the way our minds work, creating a supra-personal organisation that undermines and often destroys the personal identities of those caught up in it. As minds are slowly downed by virus might of the war rhetoric, one ends up in a place where reference to war is used to justify war and to keep it going, in a self-referential loop that we now know is characteristic of war as an organisation .

Conventional wars appear to become organisations through a prevailing dynamic of tit-for-tat provocations of conflict, making sure that one event of organised disorganisation follows another with high enough likelihood. Non-conventional wars such as terrorism cannot always rely on such a tit-for-tat loop of events and must be capable of ensuring their organisation differently. Terrorism as an organisation must keep producing - out of itself as opposed to tit-for-tat, and reliably - events of organised disorganisation, one leading to the next and so on. This is no easy feat; and it is therefore likely that terror groups all conform to a very small set of organisational types. For example, linking the production of terror events, of organised disorganisation, to the dynamics of male gang psychology with its processes of establishing an internal pecking order may work for as long as this order is still in flux. Either this is good enough to ignite proper conventional tit-for-tat organisational forms of war, or else the terror group must take steps to ensure that the pecking order among terrorists itself remains in flux in order to ensure continued posturing and with it ongoing feats of conflict. This means encouraging events of organised disorganisation that are directed at the pecking order itself, for example by encouraging the equivalent of regicide as the highest sign of valour. Far from being self-destructive, such internecine terror is then in fact necessary to maintain terror itself as a war organisation. Danton's lament that la révolution dévore ses propres enfants finds here its logic.

Our way of thinking has brought us to this point: since war is an organisation of events of organised disorganisation, it follows that opposition to war cannot itself take the form of organised disorganisation, as this would simply make it join and strengthen the war game. This means that the only form of opposition logically acceptable within our Ockhamist conceptual practice is precisely that of Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence, or that of Jesus of Nazareth who advocated presenting the other cheek after the first one has been hit. But within the logic of organisation, such opposition has a chance of prevailing only if the non-violent dissenter - by risking perhaps his own demise as a person, as an integrated mental and physical organisation with identity - thereby strengthens an organisation which is larger than himself and which importantly is not organised around events of organised disorganisation.

Our Ockhamist practice leaves only one candidate for this larger organisation: preventing organised disorganisation from forming its own organisation by means of the formation of an organisation of disorganised organisation. Just as we have found war to be an organisation, here lies the unique aspiration and hope that peace itself may become an organisation, too, and that it may not remain lifeless as the negative definition as the absence of war. Peace proper is then the organisation of events of disorganised organisation, the birth and flowering of all manner of new organisations leading to more such births and more flowering. Perhaps on this way, mankind, too, in our cultural and biological distinction will come alive as an organisation proper, as opposed to just being a statistical aggregate. This is the way, and this is our hope.

Valete, Amici.


William A. Wayman
Chief Editor
DEC 2011

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