 Just to note John that if we get more than a hundred attendees I will I will try and place it live on YouTube because we may have Some restrictions within the number of attendees, but it should be fine Okay, I'll let you know in the chat if we do that and then you can direct people if they need to Thanks very much There's no weird echo if I use the the audio of the computer a job. Are you silent now? I'm mute Yeah, no, no, okay, because otherwise I'll do the same thing you do the headphones But if it sounds okay, then then I'll do it this way sounds absolutely fine to me. Okay, never Good evening everybody. I hope you can hear me. Okay My name is Jonathan Hill and I'm director of the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at Kings College London and I'm delighted to Introduce Dr. Carol Kirsten who's going to be speaking as to as tonight. He's going to be kicking off or Restarting our seminar series in the new calendar year and we're delighted to have him Carol is reader in the study of Islam in the Muslim world in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Kings College London And the title of his talk this evening is speculative realism in the Middle East Rethinking war and terror after operation desert storm as I'm sure you are all aware the January marks important anniversary since desert storm and With the lights to have Carol talk to us about it this evening It's not an exaggeration to say that Carol is an international leader in his field And has been instrumental in many of the most important developments within it over the last few years Without going through through all of the many highlights just to pick on a couple he is the co-founder of the book series contemporary thought in the Islamic world Which is published by routage press He's also one of the founding members of the British Association for Islamic studies Which plays a very important part in the Middle East stored it brought a Middle East studies calendar He's published most recently on blasphemy laws in Indonesia, and he's got a few pieces coming out last year and also forthcoming as well and his most recent book is entitled contemporary thought in the Muslim world trends themes and issues which was published in 2019 by routage Carol's going to talk for around between 15 60 minutes which should lead us up leave us about 30 minutes to Take questions and provide some answers at the end if you do have any questions. You'd like to ask Carol Please can you write them down in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen? That's a Q&A function rather than the chat function And then I will get to those at the end when when Carol has finished and I'll invite I will read these out We'll invite his thoughts on them Without any further ado Over to you Carol. Thank you so much for that very kind introduction Jonathan. It's a pleasure to have this opportunity It's going to be quite an extensive talk, so I'm going to share my screen I have supported my my remarks with a PowerPoint Presentation, so I'm going to do that right now and then please let me know If it's all a nicely visible we start a slide show that should be there now. Is that right and I will Take myself off the camera not to distract you and get started So that the title of the talk is speculative realism in the Middle East rather grand title Rethinking war and terror after Operation Desert Storm What I propose to do is a few things I'm going to why would we actually talk about desert storm right now Why would I be doing that? Then I'll go into a few basic facts I'll briefly say a few things about the literature related to the 1991 Gulf War and I'll spend the largest part of my talk about what I'm going to call the alternative literature that was generated by The 1991 Gulf War So why talk about it? Well, first of all John mentioned it already this month is the 30 year anniversary of the launching of operation desert storm It's transformed operation desert shield into open warfare and together These code words operation desert shield and operation desert storm form the code names for the two phases of the 1991 Gulf War that followed the invasion and Occupation of Kuwait by Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein in August 1990 and the subsequent Eviction of Iraq by an international coalition force in early 1991 Secondly, it was the first armed conflict with 24-7 live media coverage in real time It was a watershed event in terms of redefining warfare for the 21st century and Finally the 1991 war has not only resulted in a reset of politics of the Persian Gulf but also of the region's relationship with the wider world and the role of Political Islam globally Now, why would I be talking about this? Well, this Gulf War is actually the only armed conflict that I have witnessed up close After graduating as an arabist from university in the Netherlands in 1988 I joined a construction and engineering firm which had been one of the house contractors of the Royal Saudi Air Force since the 1970s and from the fall of 1990 until early 94 hours stationed at King Abdulaziz air base in Daran That's the eastern province of Saudi Arabia Working on a project that was executed under the al-Yamama program a large defense deal between Saudi Arabia and the UK and In that civilian capacity, I witnessed the unfolding of the conflict from what was in effect The center of air operations coordinated by the United States military Central command, which is responsible for the Middle East now I stayed in Saudi Arabia till late 2000 and Then I embarked on a new career in academia and in my current incarnation as a scholar of Islam Specializing in the intellectual history of the contemporary Muslim world. I Was reading a book by an iranian philosopher Reza and Nicarastani and titled Cyclonopedia and My initial interest was in the Islamic reference employed by Nicarastani in this quite Strange book which fits in the genre of theory fiction. I Also learned that Nicarastani is associated with an emerging Strength of contemporary philosophy known as speculative realism and it took its name from a workshop that was hosted by Goldsmiths College in London in 2007 Through that book. I was introduced to some rather Yeah, idiosyncratic Interpretations of and reflections on the Gulf War by mostly French intellectuals and that was the incentive and the inspiration for the unconventional angle. I'm adopting in this Presentation now I have to confess that initially I was not sure what to make of these eccentric philosophers and authors Were these justice post-structuralist writings and not just new versions of that tale of the emperor's new clothes But then I learned that one of these individuals Paul Virilio was actually consulted by defense specialists and that his books are also on the reading lists of military academies I Also found out that the ideas of a of a comparable Philosophers yield the laser were explored by a Israeli general who actually did his PhD at King's and Who later incorporated these ideas in a military handbook? And it was actually only then that I sort of plucked up the courage to propose the seminar topic to John Hill and It's why I'm gonna concentrate on that alternative literature today Because that that 1991 Gulf War was the first mediatized war on a scale and intensity Not seen before and as I was based in Daran I was able to receive CNN via satellite from Bahrain Because outside the eastern province you could not watch it live in Saudi Arabia CNN was relayed with a delay of several hours in order to censor out any coverage of events in Saudi Arabia Now I remember also that at the time I described my experiences as a kind of four dimensional warfare Not knowing at the time that I had actually caught on to something that Paul Virilio in his writings on the Gulf War called the fourth front now so this by way of personal disclosure Now the 1991 Gulf War is a bit of a forgotten war Actually, because it's it's tucked in between The bloody and lengthy confrontation between Iraq and Iran from 1980 till 1988 and 2003 invasion codenamed Iraqi freedom and its disastrous aftermath Now before turning to the crux of my presentation a few key facts and key dates To August 1990 Iraq invades and occupies Kuwait On 7 August President Bush announces Operation Desert Shield and authorizes the formation of a coalition eventually joined by 34 other countries Then between August and December 1990 There was a massive logistics operation and they built up of military capacity in the region Paralleled by negotiations Between the American Secretary of State James Baker and his Iraqi counterpart and Saddam Hussein's confidant Tariq Aziz these talks lasted till the very last minute, but they did eventually break down when the deadline of Iraq's Deadline for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait past and then on 17 January Operation Desert Storm was launched. It unleashed a massive campaign of airstrikes against Iraq not only wiping out Iraq's Air defenses, but also effectively blinding the country's military command by both the use of smart bombs and the electronic jamming of communications And at the time the term shogun or was not yet in use that only came but became a famous slogan after the 2003 invasion of Iraq in 1991 the language was a bit more clinical And the objective was at the time to establish air supremacy as soon as possible It was followed but a brief Land war which quickly turned actually in a mopping up exercise of totally demoralized Iraqi troops and the only Significant resistance on the part of Iraq Was the launching of so-called scut missile attacks against Israel and Saudi Arabia? Of which I have experienced a few one actually a close hit less than a mile from where I lived at the time And the other one is the setting the Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze and this was not just an attempt to further Vandalize that country's Resources, but also a sort of a crude attempt to cover ground operations by well a literal smoke screen And then the war ended on 28 February 91 with an armistice In terms of the the literature on this Relatively brief war course there is a body of literature on it it consists for example of the memoirs of some of the key actors in particular the the very media genetic coalition commander and head of us central command General H. Norman Schwartzkopf and this was a kind of a John Wayne like character who attained more than his proverbial 15 minutes of fame and that too I think reflects how operation desert storm is the first fully Mediatized armed conflict But I also want to draw your attention to the more or less unsung hero of operation desert shield Central commands unassuming logistics commander lieutenant general Gasp agonist and at the time I heard the story that he was actually one of the very first Man on the ground in Saudi Arabia and that the general actually slept the first night on the tarmac of King Abdulaziz air base It is in particular this this logistics operation that I saw from nearby and it was very impressive to witness It gave a good insight into the magnitude of supplying an operation like that And I'm not exaggerating when I say that for four months The droning sound of transport planes landing and taking off never ceased and and whether I came on the air base during daytime Or at night, there were always three or four of these C 130 aircraft gorging equipment And what was officially of course a Saudi air base was in effect turned into one massive American military camp with PX stores Women military personnel driving cars. That was a first in Saudi Arabia also for us as as expats But I learned also some interesting background facts from these memoirs for example Schwartzkopf was not a complete novice when it comes to the Middle East because in his teens He had actually lived in Iran where his father had helped a build up the Shah's police force Including its notorious Savak the secret police And as for the Saudi commander in the theater of operations Prince Khaled bin Sultan He was not only the son of the then defense minister in the 1980s He was also the commander of Saudi air defense and he had been involved in the purchase of ICBMs from China The so-called silkworm missiles after America had refused to provide Such weapons to Saudi Arabia due to Israeli pressure Now these facts are of course not directly relevant to the Gulf War as such But it gives you an impression how the events are tied up with the wider intricacies of Persian Gulf politics And so for memoirs there are of course Works of military history and also from Middle Eastern studies But they are relatively few Now as for that alternative literature apparently the event gave rise to that and this will be at the center of the rest of the webinar My reason for focusing on this aspect of the afterlife of Operation Desert Storm is to demonstrate that Well this event in the Persian Gulf is evidently studied by interdisciplinary area specialists focusing on the Middle East Or historians, political scientists and war studies experts with an interest in this particular geographical region Apparently this Gulf War also spoke to the imagination of people from other academic specializations And I want to present this alternative literature under three headings which I've called imaginative, speculative and pragmatic and applied And as examples I will be using the French philosopher Jean-Baudrillard and Paul Verilio who both wrote short books on specifically about the Gulf War The earlier mentioned Reza Negarastani whose writings on the Gulf War or rather its impact features in different guises And I will briefly say a few things about the work of this Israeli general Shimon Nave Although they are only tangentially related to today's topic as such The unconventional military handbook he has written fits I think with the idiosyncrasies of this alternative literature Nave's extraordinary interpretations are really difficult to imagine without the occurrence of the 1991 Gulf War Now by way of preemptive stride I know that postmodern philosophy has been severely criticized and also met with outright dismissal As I mentioned at the beginning I'm also not always certain how serious to take this strand of contemporary philosophy Now some of you may know this book by the physicist so-called Embryk-Mont, Ample-Steures Intellectual, published in English as fashionable nonsense Now there is of course nothing wrong with separating the chaff from the weeds But I think it must also be recognized that post-structuralists are not writing and should also not be pretending to write science But their contributions can be acknowledged I think as attempts to think out of the box So first a few things about this Jean Baudrillard whose ideas are certainly controversial And that applies not only to the book he wrote about the Gulf War In his youth he took an interest in Alfred Jari, that was a writer and what we would now call a performance artist who is regarded as the precursor of art movements like Dada and Surrealism And Baudrillard was in particular interested in what Jari called metaphysics, which is actually an absurdist parody of metaphysics and science And I think this is what probably brought Baudrillard also in the crosshairs of Sokal and Embryk-Mont He originally trained as a Germanist teaching German at Various Lycée But then he turned to sociology and he completed a doctorate with Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Le Favre Baudrillard was indeed very much part of the generation of 1968 and he spent also his subsequent academic career at institutions associated with that movement In terms of research interests, they're very varied. First of all, he fits very much in the post-structuralist school influenced by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure and the new field of semiotics developed by Barthes As a sociologist he has also written about consumerism and later in his career he occupied himself increasingly with historicism Like Francis Fukuyama's The End of History also Baudrillard spoke of the vanishing of history as a result of globalization but unlike Foucault he did not see it as a combination of progress So in his mind the end of the Cold War was not an ideological victory and he thinks that both Marxist visions of global communism and liberalism civil society were illusions But most importantly for now is his interest in the working of modern media, in particular the work of the Canadian scholar Marshall McGlugan What is most relevant probably for today is what Baudrillard calls hyper-reality With some charity I think there are things in one of his best known books Simulacra and Simulation from 1981 that prefigure already what he would write about the Gulf War 10 years later In this book Baudrillard explains that as knowing subjects, humans do not have immediate access to understanding objects, to understanding the world It's always mediated through science or rather what he calls webs of science And in final analysis a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible because Baudrillard says humans are seduced in the original sense of the Latin word to lead away We are led away towards a simulated version of reality or to use one of these neologisms he coined hyper-reality That is not to say that the world becomes unreal but rather that the faster and more comprehensive societies try bringing that reality together into a supposedly coherent picture The more they have to rely on what he calls Simulacra, he defines that as copies without original, reality in a sense dies out And for Baudrillard one of the most illustrative examples of hyper-reality is Disneyland But actually also the 1991 book The Gulf War Didn't Take Place can be taken as a hyper-real scenario based on a perfect Simulacra Now the book led immediately to indignant reactions accusing Baudrillard of instant revisionism But just as hyper-reality is not a denial of a reality, the Gulf War Did Not Take Place is not the same thing as saying that the events we could all witness via CNN did not happen What Baudrillard questions is whether these events constitute a war in the conventional historical sense of the word And Baudrillard signals for example that there is a heightened level of military deployment of simulation technology at work that it's not replacing the realities of violence But as these technologies become an integral part of operations, imaging and other data used for exercises and wargaming have reached such a level of sophistication and speed that they become indistinguishable from real life battle conditions And this endeavor to attain what is called a seamless manipulation of images and information, blurring the lines between the real and the virtual, makes such confrontations like the Gulf War of 1991 an instance of hyper-reality Now that provocative book takes its title from the last of three articles written by Baudrillard for the French periodical Liberation and for the Guardian, it was published on 29 March 1991, so a month after the armistice The first one, Will the Gulf War Take Place appeared on 4 January, that's 10 days before the start of the air campaign And the crux of its argument is that the paralysis resulting from the logic of deterrence in the traditional sense of the world as it was developed in the Cold War era in the form of this strategy of mutually assured destruction It has transformed the nature of warfare in the sense that power is actually exercised virtually, and Baudrillard draws a parallel with the evolution of capitalism from ostentatious displays of wealth to the more secretive or discrete circulation of speculative capital In a similar way warfare has moved from an actual exchange of fire to what is afforded by electronic interferences in terms of both deception and signal jamming And in the Gulf War deterrence has become so internalized into the logic of war that with the benefit of hindsight it became evident that it can also be turned against Western powers and as we will see later Paul Virilio called this the deterrence of the powerful by the weak The second essay The Gulf War Is It Really Taking Place appeared on 6 February, so amidst the hostilities and it is concerned with Operation Desert Storm as a media event Baudrillard very critically noted the reliance of a vast majority of reporters covering the war on these life transmissions by CNN and the fact that the media were simultaneously also subjected to censorship by the Pentagon It brought the taking control of the military over reporting and images to a whole new level So depictions of Operation Desert Storm as as a virtual event had less to do with representations of a real war It became more like a spectacle stage for a variety of strategic and political reasons by all sides involved And due to the very speed of the news coverage in real time the events as such lose their identity so to speak Which actually comes on top of the fact that the news consumers never experience the bear event anyway it's always coming to us through an informational coating But images of war have a real effect and they become therefore also enmeshed with fabrics of both material and social realities for example The images of the carnage inflicted on retreating Iraqi troops was fundamental to the ceasefire because of a concern that these images would actually turn public sentiment against the war Now the biggest challenge associated with the supreme supreme importance of information is that due to the speed with which it is relate the moment of reflection on those data evaporates Holding up the media to scrutiny against you know that moral ideal of the veracity of images and truthfulness of information disappears with it And the cynical consequences of that is that both Saddam Hussein and the coalition commanders could exploit this to their advantage Now with what his English translator Paul Patton called high-risk writing style, Baudrillard put the finger on a very uncomfortable point of complicity with military, political and media manipulation that results from a lack of questioning what is real about and what is the nature of such events as the Gulf War So when Baudrillard says that the Gulf War did not take place, he is not making universal claims about a collapse of the real into the representational but what he does is making ontological claims about aspects of social reality such as virtual warfare based on deterrence and information war through the media The question is therefore whether Operation Desert Storm constitutes a war in the traditional sense of the word because there is no denying the disparity in military technology and method between the coalition and the Iraqi forces because there was almost a complete absence of battlefield engagement and Desert Storm in that sense was an asymmetrical operation, an exercise in domination rather than an act of war because despite the evident mismatch in terms of what both sides had at its disposal where it concerns military and technological hardware capacity, when the armed conflict was over and through a parallel manipulation of deception and dissimulation, Saddam Hussein was still in power and his armed forces had retained sufficient capability to quell the uprising in southern Iraq and in Kurdistan because the Republican guards had been hiding in networks of underground shelters and part of the Iraqi Air Force had been diverted to Iranian airfields So let me end this part of the discussion with a few direct quotes from Bodrila's own final observations Our wars does have less to do with the confrontation of warriors than with the domestication of the refractory forces on the planet Those uncontrollable elements as the police would say to which belong not only Islam in its entirety but also wild ethnic groups, minority languages, etc All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed This is the law of democracy and the new world order and in that sense the Iran-Iraq war was a successful first phase Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of the anti-western challenge even though it never defeated it The decisive stake in this whole affair according to Bodrila is the consensual reduction of Islam to the global order, not to destroy but to domesticate it By whatever means, modernization, even military, politicization, nationalism, democracy, the rights of men, anything at all to electrocute resistances and the symbolic challenge that Islam represents to the entire west Now Bodrila's colleague and friend Paul Virilio had his own take on the Gulf War But many of his representations and interpretations resonate I think with those of Bodrilaar And I will begin again with a few biographical effects about Virilio that help understand where he comes from and what shapes his thinking Son of an Italian communist and a mother from Brittany He lived through the bombings of the city of Nantes in World War II Originally trained as a stained glass artist, even working with Henri Matisse, he did his military service in Algeria After which he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne with Raymond Aran, Vladimir Yankelevich and Maurice Merleau-Ponti And especially the latter's phenomenology of perception have very much shaped Paul Virilio's own thinking He specialized in aesthetics and spent his career at the so-called école spécial d'architecture in Paris For Paul Virilio, the Gulf War was an instance of a convergence of the interests that have occupied him actually all his life and that formed the constituent ideas of his philosophy Combining an interest in urbanism and military archaeology The connections between speed, war and politics and for his thinking, he also coined neologisms derived from the Greek word for running or for a racing track And he comes up with Dromos and he comes up with terms like Dramology, Dromosphere, Dromoscopy Then the phenomenon of virtualization, the predominance of the image of the event or object over the event or object as such And for that purpose Virilio investigated the beginnings of battlefield cinematography in World War I, the use of photography in World War II and the significance of satellite imaging now And finally he's interested in the history of warfare And if you look at his books from the 70s and 80s, you see these interests already Now for the purposes of this account, let me highlight some key aspects of Virilio's history of warfare because it bears a direct relevance for his discussions of the Gulf War in that book Desert Screen Virilio distinguishes different epochs of warfare, each with its own weapon of choice, which in turn informs a particular type of confrontation So what he calls tactical and prehistorical epoch witnesses the emergence of urbanization It also saw a transition from the warrior to the soldier citizen of the city-state and it's dominated by weapons of obstruction, fortifications, moats, bunkers And the type of confrontation is called the War of Siege Next comes the strategic and the political era, and thanks to technologies of acceleration it's dominated by weapons of destruction, cavalry, warships, tanks, aircraft And in terms of confrontation, humankind moves to wars of mechanized movement And then comes the logistical and transpolitical era, it's dominated by weapons of interdiction based on rapid communication That's aerial detection, such as radar, but especially the instant relays via extra-terrestrial satellites And to characterize the type of confrontation, I have retained the original French because I think it captures the nature of warfare better than the English Guerre éclair et totalitaire, and this heralded of course already the post-World War II nuclear defense ideology of the tyrants based on mutually assured destruction It created a situation that Virilio calls total war and total peace But by the end of the Cold War this balance has collapsed, and in Virilio's estimation the 1991 Gulf War gave already clear indications how the absolute speed of interdiction based on instant communications was posited against the relative speed of mechanized armed forces Now if we read Virilio's commentaries on the Gulf War, we can identify an idiom or vocabulary that he uses to describe this new stage in terms of his science of speed and the history of warfare The continuous acceleration has collapsed what he calls the durée, the duration of events, because the absolute speed of communication makes them instantaneous without time to pause for reflection, before taking decisions or a fourth time to interpret the live media coverage of such events This total war and total peace and concomitant collapse of politics invokes a new term, pure war And the era of pure war is possible due to the opening of what Virilio calls a fourth front as warfare no longer only encompasses land, sea and air, but also the extra terrestrial, which makes it possible to not only fight wars in real time, but also live coverage by the news media What's mostly connected with this is the translation of Virilio's interest into a logistics of perception, it extends not only into the extra terrestrial, but also in a shift of camouflage from hiding the object itself to avoiding the detection And the emblematic manifestation of that in the Gulf War was actually the kind of ironic unveiling of the F-170 9th Hawk or stealth bomber, which can avoid radar detection Now Virilio's depiction of the Gulf War, let me turn to that now, more concretely, also this book is a collection of articles written between August 1990 and June 91, complemented with an interview in 2000 entitled Virilio looks back and sees the future, and I want to highlight three central points in Virilio's depiction, analysis and interpretation of the Gulf War, namely that it is the first total electronic war unfolding in real time The relay of detection to command centers and then back to the theater of operation, that makes the war machine into something real It also turns combatants and audiences alike into telespectators It opens up this fourth front of real time relay of detection to the battlefield The war machine, what he means by that is actually a transformation that the citizen soldiers from the old times have delegated political power, the decision to go to war to a single head of state, the president of the United States as commander in chief And the president in turn delegates now operational decision making to computers, and this is no longer war gaming, but actually a disappearance of political decision making based on reflection And the other side of this fourth front is the media coverage of war, real time does not lead to a new form of journalism or reporting It is affected by the same problem as the immediacy of decision making, namely no time to reflect, but even worse, realizing the power of the image of the event, it also meant a return of censorship Pool reports and embedded reporting only for soldiers, journalists, playing by the rules set by the military And the line between news and propaganda becomes blurred, as was the case also in World War II when film directors on both sides of the conflict were involved in that Now as a scholar of religion I find it interesting that Virilio says that a telecommunication stakes on the properties we traditionally attribute to the divine Ubiquity, omnivoyance, omnipresence, and the religious tone of Virilio's idiom is also retained in his pitching against each other of what he calls Saddam Hussein's mystical fundamentalism against the coalition's technical fundamentalism And elsewhere Virilio even phrases it that the confrontation was between Saddam Hussein's holy war against the coalition's pure war And this of course echoes Baudrillard's disparity between Iraqi and coalition forces in terms of the levels of technological capability and resulting in this asymmetry of the confrontation Virilio's characterizations of Saddam stands as a mystical fundamentalism also reflects what he calls that deterrence of the strong by the weak And this of course parallels Baudrillard's observation that the Gulf War heralded a turning of the deterrence against Western powers Chemical weapons, dirty bombs, leading to the prospect of the actual use also of tactical nuclear weapons in response And that forms the basis of Virilio's main concern regarding the aftermath of the war Namely what he calls the disequilibrium of terror, opening up what he calls a second front, but because of the use of the fourth front I find that confusing And I think it's more correct to speak of a second conflict, namely the prospect of a religiously inspired confrontation involving what Virilio calls the lost children of migrants from the Muslim world And Virilio envisages the mega cities of the world as new theaters of operation because as another post-colonial theorist Hamid Dabashi observed today the colony is as much in the metropole as the metropole used to be in the colony And well yeah with the benefit of hindsight that we happen to have this last estimation of Virilio now sounds prophetic 911 and other attacks that followed the launching of operation and during freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 and operation Iraqi freedom in 2003 seem to bear out Virilio's predictions of 1991 Now let me end this part of the presentation with the final words from Virilio's interview with James Dardarian in 2000 in response to the question what the consequences are of military schools studying his books Virilio actually observed that military professors really ought to study the Bible the Old Testament where Joshua stops the sum, or even the New Testament, the Apocalypse of John Now this reference to the Apocalypse brings me to Reza Negarestani because he has written an essay on the Islamic understanding of apocalypticism in collapse and that is a kind of yearbook publication that is at the center of that earlier mentioned school of a philosophical thinking we know as speculative realism. Together with another contribution also to collapse the militarization of peace which resonates strongly with Virilio's concept of total war and total peace, they feed into this book Cyclonopedia which appeared in 2008 and as I mentioned before Reza Negarestani is considered to belong to this school of speculative realism It comes in many shapes and forms but what unites speculative realist is a pushback against post-structural thinking that reduces everything to discourse and as the name indicates speculative realists advocate a reappreciation of reality but with a twist their view modern and post-modern western philosophy is not rigorous enough in the sense that they are philosophies of access as they call it focusing too much on the knowing subject and speculative realists argue that philosophy also needs to engage much more rigorously with the notion of finitude first of all of humankind because there was a universe before the appearance of humanity and there will be after humans have become extinct but also the universe is not eternal and Reza Negarestani belongs to a particular strand of speculative realism representing what well I call it a cheerful nihilism and he shares an affinity with what Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Inhuman calls the solar catastrophe and what Negarestani's fellow speculative realist Rebracier has called nihilism unbound and this kind of speculative realism revolves very much around the certainty that the sun will eventually extinguish and what consequences has that for philosophical thinking not in the sense that because of such radical affinity philosophy is futile actually the contrary it this realization makes shaking off the shackles of subjective thinking all the more pressing extending philosophical concerns beyond the human and that has already proven to be important because of the rise of artificial intelligence and it has already resulted in the emergence of transhumanism and post humanism and the type of warfare seen during Operation Desert Storm is prefiguring that because Negarestani's writings appeared almost 20 years later than those of Baudrillard and Virilio he also incorporates the events that have occurred since Desert Storm and that includes of course 9-11 the subsequent war of terror another intervention in the Persian Gulf Operation Iraqi Freedom Cyclonopedia is a strange and sometimes also disconcerting book it fits into that category what actually Jean Baudrillard calls theory fiction and the book attained something of a kind of cult status among speculative realists it's composed as a multi-layered frame story like the Arabian Knights and you can also read the book as a kind of an experimental novel one layer is provided by a manuscript left behind by a fictive Iranian archaeologist Hamid Parsani who features as kind of the mad scientist who comes from the excerpts of an equally fictive military operational manual written by again a fictive renegade special forces officer by the name of Randolph West he very much resembles this character of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now played by Marlon Brando and these these storylines provide the frame for the Islamic reference of the book adapting motifs and tropes we have already encountered in the writings of Baudrillard and Virilio but also in the form of a critique of two other postmodern philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari at this point I have to insert a kind of an intermezzo or make a digression because I believe we can even speak of that famous book written by Deleuze and Guattari a thousand plateaus as a kind of a prequel to some of the themes occurring in Cycleanopedia Deleuze is probably one of the best known exponents of poststructuralism of that subject bound thinking Now in a section of a thousand plateaus entitled Nomadology the war machine which has also been published separately Deleuze and Guattari unpack notions that also find incarnations in Nicarastali's thinking mainly notions like nomad thinking, striated versus smooth space and again the idea of the war machine Now a thousand plateaus is 600 pages long so I'm only going to be very briefly talking about these notions Because of the topic of this webinar it is tempting to equate nomad thinking with Arab Bedouins but it actually stands for something much bigger than that namely a generic way of thinking for which Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of the pastoral people of the Middle East tracing it back to the old monotheisms emerging there already in pre-Islamic times and when Deleuze and Guattari talk about Muslims their references are usually to the earliest times of Islam Nomad science is actually presented in contrast to what Deleuze and Guattari call sedentary thinking which has dominated actually throughout written human history and what they say is that we actually need more nomadology and that is why they also employ synonyms like minor versus state art or even imperial sciences and just let me give you very briefly a further illustration by putting the characteristics of nomad thinking and royal thinking in a table Now Deleuze and Guattari present are two different conceptions of science but located in a single field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the content of these vague nomad sciences while nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal thinking lose Nomad thinking does not refer to simpler technologies or practices but a scientific field in which the problem of these relations is brought about and resolved in an entirely different way than from the point of view of royal science Similarly, striated and smooth spaces do not refer to the conditions of the landscape in a specific geographical area like sedentary and nomad these are again metaphors for the context in which particular ways of thinking occur So striated stands for the domain of the sedentary versus the smooth as the habitat of the nomad and Deleuze and Guattari have also associated the striated space with the game of chess This is a game of regulated warfare with front lines and battles over against the Japanese board game of go as war without confrontation retreats, no battle lines, no front lines, pure strategy and contrast with a close versus an open space the relative versus the absolute and the global versus the local This comparison between chess and go brings me also to Deleuze and Guattari's thinking about war and they make a point of stressing that war is not a state of nature but a social condition of resisting or subverting the state This also explains the association of the emergence of the war machine with guerrilla warfare, the pure strategy of non battle and also why they call the war machine a constituent of the smooth space, an invention of the nomad Coming from the outside the war machine cannot be reduced to the state because it actually predates sovereignty and law However, the war machine is appropriated by the state and then institutionalized into a military But Deleuze and Guattari repeat that it is not referring to actual warfare and here Deleuze and Guattari invoke Klausiewicz to make a distinction between the war machine and state warfare as a continuation of politics with different means Instead, the war machine refers to this idea of absolute pure war, the transpolitical nature of deterrence So in that sense nomadology is also a polymology and applying this historically Deleuze and Guattari have argued that religious formations such as Middle Eastern monotheisms emerged locally among the nomads And then these absolute creeds are spread by packs and bands operating in the smooth space of the desert, generating this war machine that subverts states until they are absorbed by the state and another band of nomads comes up again And here Deleuze and Guattari also refer explicitly to that Arab historian Ibn Khaldun's theory of the rise and fall of states and civilizations Now in relation to today's Middle East, the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari have been taken into two directions, a speculative one by Reza Negarestani and what I call a pragmatic and applied one by Shimon Nave And at this point of the digression, I will say a few things about Shimon Nave Retired Brigadier General of the Israeli army, got his PhD in 95 in war studies here at King's with a thesis entitled Vernichtungsschlacht to Erland Battle the evolution of operation theory, which he then applied as the founding director of Israel's Institute for Operational Theory Research Nave has reworked this thesis in a book in pursuit of military excellence in which he traces the development of operation theory And he argues that the use of systems theory is important because it provides a sound planning for military operations and the way for conducting military operations that he calls operational art And he argues that the failure to apply such a systems approach to operational logic has killed creative military thinking because it remains locked up in tactics and strategies only Hence with an epilogue in which Nave characterizes Operation Desert Storm as follows and I quote, the recent Gulf conflict witnessed a vigorous encounter between two military cultures. The first based its professional ethos and strategic credo on system logic, which exemplifies the complexities of the postmodern reality. The second derives its rationale from the industrial age was a confrontation between military system, which had undergone a conceptual transformation accomplished through the application of the innovative paradigm of operational maneuver and the system locked up in an archaic process of the 19th century, Klosovician paradigm. Now we are began using these ideas of postmodern philosophers in formulating responses to events such as the second intifada in occupied territories. And for that purpose he had actually the text of the Leuse, Guattari, Lyotard and Virilio translated into Hebrew. One of his students has called Nave because of his commando physique and brush style of communication as a focal on steroids and this probably explains how navies work through the interest of Israeli architect, Iyal Weitzman, who wrote actually a chapter about it in his book, Hollowland. Now Weitzman happens to be a friend of Reza Nigaristanis. So that brings me nicely to the end of my detour, because Nigaristanis has turned the Leuse and Guattari to serve his own purposes as a speculative realist philosopher. The Islamic reference he employs can also be read as motifs and tropes found in the writings of Baudrillard and Virilio. The Deleuzian Guattarian model of the warfare no longer corresponds with that of the contemporary war machine, which has been appropriated by the state. This space and nomad thinking have been replaced by the sedentary striated space and royal sciences. And Nigaristan illustrates this with the example of what he calls the Wahhabi Petropolitics nexus in which an Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, which is founded on an alliance between the tribalism of the Arab desert, and an adaptation of uncompromising monotheism of the Wahhabis into a political ideology that has not only become complicit with oil politics and capitalism. It has led to the fatwas condoning the stationing of non-Muslim combatants on Saudi soil in the 1991 Gulf War, and it has turned Saudi Arabia into an ally of the West in the war on terror. One of the most interesting aspects of Reza Nigaristan thinking, and I'm coming to the end of my talk, is his transformation of the notion of Takia. This is an Arabic term that means concealment or dissimulation, and it was originally a survival tactic used by the early Shia Muslims in the face of Sunni repression. Nigaristani sketches how in the 10th century in North Africa it was turned into a military stratagem by Abdullah ibn Maimun, a warlord in the service of the Fatimids, an Ismaili sect which eventually founded a countercaliphate in Cairo that lasted several centuries. Based on the dismantling of the theatrical aspect of the battlefield and selecting civilians as primary targets and molecular battlefields. Ibn Maimun turned Takia into what Nigaristani characterizes as an instrument of hyper camouflage with jihadis hiding among the citizenry of the state. And this confounding of jihadi and civilian turns society into potentially hostile territory, or what Ibn Maimun called the abode of unbounded white war, at once the white of the thick impenetrable fog of war and the color of peace. This to my mind is an instance of total war and total peace, and also of this deterrence of the strong by the weak in response to the disparities and asymmetries between the confronting parties in desert storm. And the dramatic real life consequences of this are exhibited in the emergence of dissidents in Saudi Arabia like Salman al-Auda, Safar Hawali and Muhammad Masari, the founders of the committee for the defense of legitimate rights, but also violence, the bombing of the power, the 9-11 atrocities and all the other ones we have seen. And the ultimate manifestation of hyper camouflage were the hiding of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, right under the noses of the Pakistani military and the emergence of Assad in the power vacuum in the Iraqi Syrian borderlands left by the fledging governments of two Arab countries that are actually teetering on the brink of becoming failed states. And as Reza Negarestani describes it, by becoming as one with the citizens as expendable entities for the state, the warrior under Takia shifts the battlefield to the homeland and shifts the attention of the state and its instrument from policing on to the citizens rather than outside forces. From the white war of the jihadi under Takia evolves the black revolution of the civilians against their own inconsequentiality and the hegemony of the state. And in this domestic policymaking of Western countries that has led to homeland security, the Patriot Act and the prevent strategy achieving what Reza Negarestani calls that militarization of peace. But all that was already set in motion by the 1991 Gulf War. And Bodri-laaq's observation that just as modern communication no longer has a direct interlocutor, strictly speaking, these electronic wars have no longer a political objective and this mirrors what Virilio calls the trans political of wars of communication. Now let me end with a slide with inversions by both Bodri-laaq and Virilio of Klausovic's Maxim. And that all will end and I thank you very much for your patience to bear with me. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much Carol. And please imagine. Thank you all for your presentation which was absolutely fascinating. We've got a few questions have been posted at the bottom while you've been speaking. If anybody else has any please type them into the Q&A function at the bottom, but we'll start off with the ones we have got. The first question is by Sam, and he asks, is the classification of Iraq war from the Iraqi perspective as holy war construct of Virilio himself. How does Virilio qualify that alongside Saddam Hussein's strategic objectives, the invasion of Kuwait. All right. Yeah, these are of course terms coined by Virilio, but there is some truth to it because I don't know if you recall it but in the course of the occupation of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein had the Iraqi flag changed, he added the words Allah who are great is God is great to the Iraqi flag. And it was an attempt indeed by Saddam Hussein to get a split in that coalition between Muslim countries participating and non Muslim countries participating because these fatwas I mentioned condoning the presence of non Muslim combatants on the Arabian Peninsula was already controversial during the Gulf War. And there was definitely, regardless of his cynical opportunistic political calculations and objectives, an attempt of Saddam Hussein to indeed manipulate also religion for his own political strategies. Thank you very much. The next question is from Nadia. And it is, would you say that monopoly over media coverage leads to monopoly over the images of reality that are spread globally. Doesn't that lead to dangerous manipulation of terrorism in the name of counter terrorism by Western governments. And this is exactly what what people like Bodrilar and Virilio argue, had they are very concerned with the return of censorship and it's not even the monopoly of one station which was the case indeed in the 99 in 1991 when CNN was the only operational satellite TV station, but it continued also in operation Iraqi freedom when you had, you know, a host of media outlets including also stations like Al Jazeera broadcasting worldwide, but also in that conflict. And there were huge debate among embedded reporters, relying basically on the goodwill of the military to have, we'll call it a frontline seat to the events. And as Virilio and Bodrilar explained, it gives huge power to the military in determining what kind of an image is being relayed. On top of that, there is also the consequences of the nature of this medium, it is so fast that any user, even the most well willing users, because of the instant relay of events that there is hardly any time anymore for reflections, the game is fed to us, instantaneously and continuously. And it is that that that conflation of manipulation and speed that gives Bodrilar and Virilio reason to say well, the rules of the game have changed. And it was found out indeed with technologies also used on, say the operatives in these conflicts of war gaming, but eventually the war game became the war. And similarly, the coverage of that war has the same challenge of that absolute speed as as Virilio calls it, that makes reflection, not that it's not possible you still have these you know discussion programs and everything. And a lot of the information that comes to us is instantaneous. And, and that has led to a massive change in the nature not only of these conflicts but also the consequences of how we look at these things. And that is I think what what also Bodrilar was a, you know, a provocateur in the French sense of the word means with this notion of hyper reality and simulacra that, you know, I'm using what Marshall Mclugin already said in the 60 said that the medium is the message and the underlying realities is sort of, yeah in that sense, disappear from view, but bear in mind it also still does not deny that events atrocities, you know, do physically occur. It's just the way they are relate to us and how they come about that as that is hardly ever now, the result of either reflective policymaking because basically computers with the complexity of the data that come at you, is out of the hands of what should be the policymakers. It's simply too much to process for a human mind. And similarly, there is too much going on also in the media. So, it's not a sort of censorship in the sense of monopolization, even the multitude of all the media operating are still so it becomes a self propelled machine in that sense. I mean, it's not one party or another being dominating, because as really, oh, I'm going to also pointed out, it's also turned against the dominant powers that the tyrants of the strong by the week. It's also manipulated also the media, just as much as the other side did. If I can ask a quick follow up question, so how would you see social media and real time reporting by individuals on war and conflict and violence, how would you see that fitting into these these different strands about censorship narratives and counter narratives. Actually, it is almost the next stage of comes a monster Frankenstein doesn't it almost, but you know, with the knowledge of and the technologies available in 1991. I have to be a kind of impressed by Bodri Laher and Virilio that that that they sort of realized with what we now think is sort of crude coverage on CNN most you know young people who are probably listening in the manual thing what is he talking about. But in the 90s this was revolutionary. And what I'm saying is, in that sense that Gulf War is a watershed event, because all the other thing. This was the first time it happened. And the social media are basically the consequences and further sophistication and evolution of this process. But it was a sort of predicted now 30 years ago, when, you know, the actual possibilities locked up in this development were unknown. I mean bear in mind Bodri Laher and Virilio are not it experts. In that in that's I mean they are academic philosophers of idiosyncratic kind, but you cannot deny them a degree of, well, call it predictive power. What I found interesting is that these kind of individuals, non specialists in the sense of not being Middle Eastern studies people were so captivated by this forgotten Gulf War now almost in terms of how much of a game changer it has turned out to be a question, one of two from from do her. And it is. I'm a bit confused. To me it seems like there is less discussion and back and forth reactions would still occur and a real even if not formalized and or televised and you clarify. Yes. No that is what I said earlier that doesn't mean that we no longer have a discussion programs and reflections. I mean, I'll just see it also has inside story right these kind of programs that still exists. But in terms of what is a fat to us in news coverage that is instantaneous. I mean, of my age and older, they must really have noticed also the tremendous difference between that other big war I recalled as a child the Vietnam war and the Gulf War the Vietnam war, you know, was on the news every day, but like at eight in the evening in the evening, new news, which you know rudimentary imagery and things like that, while in. I mean I was not exaggerating when I said at the beginning that the sensation I had in the Gulf War was this four dimensional warfare and there is something addictive to it. I think it was a sort of the first stage of what Jonathan just alluded to with this question on social media. That's also instantaneous 140 characters it's a back and forth, often very rude slinging matches. And, you know, it becomes the goes in means nowadays that there is very little space given to reflection and analysis, while we try to do it in academia, right, that's still what we try to do. But I even find that in our environment that becomes challenging. Every academic has to have a Twitter account every department has a Twitter account. Which I've got do as a first question original question, which is, how much would you consider these authors belief that virtualization reduces the status of war as war. A simpler version to advancing technologies where most would consider the signal jamming and other tactics that reduce the need for the battlefield and natural progression of war. Well, yes, I think that that that is crucial and as long as you have a disparity of access to these technologies, you will see that the side who doesn't have it, you know, loses out and and that's when you get the atrocities. And so what what you know the Iraqi, well civilian population also experienced with the bombing of Baghdad. I mean, the Gulf War to my knowledge was also the first time that that other clinical term came in collateral damage. The total war was already a problem in World War Two when you know citizens were suddenly targeted there was the carpet bombing. There was a sort of a ban on that as being barbaric. But, you know, smart bombs and other detection things with to try and hit with surgical precision. Well, even that goes wrong. You know, the proverbial Afghani wedding. There are parties that still get hit. So, I think it's important that warfare does not become clinical and clean. And that is also never something Bodhrilar and Virilio said there is stuff happening on the ground. But the events as they unfold they are no longer war in that conventional sense as a level playing field, you know. Moving forward from medical fights to jewels to battlefields to the warfare we see in the 20th century. But real people get really killed. Let's not lose sight of that. This is also something Bodhrilar and Virilio do not deny they actually I mean Virilio in particular with his prediction that the war will be, you know, in the mega cities. Isn't that what has unfolded with, you know, terror attacks. 911 and everything the battlefield has moved come actually closer in that sense and that's why I was so captured by the, the, the reinterpretation the twisting around of that. It's a historic term of Takia, which was sort of a legitimate tactic, a survival tactic for the Shia, but it has been turned into a weapon by organizations like Is. And so who's saying also human shields, same story. So much, I think we've got time for one more question and just to follow on from from what you were saying about Virilio's prophecy is to where warfare would end up and to draw on some of his his early work you mentioned to do with architecture do you see any parallels in the urban landscape between sort of the occupying forces in Iraq and some of the measures that are introduced into cities in Europe and elsewhere around the world to try and control contain populations to police them better and perhaps provide greater access to security forces when they think they need it. I have not looked in depth into that because you know I'm I don't have the background but indeed actual material space features prominently not only in the in the writings of Virilio it's exactly what you what you talk about in regards to cities that was so important to Nave. I've also not studied him in depth, but I've seen a documentary on him where indeed he goes into West Bank cities and he says you know we turn the tables. It was no longer the Israeli military walking in the streets. The new tactics which he derived from his creative reinterpretations of that smooth and striated space, he took that literally. And you know Israelis go through walls now from one house to the other, and suddenly the resistance fighters find themselves in the streets, and they get picked up picked off by snipers. I mean, Nave gave a sort of, you know, he's a counterinsurgency expert, but he basically twisted these ideas around got inspiration from it. He was thinking out of the box, which I think is the value of Virilio and Bonilla thinking looking differently at these conflicts than we as, you know, usually trained as historians or political scientists tend to do. They do a new level of abstraction, but the guy like Nave has an ability of giving that he twists it back to a very pragmatic approach cynical often and he also admits that you know, it's not a humanitarian. He's definitely a guy who's there with a mission. And he has used this way of thinking of indeed using space differently and to the advantage of the dominant power. And I think that that the same dynamics which are also sketched by Deleuze and Guattari are at work there. I mean, I can follow his thinking to that sense because you know I'm not a war studies expert and I have no military training whatsoever, but I sort of can sort of sense what he's doing with it. Right. Thank you very much. Having said that was the last question we've got if you if you can we've got one last question that's come in if you can take that is from Gary, and he asks, have you looked at Edward size coverage of the Gulf War. And do you think it would be is relevant within contemporary analysis. The short answer is no I haven't I, I'm familiar with Edward say it's outlook on all my actual field of expertise in the book Orientalism, but no I have not looked at his writings about the Gulf War, but having read imperialism and culture and Orientalism and things like that I sort of can envisage what how his, what he would have said about the Gulf War but I have to admit I've not looked in depth into his writings. I sort of returned actually to the Gulf War by coincidence when I almost, you know, seren serendipitously came across that book of raise on the garstani for entirely different reasons I was reading him. And, you know, I suddenly recall those so that it is 2020 2021. And as I said at the beginning it was the only conflict I've seen up close that that I started looking into that but I'm to a degree I'm an office to to the literature on modern warfare. I was struck by the fact that two of these arcane French philosophers took the trouble of writing books about it, and that they got traction were considered controversial. It's actually that route that brought me back to it, but you know I'm not going to pretend to be a security studies expert and I genuinely doubted whether what I was looking into was something genuine and even interesting and convincing me to say that. No, we like an unusual angle on things that basically made me look into it with the time permitting. What was going on there. Great. Well it was serendipitous indeed because we greatly enjoyed your talk tonight thank you very much for speaking to us. And I'm sure everybody is expressing their own thanks at home right now. If you enjoyed Carol's talk which I'm sure you did. Please join us for the next presentation in the Institute seven series, which will be on multinational cooperation, coalitions and security in the Middle East. It will be on the 10th of February at 1500 hours Greenwich meantime and will be given by Dr Sarah car down a former visiting fellow in the Institute. Thank you very much again Carol and thank you very much to everyone for tuning in and for your participation.