War and Media Network

This book is more accurately described by its subtitle than its main title. Based on a series of lectures, it explores the theme of war in the writings of just about everyone except the principal social theorists who have been concerned with it. For brief accounts of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Marcuse, Lacan, Kojève, Ruddick, Fukuyama and many other thinkers from the same vein up to Hardt and Negri, one could do far worse than consult this fluently written text. Yet one will look in vein for the classic ideas of Clausewitz, or for social theorists like Weber, Foucault, Giddens and Mann, or sociologically minded analysts like Kaldor - of these, only Mann even makes the index. However, War and Media readers will be particularly interested in the chapter, 'Media and Machine', which provides a useful summary of writers like Mattelart, Baudrillard and Virilio.

The book pursues an essentially simple argument. The definition of war as 'the clash of two organized armed forces that seek to destroy each other's power and especially their will to resist, principally by killing members of the opposing force' (taken, as it happens, from this writer's work) is insufficient because it fails to specify the value element of warfare: 'Wars may be physical conflicts, but they are also about ascribing, defending and furthering particular worlds.' The book is devoted to exploring the claim by Hans Joas - one of few mainstream sociologists cited (but not discussed in detail) - that 'the experience of violence is the "perverted twin" of the experience of value commitment'.

This approach gives rise to two main problems. Analytically, meaning is privileged over lack of meaning. The book is dedicated to the author's grandfather, who died, and great-uncle, who fought, presumably in the First World War. Perhaps they experienced their war in the terms of value-commitment and intense, meaningful experience assumed in the arguments of this book. But many soldiers' narratives of their experiences in that war, reinforced by others in many other wars, concerned the loss of meaning - and the illusory nature of the ideological representations through which governments conducted the conflict. Curtis over-ideologizes war, interpreting the 'war on terror' as a conflict of 'beautiful fictions', a 'clash of fundamentalisms' indeed. He fails to address either the crasser power motives that drive states and terror groups alike, or the bloody messes that their uses of armed force produce.

Theoretically, Curtis does not engage properly with the theorists, strategic and sociological, who have analyzed military power in its own terms and related it to the other main forms of power, political and economic as well as cultural and ideological. Thus the mainstreams of serious thinking about war, quickly transcended in his opening remarks, are never really allowed back into to challenge the philosophical-psychological ideologies that the writer favours, or the narrative of meaning that he constructs from them.

Martin Shaw
University of Sussex

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