Intelligence Incarnate

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Intelligence Incarnate: MartialCorporeality in the Digital Age

MICHAEL DILLON

For there to be ghosts there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstractthan ever. The spectrogenic process corresponds therefore to a parado xical incorporation. O nceideas or thoughts are detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost by givingthem a body. (Jacques Derrida, Specters of M arx: 126)

Power: Intelligence Incarnate

In references too numerous to cite, Foucault teaches us that pow er is a relational

phenomenon. A fi eld o f pow er relations is instituted by a generative principle ofdifferentiation and formation that introduces a relational order: a system ofcombinatory possibilities, the bodies (dis)empowered by those possibilities and

their enactment of the very relations of power that animate them as the bodiesthat they are. Such a principle of differentiation and formation is generative,productive and creative not merely negative and punitive. D ifferentiation estab-lishes a terrain of power relations whose geometrics of difference are spatial andtemporal, synchronic and diachronic, comprised of vectors in time and motion

as well as states of existence. Indeed because states of existence take place, intaking place they are necessarily alw ays already in time and motion. Such states

may even be possessed of their own particular operant temporalities as well as

Body & Society 2003 SAG E P ublications (London, Thousand Oaks and N ew D elhi),Vol. 9(4): 125[1357034X(200312)9:4;125;039160]

www.sagepublications.com

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dynamics (Rheinberger, 1997). What differentiates is also the locus, however, ofattempts to command its very capacity to inaugurate and regulate relations ofpow er as such.

This article on the contemporary military body follows Foucaults account ofpow er, but t he principle of d ifferentiation and format ion that concerns it is intel-ligence itself. By intelligence I mean the capacity to tell signs.1 Intelligence andthe sign have been intimately linked since classical times: It is nosthat enablesone to recognize (Nagy, 183: 37). To tell signs is to exercise the power ofsignification, to encode and decode, the uncanny ability to make meaning out ofinarticulate matter and to make inarticulate matter out o f meaning, to make silentmaterial, indeed to make silence itself, speak and to silence what ever shares in thecommon capacity to signify. To tell signs is to discern and discriminate and, in

thus differentiating, to en-gender both a system of pow er relations and the bod iesthat enact it. Such a power itself depends upon relationality, the relation betweensigns that allows the possibility of telling them apart. There is no tellingthem apart discrimination w ithout an order of relation that allow s of theirtelling as such. Telling signs does not simply bring things to light, it mobilizes a

world.A relation always determines its elements, parties or terms. It also institutes

an associated art of combinatorial possibilities, its logics and protocols, and thecreative acumen required to enact them. For a system of thought that embracesthis relational account of the order of things, that art is strategy, the capacity to

tell signs and, in telling signs, to command systems of operational combinationinstituted and en-gendered by signs, systems that bring things to presence, order

them in their presence and remove them from presence: the violent comings andgoings of power relations.

The power to differentiate as such lies in Language. It belongs to us, and

it does not belong to us. We have Language, but Language, the relationality thatallows of the telling of signs, also has us, for it is not simply ours to have. Itprecedes and succeeds us. Its very capacity to signify anew iterabiltiy is onethat escapes our command. Thus what cannot be captured in Language is the

name of Language itself, the nameless anterior somehow to naming (Derrida,1995). Precisely because we have no pr ior possession of it , or sovereign commandover it, every utterance speaks of t he Language that enables it, but simply cannot

be secured by it. Derrida teaches us that this elusiveness of Language is the verycondition o f possibility of enunciation and iteration (D errida, 1976). If L anguage

were not free of us in this way there would be no power of Language. IfLanguage were not free of us in this way there would be nothing more to say. IfLanguage w ere not free of us in this w ay there would be no pow er thus ultimately

2 Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 4



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frustrated in its effort to command power.2 This elusiveness also gives rise to aform of strategy that differs significantly from rationalistic and telicconceptionsof strategy that have traditionally informed military thinking:

In the delineation of dif franceeverything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because notranscendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality ofthe field. Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategyorients tactics according to a final goal, a telosor theme of domination, a mastery and ultimatere-appropriation of the development of the fi eld. Finally it is a strategy w ithout fi nality, whatmight be called blind tactics . . . The concept of play keeps [here] . . . the unity of chance andnecessity in calculations w ithout end. (D errida, 1982: 7)

Aspects of this understanding of strategy are increasingly evident in the militarystrategic discourse of the information age. Military strategists have not become

deconstructionists but there is a move, recognizing the power of these decon-structive features, to appropriate them to traditional military designs. In whatfollows I seek to illuminate this twist to an old story concerning martial desireand mastery by casting it in the form of an allegory concerning the cosmologi-cal conflict between Zeusand the goddess of cunning and intelligence M-etis.

There is, then, no assignable origin to this pow er that immemorially w e are:and how we are is a function of diverse principles of formation that operate toinvoke orders of being-with in ways that are equally diverse and frequentlyopaq ue to us. H ence Language that capacity to signify, differentiate and en-gender relations of power that themselves en-gender (dis)empowered bodies of

every description is the immemorial locus of conflict. Empowering alwayswages war first, in other words, over its very own conditions of possibility

immanent in the pow er of signifi cation itself. I t d oes so precisely because a givensemawill not, of and by itself, explicitly declare or command. To make sense ofa message one must have recognition (noun nos, verb no-o) of how semaworksw ithin its code (N agy, 1983: 40). The struggle over the pow er of signifi cation isthus the struggle over power. Whoever commands the power of significationembodies power. The one who gives the sign is the leader or commander: Theleader or commander, in G reek the strategos, is the leader or commanderprecisely because s/he is in charge of the telling of signs: Thus, implicit withinthe language of early G reek poetry is the connection betw een pow er, and sema,and by extension t he association of sema, logoiand po w er (H olmberg, 1997: 29).

This fundamental association carries over into the Roman world as well, andmade quite explicit there too. The Lat in for obey orders is signa sequi literallyfollow the signs. The wo rd signumrefers in this context t o t he military standardcarried by the signifier or standard-bearer. Signumtherefore refers to thatw hich is follow ed. Thus when the signumor standard is planted in the ground

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by the standard bearer the soldiers encamp. Ro man military o rder developed thisschema to a high degree of precision. H ence, for example:

Signa subsequi keep in order of battle

Ab signi s di scedere desertSigna figere encampSigna mouere decamp, break up the campSigna inf erre attackSigna consti tuere haltSigna prof erre advanceSigna conuer ter wheel, turn, about faceSigna conferre engage in close fight. . . and so on . . . (Nagy, 1983; Benveniste, 1973)

Thus when Foucault talks in terms of power relations as strategic arrangements

he is, in a sense, literally correct. In a relational order of things dependent upontelling signs, power as strategy strategizes by instituting and commanding adifferentiat ing system of signifi cation. The pow er of the sign lies in the verydisturbing fact, how ever, that that pow er is un-assignable. If the sign is to signify repeatedly its pow er to signify cannot fi nally be secured (D errida, 1988). In

order to secure itself in possession of the power of the sign, power is driven tosecure the sign. A power that is always already possessed though not securelyand that is the point by us who seek to stabilize and secure it, the power ofthe sign always operates, however, both with and against the power of the sign.Here, in the strategic conflict through, over and for the power of signification,

the war is ultimately waged less between the bodies constituted and deployedacross a strategic terrain of pow er relations instituted by an order of signifi cation

than w ith the irredeemable duplicity of t he sign itself, w ithout w hich there w ouldbe no terrain of power relations and the strategic conflict waged to command it.It is the very polysemous pow er of t he sign that thus incites the desire that results

in the w ar to secure its possession. In that w ar the polysemous pow er of the signcontinuously evades capture thus re-engendering the desire that fuels the conflictover its possession.

A second argument follows from the first. The body, too, has its epiphany

in Language, in some mode of signification or other. Since conflict over signi-fication typically becomes gendered and sexualized, particularly, for example,because of its intimate association with the power of reproduction, though how

alw ay s remains a critical political problematic, there w ill also b e a sexual politicsto the conflict accompanying the complex play of desire in any order of signi-

fication. The homology between reproduction and signification is of course adeep and intimate one. Any order of reproduction is a matter of the deploy-ment of the power of the sign, a politics of signification itself. Meat, or meet,




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corporeality is alw ays signified. Meat or meet is a modality of corporealiz-ing.

G ender and sexual politics are thus alway s about mo re than gender and sex,

since these politics do not precede the relations of pow er that proceed from thepower of signification and the desire incited by it. Instituted by that power, andcorporealizing its desires, they in t urn also seek to command t he pow er of signi-fi cation and police its associated desires. G ranted that sexual reproduction has

hitherto appeared to be the power that men cannot appropriate, it is not powerover sexual reproduction t hat is at issue here but confl ict over the pow er of repro-duction as such: the power to tell signs, signification. The power of reproduc-tion, one might say, stands for the power of reproduction. As will becomeevident, w hat w as true of classical myth remains as true for the martial as well as

for the many other fo rms of cont emporary politics. Albeit gendered and sexual-ized differentiation are primordial loci and tropes of the conflict over thepower to command the empowering of signification, the difference that thesedifferences makes are inscribed by the institution of historically specifi c forms ofpower relations, and their cognate plays of desire, themselves dependent upon

specific orders of signification.In sum, pow er relations are instituted by the un-securable pow er of signifi ca-

tion. The institution o f a system of pow er relations ty pically also fo unds itself ina play of desire and a system of gender differentiation that also establishes asexual politics. Sexual politics do no t, how ever, pre-exist the confi gurat ion of

pow er relations and play o f desire that constitute them as the sexual politics thatthey are. To appropriate the pow er of the sign through coveting prior possession

of the power of the sign is the means through which command of that power issought. Commanding the sign seeks command of the sign. Desire is desire forthat command, albeit the command may be sought in different ways giving

expression thereby t o diff erent confi gurat ions and expressions of desire. The verydistinguishing character of the power of signification itself nonetheless alwaysfrustra tes such enterprizes. The sign has the pow er to signify repeatedly preciselybecause the meaning of it is ultimately un-securable. If the power of the sign were

stabilized and secured it w ould lose its pow er to signify, and t hus also to excite.Thus, in the age of information, netw ork and cod e, the martial body does not somuch seek to inscribe the surface or discipline the mechanics of the body any

longer. It seeks instead to command the power of the power of reproduction orsignifi cation itself. Noting that any order of pow er relations, most especially one

that founds itself explicitly in the command of the sign as modern ones increas-ingly do, typically also instituting itself through an allied play of desire andexcitation of gender and sexual politics, this article seeks to explore some of the




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discursive conditions of emergence and characteristic features of the contem-porary military bod y-in-formation as intelligence incarnate.

Corporeal PhenomenalityLo ok for no thing behind phenomena: they are themselves are w hat is to b e learned. (G oethe,M axi ms and Reflections: n.993)

In d irect senses of t he term, this exercise is also w hat Jan Pato cka calls a phenom-enology of fi nitude (D astur, 2000: 79). It is addressed, for example, to t he domainin which finitude and the struggle to master and command finitude through thepower of signification are violently at issue, subject in addition to what often

aspires or claims to be a science of f orce that may often achieve its ends withouthaving to use force; strategy, specifically strategy in the form, here, of martialcorporealizing.3

Franois D astur reminds us, how ever, that phenomena are not g iven. Recall-ing H eidegger, she says they are alw ays already doctrines, significant systems of

signifi cation (D astur, 2000: 26). Retaining thisHeideggerean twist to phenomenology, we canalso say that what is most essential to corporealexistence is that it is so originally structured bylanguage that it cannot appear to itself in nature.

One has to begin then by contriving some way ofallowing it to give itself away. Since phenomenal-izing is prone to hiding as well as manifesting, it

needs a little help if it is to do so. Martial corpo-realizing is more revealing than others in this

regard. It is prone to putting itself on parade. Thetrick then is to take seriously, but not to be taken-in by, the phenomenon of martial display.

Since phenomena are always already doctrines, philology and etymology are

amongst phenomenologys natural allies, and so I propose to take a classical signof contemporary martial embodiment seriously. With it, I play a form ofphenomenological analysis in both a major and a minor key. I major in the keyof the goddess Athena, invoked as their patron by two of the most prolific andinfluential military strategists of the information age, John Arquilla and David

Ronfeldt of the RAND Corporation. I minor by running alongside this reveal-ing sign of the corporeal ambitions of the modern military body-in-formation embraced o ffi cially and no t just idealized in strategic discourse an extract thatserves as the preface to a United States Air Force White Paper, SPACECAST


I t had been five mi nutessince the ti ngli ng sensati oni n her arm had summonedher fr om her office. N owshe was stand i ng alone i nthe dark ened battl e-assessment r oom wonder i nghow she woul d do i n her

first act ual conflict ascommander i n chief(C INC) .



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2020. En titled, Leveraging the Infosphere (SPAC EC AST, 1995), the extractfantasizes the opening of a future war in w hich command of informat ion is para-mount. I let this parading of the fantasy of military intelligence incarnate illus-

trate and punctuate my reading, via the complex corporeal valences of Athena,of the desire of contemporary martial corporeality t o b ecome intelligence incar-nate.

O ne fi nal prefato ry remark. What is most fascinating about t he developments

taking place at the cutting edge of military format ion at the beginning o f the 21stcentury is therefore this. The very means by which phenomenality is itself en-gendered the intimate correlation between appearing and what appears, enactedthrough t he pow er of signifi cation has become, above all, the prow ess to w hichmartial embodiment, paradigmatically represented by the US military, now

aspires. Strictly speaking, the contemporary military body is no longer a mereformation. It frankly recognizes itself to be in-formation. The word play isdeliberate and revealing. A creature of t he age of information and cod e it espousesthe view that the very power of en-gendering en-gendering itself is, funda-mentally, a function of code, subject via digitalization and geneticization t o elec-

tronic and molecular modulation and control. I t embraces the allied view that, asa function of code, any (military) body must be endlessly mutable, and that theway to command this mutability is to develop a strategic virtuosity in theemploy ment of informat ion in order to refashion (military) bodies-in-formationaccording to any and every eventuality. H aving cracked the code, military corpo-

reality now embraces martial becoming.This so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is no simple transform-

ation in high-tech weaponry (Blank, 1996; Freedman, 1998; Sullivan, 1998). Toregard it that way is facile. We are witnessing a profound transformation of thevery military phenomenality o f our civilization deeply infl uential in respect o f

the conditions o f possibility and o f t he strategic imaginary decisive in the emerg-ence also of the aspiration o f o ther allied bod ies-in-formation: co rporations andpolities, for example. Seeking to make the correlation between appearing andwhat appears a matter of strategic command, martial corporeality as body-in-

formation identifies the confluence of the digital revolution in information andcommunication technology with the molecular revolution in biology as thesource of t he pow er that w ill grant it this ancient wish. H eroic Co mmander here

becomes Digitally Empowered Magus.




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CampingAthena

Information has been associated with power, war and the state since at least the time of theG reek gods. O ne normally thinks of Ares, or the Roman version Mars, as the god of w ar.

Where warf are is about informat ion, how ever, the superior deity is Athena the G reek godd essof wisdom who sprang fully armed from Zeus head and went on to become the benevolent,ethical, patriotic protectress and occasionally w rathful huntress who exemplifi ed reverence forthe state. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Information P ow er and G rand Strategy: I n AthenasCamp1997: 132)

Invocation of the goddess Athenarevealingly discloses the corporeal desire atwork within the newstrategic discourse ofthe Revolution in

Military Affair that istaking place at thebeginning of the 21stcentury. Athena ismartial presence

without history, amilitary expression ofthe metaphysics of presence pre-sent. Sprung fully armed from Zeushead, exemplar of military might, Athenaalso bears the intelligence of her motherM-etiswhom Zeushad ingested. H ers is military b ody w ithout the usual andapparent gestation. But even goddesses have histories, as Xenophanesfragmentsand H esiodstheogony attest. Embodiment of military embodiment, whose invo-

cation threatens to elide the awkward genealogical question posed by thehistorical presence of military presence, Athenasstory nonetheless also revealsas well as conceals. Without a mother, also refusing marriage and maternity in

order to act instead as divine protectress of the virility of the polis, Athenaprovides a complex figuration of the politics of desire at work in the conflictedhistory of en-gendering desire. Virgin patroness, her pivotal role in the foundingmyth of Athens commits Athenians to a perennially uncertain political and

cultural game in which masculine worth has continually to be asserted overfeminine difference in a system profo undly contradicted by its founding premise:the total exclusion of woman from the public realm. Through comic farce and

tragic ambiguity, as w ell as philosophical reflection, the life of the G reek polisnotonly afford s an enduring democratic ideal for w estern civilization. It a lso records

the to rtuous diffi culties that civic discourse encounters as it t ries to conjugate theconvoluted grammar bequeathed by founding myth enacted in civic practices(Loraux, 1993). One is powerfully reminded here of Levi-Strauss observation


C omputer on, terrestr i al v i ew, she snapped. Si lently, a huge,thr ee-d imensi onal gl obe floated i n f ront of her. Target:Western Pacific. D i splay f ri endly and enemy orders of batt le,uni t status, and activ i ty l evel, w as the next command. The

globe tur ned into a flat bat tl e map show i ng corps, div i si on, andbattali on di sposi ti ons. L i felik e im ages appeared before her,mark in g the ai rcraft bases w it h smaller figures showi ngair borne formati ons.



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that: Men do not think in myths, myths think in men without their knowing it(Levi-Strauss, 1969: 12). Read more closely, the en-gendering of Athenasbodynot only recalls the gender and sexual politics of our own political systems. In

particular, it problematizes the very d esire to command fully present presence viaintelligence that excites Arquilla and Ronfeldts invocation of the goddess.Whereas Athenas expresses a pre-Socratic conception of corporeality, the

modern conception of the bod y has, of course, evolved and prospered under the

post-Socratic illusion of self-evidence. That self-evidence has been sustained bytwo manoeuvres. The first was the one that separated animation from corpore-ality by dividing body from soul. Thus body became mere repository for some-thing else, something purer or at least purifi able. This manoeuvre was intimatelyrelated to a second. H ere the body w as reduced to matter. As matter it w as depen-

dent on, and open to, positivistic study. In short it acquired the status of a medicaland then mor e broadly a scientifi c object. The G reeks contributed to t his processof objectification onboth counts. First, inrelation to the differ-

entiation of body andsoul and, second, inrelation to themedicalization of thebody as an object of

systematic enquiryand examination in

respect of its health,disease and death.But this Socratic pre-

cursor of the modernbod y nonetheless alsomarks a deep and tro ubling rupture in the very G reek culture that it alsoexpresses. Athena, especially, recalls a corporeal sensibility in classical life thatprecedes this Socratic break. Jean-Pierre Vernant helps us to appreciate what thatis when he notes how Xenophanestheogony indicates some of the definingfeatures of the pre-Socratic bo dy.

Although he lampoons the heterogeneous and restless troop of H omeric godsand goddesses in order to propose a more rigorous and refined conception of

divinity, Xenophanesdoes not radically dissociate divine nature from corporealreality. H e merely claims that the body of a go d or go ddess is not like that of amortal. To be precise, it is dissimilar. It is dissimilar moreover for the same


A scant five mi nut es had passed since the global survei ll ance,reconnaissance, and targeti ng (G SRT ) system alert ed theCI NC of unusual activ it y on the other si de of the border.Mul ti pl e sensors, some of whi ch had been dorm ant for yearsand some that had recent ly been put i n place by specialprecision gui ded muni ti ons (PGM) deliv ery vehicles, hadpi cked up i ncreased signal acti vi ty and detected an unusualamount of mot i on, scent , heat, noi se, and motor exhaust i n andaround enemy bases. N ow GSRT acti vated tw o addit ionalCI NC satelli te (C IN CSAT) low earth orbit ( L EO ) multi sensor

plat forms, launched four ai r- breath ing sensor dr ones, and firedtw o li ghtsat, i ntersystem, omnisensori al communi cationssatelli tes i nto orbi t t o bolster the surv ei llance gri d th at w atchedthe globe and space beyond, 24 hours a day.



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reasons that a goddesses thought is dissimilar to a mortals thought. Vernantsummarizes Xenophanes account o f the difference between gods and mo rtals thisw ay: D issimilarity o f bod y and dissimilarity of t hought arejoint lyproclaimed

in the unityof a formula in which gods bodies and thoughts are fused by virtueof their common difference to human beings (Vernant, 1989: 21, emphasisadded).

D ivinities are the divinities, here, that they are via the operation o f a dividing

practice that differentiates them, while intimately also allying them w ith, mort als.Strictly, then, as Vernant says, divinities, have a body that is not a body (1989:39). They possess the power of becoming-corporeal. In the capacity to becomecorporeal they signify a correlated dis-similarity of gods and mortals. A bodyinvisible in its radiance, a face that cannot and must not be seen directly, the

apparition of the goddess rather than revealing her being, hides that being behindmultiple guises. Athenapossesses the distinguishing mark of all deities, then, apower of corporeal seeming finely calibrated to the feeble human capacity tow ithstand the sight of it. A body w ithout organs since the life of o rgans is fi nitewhereas the goddess is immortal the being of Athenais not exhausted bybecoming-corporeal. It is comprised instead of immortal faculties, undyingenergy and inexhaustible vitality. Faculties that may en-gender corporeality, theseare capacities which cannot be exhausted through the process of becoming orbeing a body. In Athenascase these powers and capacities are especially inter-esting because they are expressed not only in terms of martial prowess but also

in terms of an intimately allied command of ingenious stratagems, skill-fullknow-how, lies and deceptions: in short the cunning intelligence of m-etis, the

signifying art of seeming as such.If the goddess capacity to become corporeal can take the form of many

different bodies, the reason is that no corporeal manifestation may exhaust the

power of corporealizing that enables each and every one of them. The corpo-realizing pow er of the god dess w ould be impoverished if it w ere to be identifi edw ith any one of the fi gures that lends it its appearance (Vernant, 1989: 38).Moreover, mortals must not see the goddess in her full presence if they are to

withstand that presence. It works the other way around as well, of course. Justas mortality, in the correlation of gods and mo rtals, is defined against the infi nitepower of the gods, so the infinite power of the gods is imagined in contra-

distinction to the power of mortals. If this power of corporealizing the verypow er of martial corporeality to w hich Arquilla and R onnfeldt aspire, the desire

for w hich they express through invoking Athena is to retain its supreme quality,then it must not be fully visible to the humans in whose world it is exercised.The allusion to Athena powerfully recalls then the complex semiotic




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military-industrial forcesthat currently lay-outterrains of power com-

prised of surveillance andseduction, differentiatingbetween all manner ofparties but utterly depen-

dent upon the correlatingof those parties in theirvery dis-similarity. Theseare quite opaque to themechanisms of liberal transparency and accountability championed by liberal

governance whose own global power play, ironically, they now so powerfullyenable (Dillon and Reid, 2000, 2001; H ardt and N egri, 2000). N o goddesseswithout humans, no humans without goddesses. No military body withoutinformation, no information without military body-in-formation either.

The same goes not only for male and female in the sexual politics of the early

myths, and of H esiodstheogony whose cosmology is an account of theimmemorial struggle to master the reproductive pow er of signifi cation played outas a violent sexual politics. It also goes for the way in which modern militarypower similarly also seeks to command the very power of differentiation ofinside and outside, of secure and insecure, less of a mere geo-strategic terrain of

power than the capacity through the power of signification to create andcommand multiple terrains of power relations as such. What we have here is less

terrain to be held than incarnation to b e commanded. Invoking Athena, contem-porary military strategists seek her immort ality indirectly via science rather thandivinity, though divination works, however differently, in both.

So originally structured by language that it cannot appear to itself in nature,corporeality has t hus become a function of t he sign because the information ageis an age whose ontology is that of code. In the electronic capacity to manipu-late information and code digitally not as message or meaning, not as product

or commodity but as the generative principle of formation of in-formation assuch information age strategists discern the very synthetic power of material-izing itself. It is the power over the telling of signs upon which corporealizing

depends becoming body, incarnation to w hich they lay claim w hen invokingAthenaas the patron of strategy and war in the information age.To invoke is, however, also to evoke. Body without organs, invocation of the

goddess thus also serves to disclose some typical manoeuvres and desires at workw ithin the martial pow er play of t he information age including: the desire to see


Besi de each symbol were the unit ' s designator, i tsmanning level, and the plain-text int erpretation of i tscurrent activ i ty. The fri endly f orces were shown i n blue,

and the enemy in r ed. Al l the fri endli es were in th emi dst of a recall. T he map showed tw o squadrons of ai r-domi nati on drones, a wi ng of tr oop-support drones, andan airborne command module (AC M) heading towardthe formati ons of enemy f orces. Shaded ki ll zonesenci rcl ed each for mat i on. Enemy forces floated beforeher, also displaying textual i nform ati on. The imagedi splayed enemy uni ts on t he move from their garri sons.



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without being seen; to strike with impunity; to confound with tricks and strata-gems borne of supreme metisticvirtuosity, commanding the play of signs andmeaning; to come and go a s one pleases. Above all, to appear armed and capable

w ithout the protr acted vulnerability of coming to presence as armed, and to dis-appear before armed presence becomes a target for retaliation. Preferring websof signification as snare and trap. Inspiring shock and awe, through confusion,disorientation and dislocation sewn by strategic command of the sign. Ideally,

having mass only to suit. Abo ve all, the desire to prevail witho ut, apparently, theexpenditure of much prevailing cost or effort. P ow er over the sign as immanentpow er, corporealizing at w ill in shapes and fo rms appropriate to t he task, desireor necessity at hand (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2000). Invested with the immanentpow er of the sign, thus enabled strategically to en-gender and re-engender pow er

itself.It is therefore simplistic

merely to say, as Arquilla andRonfeldt do, that Athenaexemplifi es patrio tic reverence

for the state: Paul Revere indeified drag. Athena is(semiotic) intelligence incar-nate. Invoking Athena, themartial carnality that Arquilla

and Ronfeldt promoteexpresses pro tean desires long

associated in many cultures with the power to en-gender through commandingendlessly re-fi gurab le embod iment. In the process, how ever, they elide all theethical and political issues, as well as the attendant risks, associated with such

power.Camping Athenain the way these strategists do consequently connotes much

more than the compulsory clich of paying strategic obeisance to classical implied timeless and universal strategic authorities. Doing what modern strate-

gists never do seriously engaging the deeply correlated semiotic, semantic andpolitical registers conjured back to presence by such invocations serves, here,to bro ach an interrogation into t he martial corporeality and political economy o f

desire sequestered in this information-directed R MA. O ne might have thought,then, that strategists so attuned to the generative power of the sign in the very

en-gendering of every sort o f modern pow er information is the prime moverthey say elsewhere would have been more careful about giving themselves awaythrough the choice of such a revealing sign as flashing-eyed Athena. Invoking


Aboard the ACM , the aerospace operati ons di rectorobserv ed the same batt le map the CI NC had j ustsw i tched of f. B y t ouchi ng t he flat screen i n f ront ofhim, he sent target formati ons to hi s dozencontrollers. Each controll er wore a helmet and facescreen that vi rtually put hi m or her j ust above thedr one flight being maneuvered. The si ght , feel, andtouch of th e terr ain p rofile-i ncludi ng tr ees,bui ld i ngs, clouds, and rai n-were all t here as eachcontroll er pressed to attack t he appr oaching foe.



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the god dess recalls the pow er plays of desire and en-gendering that fo rmulate asthey also try to resolve the troubling problematic of the radically (in)securepower of the sign. For the politics of those power plays, so deeply installed in

the mystery of signification, are first explored in the different orders of signifi-cation represented cosmologically by Zeus, and his wife M-etisas well as theirchild Athena, to whom our information strategists have appealed.

Cocking the Question

There was no mother who gave me birth; and in all things, except for marriage, wholeheart-edly I am for the male and entirely on the fathers side. Therefore, I will not award a greaterhonour to the death of a woman who killed her husband, the master of the house. (Athena tothe Court, Aeschylus, Eumenides: 734)

Classically, women have been made to bear the odium that this self-frustrating

campaign, to command that that cannot be commanded if it is to retain the verypower that distinguishes it, excites. In the same cause John Locke, for anotherexample, w as as bad as the G reeks. H ere, w ith heavy irony, he complains:

From what has been said in the foregoing Chapters, it is easy to perceive what imperfectionsthere is in language, and how the very nature of Words, makes it almost unavoidab le, for manyof them to be do ubtf ul and uncertain in their signifi cation; (1975: 4756)

Eloquence, like the fair Sex has too prevailing Beauties in it, to suffer itself ever to be spokenagainst. And tis vein to fi nd fault w ith those Arts of deceiving, w herein Men fi nd pleasure tobe deceived. (1975: 508)

All bodies are subject t o t he play of fi liation as well as to t he en-gendering power

of differentiation effected by signifi cation. The subject of fi liation, too , is deeplyimplicated in the laying out of a field power relations, relations instituted bydividing practices that effect correlations and affi liations as w ell as enmities:

parties dependent upon their very dis-similarities locked in conflict over thevanity of insignifi cant differences that divide them as much as over the brute fearof that ineradicable alienness in which they nonetheless share. A substantial partof Derridas most direct and sustained reflection on the question of the political

Polit ics of Fr iendship(1997) is taken up precisely with the deconstruction ofthe phallo-logo-centrism of the filiation upon which western conceptions ofsignifi cation, pow er and politics have been based since classical times. From the

perspective of that reflection, as this, the question of being as such a fortiorithe question of being a body, most notab ly a political or military b ody has come

to us cocked: simultaneously bo th armed, sexed and gendered. O ur informationstrategists chose much more than t hey knew, then, w hen invoking Athenaas theirpatron. C ocked, the issue of intelligence incarnate, fi rst posed and play ed out in




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the G reek myths and H esiodstheogony, is no less primed for us today. Intelli-gence incarnate, Athenashistory is one of bloody conflict sexualized and sexu-alizing, gendered and gendering, in the struggle to command the power of

en-gendering signification itself.The story goes that Athenasmother was an Oceanidnamed M-etis(may-tis),from w hom a special from o f intelligence (m-etis)receives its name. After allyingwith M-etisin order to use her cunning to o verthrow his father, Zeushad impreg-nated her. Gaeaand Uranushad, however, prophesized that if M-etisbore thechild it was destined to be a son who would in turn overthrow his father, Zeus.Zeuspromptly swallowed M-etis. In t ime, and in ord er to relive him of a t erribleheadache, Prometheusstruck Zeuson the head. Out sprang Athenain all hermartial puissance.

My reading of the myth is that this is a means by which different powers ofsignifi cation are fi rst distinguished and sy mbolized in terms of distinctly male orfemale capabilities. A reunion of the two powers is then effected by first sub-ordinating the unstable power of female signification (M-etis) to that of the male(Zeus). The resolution is then legitimated and domesticated in a female figure,Athena, dedicated to championing the institution of a hierarchy of signifyingpower subordinated to that of the male.4

According to the detailed account given by Detienne and Vernant (1978),classical G reek thinking is distinguished by the w ay in w hich it consistentlydifferentiates between speculative reasoning and metistic intelligence. For them,

as also for Lisa Raphals (1992) who compares and contrasts the semantic registerof m-etiswith that of zhiin Chinese literature, while m-etisis clearly distinguished

as a stochastic intelligence, rather than a formal epistemology, it is quite clearlyalso an explicit not a tacit capability. Metistic intelligence entailed recognition ofthe polyvalent nature of the universe and the transformatory polysemic nature

of signs, a world in which form was constantly changing and in which no rulew as given but had alw ays to be found. Such intelligence is intimately bound-upwith a sophisticated ability not only to read and interpret signs but also, in themaking of them, to escape predicaments, resolve diffi culties and solve prob lems.

Metistic intelligence was, in short, synthetic as well as hermeneutical and analytic.Like phronesis, m-etisapplied to environments that were mobile and mutable,subject to radical contingency and uncertainty. U nlike phronesis, how ever, it w as

not confined to the social world, or to the affairs of the polis. Its remit extendedto the humans generic environmental embededness, applying also to their radical

connectivity with other creatures, and other things. Certain kinds of animalswere, for example, also thought to have m-etis. Thus, while O dysseuswas theexemplar of metistic intelligence amongst humans, the octopus and the fox were




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thought to exemplify it amongst animals. A kind of cunning, m-etiswas at apremium in hunting, fishing, war and politics as well as in navigation andmedicine. (D etienne and Vernant , 1978: 312).

Albeit conflict over and through m-etisin G reek my th is not one exclusivelyconducted betw een male and female, it often also characterizes confl ict betw een

male and male, en-gendering takes place

here through the veryprocess of formulatingthe problematic ofsignifying power andeffecting a solution to

it. The ambiguity isnonetheless important.The duplicity generallyassigned to femaleintelligence in the form of m-etisin early G reek literature is in fact never exclus-ively t he property of t he female. C lassically it is also an innate property of certaingods and heroes: notably Zeusamongst the gods and Odysseus(know n for all histricks and stratagems as polumetis) amongst the mort als. Indeed Zeusis only ableto defeat M-etisherself because he is in fact already in possession of a measure ofmetistic intelligence. Fo r example, he tricks M-etisinto reducing her size in orderto swallow her.

More generally, it is perfectly clear also that one has to have metistic intelli-

gence in order to be able to tell and make signs at all, and that the slipperyunstable character o f m-etisis a function of the radical polysemy of the sign, itscapacity interchangeably both to deceive and to tell the truth. In other words,

the very condition of possibility of m-etislies in the irreducibly polysemouscharacter of the sign not the essential properties of a sex. The fear of femalesemiotic monopoly is the gendered expression consequently of a lust incited bythe signs ow n opaq ue polysemous power. Pro jected onto the female as a means

also of bringing it to signifcatory presence, so-called female strategies foremploying this power are themselves re-assimilated by males appropriatingtypified female speech, female acts (notably weaving) and finally also, as with

Zeus, in simply appropriating the female as such. In the process, however,maleness is also differentially established: as t he pow er of abstraction and of the

capacity to institute symbols that are stable, fixed and enduring, as well as thepow er of brute force (bi).5 Ironically, how ever, males are depicted as persistentlyfailing in their attempts to domesticate the polysemous pow er of the sign because:


Speed, strength, and combat r adii were marked for each uni t.Some enemy un i ts showed sti ll i n garr i son but w i thengines runni ng, di scovered by sensi ti ve seismi c, tacti le, andfum e-smelli ng sensors. Manchur i a, came the next command .The map changed. The CI NC was now i n the mi ddle of aholographic di splay. Ground superior it y vehicles (G SV) ,i denti fied by the reli able str uctu ral sensory signature system(S4), moved below her, and dr ones flew ar ound her. Shecould see her f orces respondi ng t o the enemy sneak attack

and monit ored their progress.



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Male figures attempt to impose a sema[n]tic control on m-etiswhile not fullyrecognizing the m-etisof semathemselves (H olmberg , 1983: 30).

Abstraction, symbolic thought, metaphor thus are depicted as properties of the male; the

female is completely excluded from meaningful symbo lic communication. But the semaitself, the product of m-etis, provides a false security which these texts also acknowledge.The creation of the fi rst sema, at least in the Theogony, is explicitly linked to the female in thefigure of Pandora, the perfect sema, the ultimate example of representation and m-etis. Thedistance between a semaand its referent in fact re-enacts in every incident an ambiguityessential to the female and a movement essential to the action of m-etis. Thus the attempt atgender differentiation is consistently undermined by the nature of sema. (H olmb erg, 1983:3031)

The undecidability of the semais disclosed by m-etis. Those who signify,whoever they are and however they may be sexed and gendered, are always

already infected by this undecidability; always already participate in its power.The lust to repossess and domesticate m-etisis itself played out metistically and

is therefore always alreadysubverted by the very playof undecidability of which

metistic power is essentiallycomprised. Undecidabilityrules, even amongst thegods.

Lying in the triangu-

lation of reasoning byexample, the deciphering of

signs and endless word play,m-etisalso links the visible tothe invisible. One of its

principal purposes was to secure victory in adversity: through turning onesopponents strengths to ones own advantage; and, through setting traps, snaresand other webs of (dis)simulation. The ability to change colour or shape, tobecome undetectable, and to surprise also distinguishes it. Above all, metistic

intelligence was said to be fluid and supple, it kicked-in where the rule broke-offand only ruse and invention would do, or where the rule was a positiveimpediment and a creative ability to play with the signs that constituted it was

necessary to securing a successful outcome. In stark contradistinction to themodern ideal of disinterested scientifi c know ledge, metisticintelligence wasnothing if not interested and invested in the circumstances, usually of survival,that called for its virtuosity. And that virtuosity was essentially semiotic,command of the sign as virtuoso performance in exploiting the possibilities


O n t he ground, a platoon sergeant nervously watchedhi s face-shi eld vi sual di splay. From h i s posi ti on, hecould see i n thr ee-dim ensional colour t he hill i n fr ontof him and the enemy i nfantry approaching fr om theopposi te side. If t he agency had had enough ti me befor ethe conflict, i t could have loaded DNA data on theopposi ng commander i nto t he data fusi on contr ol bank(D FCB) so he could posit i vely identi fy him, but suchwas the fog of war. The dri vi ng rain k ept hi m fr omseei ng 10 feet i n fr ont of hi m, but h i s moni tor clearlyshowed the enemy f orce spli tt i ng and coming aroundboth si des of th e hill .



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afforded by the necessarily undecidableplay of signs. Perhaps its most dis-tinguished feature is its pow er to transform:

words, circumstances, shapes and bodies.To seek to appropriate m-etisthrough theplay of m-etisis equivalent to seeking toappropriate the power of the sign through

the power of the sign. To do that is tostrategize, but to strategize in a differentkey, one without final end.6

Discursive Conditions of Emergence of Military Digitality

The military body, its appetites, forms and desires, its entire sensorium, is thusnot what it once was. But then nobody is. The discursive conditions of emerg-ence that have empow ered t his new strategic discourse of martial corporeality asintelligence incarnate, threatening to supplement if not supplant the disciplinary

determinations of the military body explored by Foucault (1982), are thoseshared with the forces transforming corporeality as such these days. There is nospace, here, to tell their story in detail. But some of the salient features may benoted.

In some respects the genealogy goes back beyond the Second World War of

the 20th century. The war itself, and its immediate aftermath, was critical forinitiating the complex networks between cyberneticists, information and

communication scientists and ultimately also molecular biologists that becamesuch an integral part of it. These were to be extensively developed throughoutthe Cold-War years. Eventually, the force of global military and ideological

conflict combined with militarily resourced, nationally organized and com-mercially driven science, in which the molecular and the digital have becomepowerfully allied politically, economically, technically and conceptually, to effectlife science as strategy and strategy as a life science (Dillon and Reid, 2001).

It also helps to continue keeping H esiodstheogony in mind. Recall that theconflict between Zeusand M-etisis a conflict over the power of significationwaged between different accounts of the power of signifying. The first, said to

be that of the male (Zeus), is more abstract, speculative and formal. The second,said to be characteristic of the female (M-etis), is more supple, sinewy andunpredictable, characteristic in fact of the undecidable and polysemic characterof t he sign itself. Recall, too, that the resolution o f this apparent confl ict requiresone command of signification to appropriate and subordinate the other (Zeus


The enemy' s doctri nal patt ernsi ndi cated that hi s most li kely attackcorri dor w ould be on the eastern

sid e of t he hill . N ow t he enemy wasspli tti ng hi s force in hopes ofsurpr i si ng our forces. The platoonsergeant' s tr oop commander saw t hesame screen as her t roops did , w i ththe added f eature of hav i ng heropponent' s pr edi cted movementsoverlaid w i th hi s actual movements.



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swallows M-etis). A hierarchy of pow er is thus instituted, represented by a do mes-ticated female fi gure (Athena), devoted to the maintenance of a certain genderedsolution to this en-gendering problematic.

We no longer, quite, inhabit the rich cosmological and mythological world ofthe G reeks (or the C hinese for that mat ter), so there is no mod ern fi gure ofAthena. But, addressing the discursive conditions of emergence of contemporarymartial corporeality, this concluding section of the article suggests that we under-

stand the modern military bod y as function of the turbulent and complex confl u-ence of quite different understandings of know ledge and intelligence than tho sepositivistic and telic understandings that have traditionally informed the analy sisof martial embodiment. In-formation is an ambition that revolves aroundwidely shared, albeit nonetheless highly problematic, interpretations of key

discursive terms information, language and code as well as the institution ofa complex semantic field, shared between the information, communication andlife sciences, that allows for combinatorial possibilities that did not exist prior tothe pow erful forces unleashed by their recent confl uence.

Information, language and code are not, of course, synonymous. Not only do

they differ, there are radically different understandings of language and code justas there are quite different accounts of info rmation. E arly cy bernetic informationtheory, fo r example, specifi cally excluded semantic content from its mathemati-cized and digitalized conception of information. Such differences also obtainwithin as well as between the information, communication and molecular

sciences. The story of how information and code came to constitute a semanticfield shared by the information and communication and molecular sciences is,

however, well-told in particular by Lily Kay (1993 and 2000a).In the 1950s the spread of information theory, electronic communication tech-

nologies and computers had an enormous impact also on the life sciences. A new

and prof oundly important space of scientific representation emerged:

We witness here the opening of a new discursive space in which the world, or the message,became confi gured together w ith concepts of the gene as the locus of scriptural-technologicalcontrol, and with notions of control over bodies in ways which by-passed their physicality.Their three dimensionality was flattened into a one-dimensional magnetic tape; their materialdensity symbo lically represented as a digital cod e. (Kay, 2000b: 107)

The trope of info rmation w ith all of its allied relations w ith mathematics, crypt-analysis, linguistics, computers, operational research, surveillance and weapons

systems served to integrat e mechanisms of molecular specifi city, structuralconsiderations, mathematical relations, linguistic att ributes, and coding, w ithin asingle explanatory framework (Kay, 2000b: 115).




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The discursive vocabulary of information andcode has also long since passed fro m the informat ionand life sciences to the military sciences. Clearly,

too , the reasons why it has done so are, in part, thatthese originally emerged in connection with broadgeo-strat egic exigencies as w ell as specifi c militaryprojects, most especially in the USA (Aspray, 1985;

K ay, 1989 and 2000; Beatty, 1991; Leno ir and H ays,2000). The same is true in many respects of theH uman G enome project, initially styled theManhattan Project for Biomedicine (Lenoir andH ay s, 2000). Strategic discourse does not w ork

despite borrowing widely divergent terms. It worksprecisely because of the o pen semantic fi eld b rought into play via the intersectionof different, if cognate, terms.

The Networked Body-in-Formation

D uring the course of one of the earliest internecine w ars that gave birth to the

modern age, O liver C romw ell invented a new model army. In t he centuries thatfollowed the military body as a disciplined body co-evolved across Europe withother sites of institutional confinement that Foucault taught were characteristicof the disciplinary societies of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As G illesD eleuze remarked, in such societies individuals are alw ay s going from one closed

site to another, each with its own laws: first of all the family, then the school( yo ure not at home yo u know ), then the barracks ( yo ure not at school youknow ), then the factory, hospital from time to time, maybe prison the modelsite of confi nement (D eleuze, 1995: 177). D eleuze not ed, how ever, that Foucaultwas a genealogist not an essentialist, recognizing that disciplinary societies were

an historically contingent power formation. One, Deleuze argued, that wasalready being superseded or at least supplemented by cybernetic developments.Now, Deleuze says, in response to Foucault, we are, in the midst of a generalbreakdow n of all sites of confi nement . . . Contr ol Societiesare taking over(1995: 180). [Control is the cybernetic understanding of control by means of

w hich open information systems are strategized into modes of self-regulation andself-reproduction.]. Thus, w hile:

sovereign societies w orked w ith the simple machines, levers, pulleys, clock;. . . disciplinarysocieties were equipped with thermodynamic machines presenting the passive danger ofentropy and the active danger of sabotage; control societies function with a third generation of


From her vi rtualcommand post, shearr ayed her forces to

flank the foe. She had t obe careful not t o befooled by the holographi cdeception i mages put i nplace by the enemy anall t oo frequent anddi sastr ous occurrence inthe last conflict. I f shewas lucky, surpr ise woul dbe on her side today.



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machines, with information technology andcomputers, where the passive danger is noise andthe active piracy and viral contamination. Thistechnological development is more deeply rooted

in a mutation of capitalism. (1995: 180)

Such capitalism, Deleuze says, is:

a capitalism no longer directed towards produc-tion, but towards products, that is, towards salesor markets. Thus its essentially dispersive, withfactories giving way to businesses. Family, school,army and factory are no longer so many analogousbut different sites converging in an owner,whether the state or some private power, buttransmutable or transformab le coded confi gur-ations of a single business. (1995: 181)

It is as well to be cautious about grand claims about the panoptic and post-panoptic character of western societies (Boyne, 199). Nevertheless, Admiral

Arthur C ebrow ski, one of the key architects of the transformation of U S militarystrategy in response to the information revolution (known as network centricwarfare) designed comprehensively to reconfigure the US military body in waysthat enthusiastically embrace the biopolitical capital dynamics of controlsocieties, wholeheartedly concurs with Deleuze. Noting that while there is, as

yet no equivalent to Carl Von Clausewitzs On War fo r this cyberneticist revol-ution in military affairs, Cebrowski and his co-author explain in detail how it is

possible nonetheless to, gain some insight through the general observation thatnations make w ar the same w ay t hey make w ealth (C ebrow ski and G artska,1998: 2). Network-centric warfare and all of its associated revolutions in military

affairs, Cebrowski writes, grow out of and draw their power from the funda-mental changes in American society. These changes have been dominated by theco-evolution of economics, information technology, and business processes andorganizat ions linked by three themes. First is the shift in focus from the w eapons

platform to the concept of informational network. Second, is the shift to radicalrelationality, from viewing actors as independent to viewing them as part of acontinuously adapting ecosystem. Third, is the tendency towards biophilo-

sophical mod es of d iscourse: t he importance of making strategic choices to adaptor even survive in such changing ecosystems (C ebrow ski and G artska, 1998:

12). Speed, self-synchronizat ion and fl exibility are at a premium and netw ork-centric operations are claimed to deliver to the US military, the same powerfuldynamics as they produced in American business (1995: 5). Disclosing the


As the CIN C, ai rborne controller,and ground-t roop commanderacti vat ed thei r sit uati on assessment

system (SAS), GSRT i denti fied them,confirmed thei r locati ons, and passedinf ormation required to get t hem on-li ne. As each war ri or requestedtarget data, G SRT fused sensor data,tapped databases, acti vat edresources, and passed temp lat ed,neurally collated inf ormati on to eachperson in exactl y the form at he orshe needed to get a clear pi ctur e ofthe enemy and the unfoldi ngsituation.



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conceptual provenance and inspiration of this refashioning of the military b odyin the biophilosophical discourse of the complexity sciences, Cebrowskiconcludes:

Military o perations are enormously co mplex, and complex-ity theory tells us such enterprizes organize best from thebottom-up. . . . This is not just a matter of introducing newtechnology ; this is a matter of t he co-evolution of t hat tech-nology with operational concepts, doctrine, and organiz-ation. . . . This is not theory it is happening now. Forexample, new classes of threats have acquired increaseddefensive combat power for joint forces. The combatpower that has emerged the co-operative engagementcapability (CEC) was enabled by a shift to network-centric operations. (C ebrow ski and G artska, 1999: 79)

Successful organization of war mimics successfulorganization for profi t to mimic the operation ofcomplex adaptive systems determined by negoti-ating d iverse and challenging fi tness landscapes

through mutating, morphing and other means ofchanging their constituent elements, forms and connectivities: bodies-in-format ion (C ebrow ski and G artska, 1999).

Omniscient, omniversal, omnisensorial, omnidirectional, the new strategicdiscourse embraces a corporeality designed to realise martial intelligence incar-

nate; morphing and swarming according to targets of opportunity and combatexigency The technical radicality of this military vision contests, on the terrain

they had claimed as their own, the political radicalism of those that embracecyb orgizat ion fo r alternative political, cultural and corporeal becomings. Military

strategists, too, now know their Foucault, D eleuze and H arraw ay. They alreadyhad operational research and cybernetics; they are developing network warfareand complexity thinking. Already extensively cy borg and virtual, the primacy ofsynthetic environments long accepted, martial desire lusts for a mutable corpo-reality-in-formation whose top sight enjoys the overwhelming power of digital

synoptic intelligence: matrix made flesh. The Mesh and t he Net(Libicki, 1994),I nformation Warfare(Schwartau, 1996), Shock and Awe(Ulmman and Wade,1996), D ominant Battl espace Know ledge(Johnson and Libicki, 1995), Strategic

I nformation Warfare(1996) N etw ork-Centric Warfare(C ebrowski and G arstka(1998), Chaos Theory and Str ategic Thought(1992), Complexit y, G lobal Poli ticsand N ational Secur it y(Alberts and C zerw inski, 1997), Swarming(Arquilla andRonfeldt, 2000). These are RAND and National Defence University titles thatexpress this desire while formulating the orders of discourse through which it is


Th i s was the same GSRTthat was also aidi ng SanFranci sco in respondi ng toyesterday' s massi veearthquake. From t hepresi dent to the cit y mayorto the fireman tr yi ng to findthe best r oute through t heclut tered and congestedstr eets, each got t herequested r eal-t ime

i nformati on i n seconds, j ustas our t roops in the WesternPacific di d.



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being pursued. Joint Vi sion 2020(2000) is the Pentagons strategic design to givemilitary effect to them, throughout t he military bo dy. Info rmation dominance ofinner space is, however, critically dependent also upon outer space, since the

infosphere merges here with the biosphere. Thus do the bio- and geo-politicalimperatives of contemporary martial corporeality collude, as well as collide. Inemulation of its divine patron, the military body in-formation marries extra-terrestrial power to the task of terrestrial dominance and Star Wars meets the

Matrix in defence of the planetary information infrastructure without whichintelligence incarnate becomes mortal fallibility.

Conclusion

Voice of Athena, dearest to me of the god s, how clearly, though y ou are unseen, do I hear yourcall and snatch its meaning in my mind. (Odysseus. Sophocles, Ajax: 14)

Incarnation is now a life science. Life science, for w hich information in t he formof code is currently the prime mover, has gone digital. With the success of thatmove, tw o things happen. First, is the digitalizat ion o f intelligence that promises

real-time omniscience through the terminals. Second, is a fundamental change inthe corporeal imagination of martial presence. It has long been recognized thatthe question of the bodies we are is indissociablefrom the complex cultural specification of thebodies w e want and do not w ant. O r, rather, of the

bodies we are enjoined to want, and not want, toposses and be possessed by, to domineer, dominate

and punish. Throughout the modern periodmilitary bod ies have been disciplinary bo dies. N owthey aspire to be digital ones. Domination remains

the desire that animates them shock and awe inthe battlespace, hegemony in geospace but sincethe desire is increasingly mediated through radi-cally different digital practices, the corporeality it

engenders is undergoing t ransformation as w ell. Anovel politico-cultural economy of martial desire isenabled here by technologies and biophilosophical

discourses in which materiality has become code. Code cracked, materialitybecomes a function of the digital architectural strategies desire in pursuit of

algorithmic realization that effect its recombination. A matt er thus of the aston-ishing powers of modern techne corporatized choice courtesy of board-roompraxis, capitalization, military command and the epistemological acquisitiveness


The CI NC paused forseveral moment s,wonderi ng how battleswere ever fought wi thout

the i nformati on systemsshe now used w i thpr acti ced ease, and shewas glad t hey werefighti ng an enemy sti llmired in thevisual/electromagneticintell igence (ELI N T)-ori ented manoeuvre forceof the last w ar.



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of research institutes life science becomes strategy and strategy becomes a lifescience. Students of strategy, military strategizers are themselves thus now alsocompelled to b ecome life scientists (D illon and R eid, 2001). As military embod i-

ment pursues the intelligence incarnate offered by the information and molecularrevolutions, pow er over life becomes allied w ith pow er over death in a complexconvergence of sovereign geopolitics w ith glob al biopolitics gone digital. P opu-lated by martial bodies that have long been cyborgs, here we are witnessing the

emergence of a libidinality in thrall to Athenathe w ise as digital dominatrix.

Notes

1. I allow for H eideggers account of the sign here as Wink(in the sense of gesture) that makessomething immediately evident, makes something to be thought appear directly and is the fundamentaltrait of language, rather than mere Zeichen(sign in the sense of mark or index) that indirectly desig-

nates a thing not actually present. Mart in H eidegger, O n the Way to L anguage(1971).2. There are, of course, many w ays to be in language, many experiences to have w ith language, so

this argument is not one that claims that all that there is to language is the power struggle over thepower of language to en-gender things; although Heidegger, for example, first seems to side with theview that says there is only the polemosof the being that comes to being in language and then, viagelassenheit, poetry, language and thought, to explore ways in which letting be rather than strugglemay characterize the being that comes to b eing in language. The advent of language is nonetheless also,if not exclusively, a power struggle over the power of language to en-gender things. It is that struggle,the cyberneticism and molecularism that are beginning to fashion a military body in-formation, thatconcerns this article.

3. The capacity of strategy, understood in these terms, to achieve its ends without necessarily havingto use force is detailed in a number of classical texts, most notably in that of Sunzis, Ar t of War. SeeRaphals, C hapter 5 (1992).

4. The social and political contradictions, tensions and paradoxes which this induced in the G reekpolisare brilliantly explored b y N icole Loraux (1993).5. For a careful account of how m-etisthus differs from the so-called masculine attribute of bisee

D unkle (1989).6. This account of strategy differs as much from the modern military t radition as much as it does

from that offered by, for example, De Certeau (1974).

References

Alberts, David and Thomas Czerwinski (1997) Complexity, Global Politics and N ational Securi ty.Washington, DC: National Defense University.

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Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster and co-editor of Cultur al Values:The Journal of Cult ural R esearch(Routledge).




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