Ontological and corporeal ‘turns’: Converging paths

In the spirit of the philosophy which grounds this paper, I begin with ontology. The re-invigoration of the ontology of war began, most significantly, in 2011 with a series of sole-/co-authored articles by Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton.Footnote ¹⁹ In a sole-authored article, Barkawi outlines the problem a CWS – which centres around an ontology of war – would solve.Footnote ²⁰ In short, the academy, most notably the social sciences, shifted focus to a ‘wider agenda’ of ‘peace and security’, thereby neglecting the notions of force and war. This was especially the case in IR – that discipline which, as Barkawi notes, should arguably centre around the critical study of war.Footnote ²¹ Instead, Barkawi observes, IR came to study ‘things like the incidence of war in the international system, the causes of war, crisis decision-making, the dynamics of alliances and so on, none of which are the same object of analysis as “war”’.Footnote ²² This is particularly problematic, as Barkawi notes, given that we live ‘in a world made in no small measure by ongoing histories of organised violence’.Footnote ²³ If objects such as economics and sustainable development can constitute their own disciplines, why not war – that object which, especially since the advent of weapons of mass destruction, poses the gravest existential threat to humanity?

The same year, Barkawi and Brighton published an influential article in which they elaborate the problem (that ‘the most basic questions regarding the ontology and epistemology of war have hardly been asked’)Footnote ²⁴ and then propose their own solution, namely a Foucauldian/Clausewitzian ontology of war which illuminates the relationship between war’s interior (the fighting by which it is characterised) and its societal/political effects (i.e. that which it generates). Thus, ‘fighting’ is ontogenetic in that it produces an ‘excess’ beyond the acute kinetic exchange of a clash of arms.Footnote ²⁵ The main implication of this reasoning is provocatively summed up in their opening phrase: ‘While destructive, war is a generative force like no other.’Footnote ²⁶ This reasoning is provocative because it problematises a method of critique which ontologically construes war as exclusively destructive and meaningless.Footnote ²⁷ Critics of Barkawi and Brighton’s have indeed focused on this provocation, accusing them of peddling an ancient mythFootnote ²⁸ and of reifying war in academic discourse.Footnote ²⁹ In this paper, I agree with Barkawi and Brighton that these concerns are exaggerated and misplaced,Footnote ³⁰ and I aim to develop their central insight about ontogenesis through a phenomenological ontology which grounds war in agential embodiment. Moreover, I will argue that phenomenological ontology overcomes an untenable consequence of their Foucauldian/Clausewitzian framework, namely its disavowal of the human body and the resulting hypostatisation of war.

Barkawi and Brighton’s call for a critical ontology of war has been significantly answered; ontology is now seen as a valid principle of enquiry, and there is the growing basis for a field of CWS. One aspect of this emerging literature has focused on further problematising the relationship between war itself and war as an object of knowledge. Notably, Bousquet, Grove, and Shah have advanced Barkawi and Brighton’s observation about ‘war’s recalcitrance as an object of knowledge’:Footnote ³¹ since ‘every attempt to conceptually shackle war is undone by the creative advance of its new modes, residences, and intensities’, Bousquet et al. suggest that we need a ‘strange, paradoxical and provisional ontology that is consonant with the confounding mutability of war’.Footnote ³² They then propose a ‘martial empiricism’ – not so much a theory but ‘a style of investigation that encompasses both the enduring cohesion and the radical dispersion of war’ and which underscores the need for a processual ontology centring on becoming rather than being.Footnote ³³ From here, it follows that the object of ontology (i.e. war) is not static and timeless but continually emerging from a continuous present; moreover, that embodied experience (agential or not) is the pivot of this emergence.Footnote ³⁴

This convergence between ontology and the body/experience has been recognised in the literature. Through her inquiry into human-material assemblages in war (particularly drone warfare), for example, Holmqvist follows Barkawi and Brighton in ‘re-centr[ing] questions of ontology to the study of war’ but argues that the most important object of such an ontology is the human being.Footnote ³⁵ Holmqvist also suggests that this renewed ontology of war leads to considerations of agency (although she proposes a notion of agency couched in ‘the agentic capacity of matter’Footnote ³⁶ – a position I oppose below). Moreover, Wilcox – drawing on Judith Butler’s critical ontology – suggests that understanding war as a generative force ‘requires that we consider how bodies are enabling and generative of war and practices of political violence’.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, Dyvik and Greenwood begin their special issue on Embodying Militarism by explicitly establishing the methodological link between ‘exploring the embodied experiences of … war’ and Barkawi and Brighton’s notion of war’s ‘generative capacity’.Footnote ³⁸ To appreciate the promise and limitations of this convergence, I now shift tracks to consider the corporeal turn in CWS on its own terms.

Like the ontological turn, the corporeal turn began with a critique of the ‘traditional’ war studies literature. The problem with this literature was recognised some time ago by literary scholar Elain Scarry. She documents at length how, despite war being ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’, the actual human body tended to be omitted in both academic and popular discourses on war.Footnote ³⁹ Despite Scarry’s writing in 1985, however, it took more than two decades before a corporeal turn in war studies would materialise; thus, sociologist McSorley could still observe in 2014 that ‘the intertwining of war and the body has … remained an object of limited and sporadic analytic attention for the social sciences, leading to a relative paucity of theoretical resources on how to formulate and think about such linkages’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the years since, this omission has been somewhat corrected, notably by feminist scholars.Footnote ⁴¹ Equipped with methodological tools developed through theoretically foregrounding particularly women’s embodied experiences in war,Footnote ⁴² feminist scholars have problematised the omission of the body from the larger discourse on war and underscored the essential validity of its inclusion. A prominent example has been the work of Sylvester who, writing from an IR perspective, challenged her discipline to turn from the concepts through which it had traditionally studied war (i.e. states, militaries, strategies, conventional security issues, weapons, etc.) to instead theorise war ‘from the starting point of individuals, the ones who experience war in the myriad ways possible – as combatants, casualties, voyeurs, opponents, artists, healers, grave diggers, and so many other identities’.Footnote ⁴³ A central premise of this turn, Sylvester notes, would be that ‘understanding people’s experiences with/in war is essential for understanding war’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Since Sylvester’s challenge to IR, the corporeal turn in war studies has achieved a considerable cross-disciplinary status, and the sources and methods deemed valid for interpreting war have likewise diversified remarkably. Anthropologists, for example, have underscored the relevance of experience for broader understanding;Footnote ⁴⁵ critical geographers have explored the complex interactions between space and the body/experience in war;Footnote ⁴⁶ and sociologists and political scientists have increasingly problematised micro-experiential phenomena – ranging from senses to emotional states to narrative understanding – for understanding macro-phenomena.Footnote ⁴⁷ In terms of sources/methods, the broader political/socio-cultural significance of embodied experiences of war has been examined through mediums such as (inter alia) memoirs,Footnote ⁴⁸ photography,Footnote ⁴⁹ tattoos,Footnote ⁵⁰ conversational dialogues with veterans,Footnote ⁵¹ and material objects.Footnote ⁵² Meanwhile, feminist scholars have continued to emphasise that both experience and its sources, as well as the researcher’s interpretation of those experiences/sources, are always socially/politically embedded.Footnote ⁵³

In terms of the phenomenological-ontological analysis advanced below, one particularly relevant theoretical development is the post-humanist problematisation of the relationship between the human body and rapidly evolving technologies of war. Wilcox, for example, has challenged the notion of a zero-sum trade-off between human sovereignty and technology, arguing – through the case of ‘drone assemblages’ – that military technology is oppressively ‘corporealising’ in terms of racial and gendered structures.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, Brandimarte explores the relationship between experiences of aerial warfare (in the context of Fascist Italy) and the constitution of racialised global orders.Footnote ⁵⁵ Through his characterisation of aerial warfare as ‘more-than-human’, however, Brandimarte seems to depart from a post-humanist perspective into a trans-humanist one; to this extent, he seems to contradict Wilcox’s point that advanced military technologically is ‘corporealising’. Phenomenological ontology, I suggest, can clarify these distinctions and notions. For example, in opposition to Brandimarte’s position that ‘a humanist theorisation of experience obscures fundamental logics and processes behind the institution of colonial war and world politics as a racial formation’,Footnote ⁵⁶ I contend that humanism is in need of critique, not rejection – that only through a recognition that technologically advanced warfare is our (distinctively human) doing might we effectively harness the normative potential of our agency to banish it (along with its concomitant structures) as our wrongdoing.

In light of this extant literature, it is clear that the corporeal turn in war studies methodologically presupposes an ontology of war (or at least a conceptualisation of that which is embodied). Above, I offered some examples in the literature of scholars who have recognised this. I argue in this paper that phenomenological ontology is uniquely equipped to methodologically integrate these notions and ground war – conceptually and ontologically – in embodied experience. This has also been explicitly recognised in the literature. Sylvester, for example, proposed a phenomenological intervention as a way of avoiding a reductive understanding of war which focuses on injury;Footnote ⁵⁷ Brighton, meanwhile, introduces phenomenology as a means to understand war’s generative logics.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the rest of this section, I aim to clarify the contribution phenomenological ontology has yet to make to CWS through a critique of two case studies from the literature. The first is an article by Narozhna which, as an outgrowth of the corporeal turn, represents the most explicit attempt to date to conceive a phenomenological ontology of war.Footnote ⁵⁹ The second is Barkawi and Brighton’s Foucauldian/Clausewitzian ontology of war. Despite their methodological and theoretical promise, I show that in each case war is ultimately disavowed. I offer these critiques as a (somewhat-representative) illustration of how certain normative and theoretical presuppositions can undermine the integration of war and the body in CWS.

The disavowal of war in CWS

In her phenomenology of the embodiment of war, Narozhna begins by outlining the limitations of both the ontological and corporeal turns in the literature. While the ontological turn construes war as disembodied, the corporeal turn, specifically in feminist IR war studies, has not yet offered a ‘sustained ontological investigation of war as embodied experience’.Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘Taking the task of theorizing embodied experience of war seriously’, Narozhna writes, ‘means that we must treat the core concept of a body as the ontological starting point for understanding the relationship between corporeal experiences and war.’Footnote ⁶¹ For this, she proposes Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology.

Despite the broad promise of her initial agenda to conduct an existentialist phenomenology of the embodied experience of war, however, Narozhna is in fact exclusively concerned with the embodied experience of an effect of war, specifically injury; war itself, meanwhile, is reduced – borrowing a phrase from Sylvester – to a ‘politics of injury’ which is inherently and exclusively destructive.Footnote ⁶² While, for example, Narozhna begins by employing phenomenology to holistically conceptualise people as possessing the potential for agency and meaning-making, and as being able to embody social identities and roles, she argues that war destroys all of these abilities. It is of course true that war can and often does disrupt all of life’s modes (and phenomenology can certainly inform us about this); yet, with war reduced to an inherently and exclusively ‘alienating’ and ‘disruptive’ phenomenon,Footnote ⁶³ Narozhna effectively sells short phenomenology by implying it would have nothing to say about how war facilitates and can be an expression of agency, how it generates meaning (for some), and how it creates communities and occasions the opportunity for meaningful intersubjective encounters. She writes, for instance, that war ‘disconnects [people] from their pre-war identities’,Footnote ⁶⁴ but nothing is said of the identities war might generate – let alone how such identities may be more meaningful than pre-war identities. Furthermore, the overarching normative-ontological commitment that war is categorically destructive of meaning leads Narozhna to obscure any difference of perspective. Thus, she categorises together perpetrator, observer, and victim in the same theoretical frame when she writes: ‘Whether they suffer violence as direct victims, witness it as passive observers, or commit it as active perpetrators, the lived bodies experience the alienating effect of the politics of war injury.’Footnote ⁶⁵ As such, no distinction is offered between choosing to embody war (whether in the mundane ‘everyday’ or in acute outbreaks) and embodying war through violent imposition.

Narozhna’s disavowal of the agent in war results – by logical implication – in a disavowal of war itself. Indeed, within the scope of Narozhna’s framing, war is not something that humans do but that is done to human agents; it is, as such, an exogenous and essentially inhuman force which befalls humanity. In some sense, the underlying limitation of Narozhna’s existentialist phenomenology is that she fails to theoretically integrate it with Barkawi and Brighton’s basic insight that war is not only destructive but inherently generative; as I now show, however, Barkawi and Brighton’s Foucauldian/Clausewitzian framework has the same untenable implication as Narozhna’s, though for different reasons.

From the phenomenological perspective advanced in this paper, the problem with Barkawi and Brighton’s Foucauldian/Clausewitzian framework is that the body is largely absent, and when it does come into view it is a docile entity which succumbs to the ontogenetic forces of an epistemic power – what they term ‘War/Truth’ – beyond its control.Footnote ⁶⁶ Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, for example, the body is not spoken of as doing war but as being ‘cast into movement’ by war.Footnote ⁶⁷ This disavowal of the doing body is rooted in a disavowal of agency, and this disavowal, in turn, hinges on their application of Clausewitz’s notion of ‘uncertainty’ – an essential unpredictability which characterises war. Applying this notion more broadly to the ontology of war and to war’s epistemic-ontogenetic logics, Barkawi and Brighton understand war in the following terms: ‘A fundamental, essential, property of war is … the actual and potential undoing of all that stands as essential in human orders. The ontological structure and the ontological status of war as an event centre on the undoing of certitudes.’Footnote ⁶⁸ I contend, however, that this is an overly reductive ontology of war in that it brushes over the lived experience of those who participate in war. To make this point, it is necessary to distinguish between strategic certitude (i.e. the ability to predict outcomes in war and the kind Clausewitz theorised), on the one hand, and existential certitude, on the other. As I argue below, ontologically more fundamental than the ability to predict/determine outcomes (strategic certitude) is the striving for existential certitude which defines experience/behaviour in war and which gives rise to strategic (in)certitude.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, from an existentialist-phenomenological perspective, it is the desire for certitude which is the condition for the possibility of incertitude; the desire for certitude is therefore the exogenous variable in Barkawi and Brighton’s analysis.

In a strict sense, therefore, Barkawi and Brighton place the emphasis the wrong way round when they say that ‘existential investments … remain vulnerable to the contingencies of war’ (a statement which is only derivatively true).Footnote ⁷⁰ It is of course true that the existential investments in war – made by soldiers, politicians, citizens, etc. – are vulnerable to the contingencies of the unfolding of that war (and that agency is essentially conditioned). At a more fundamental level, however, it must be ontologically emphasised that war itself is necessarily (existentially) contingent on the agential-existential investments that humans make in war; that if there were no such existential investments, there could be no war. ‘War/Truth’, therefore, is not a force unto itself but the ontogenetic manifestation of agential human investments – however strategically hopeless those investments may be. To be sure, it is not a necessary condition of agency that it achieves its ends. If, for example, one chooses to become a soldier because they want a ‘glorious’ war, the fact that they become disillusioned with war does not undermine their act of agency to become a soldier in the first place; rather, it exposes a short-sightedness (or an ontological evolution in their being) and the unpredictable contingency of events. Moreover, their subsequent attempt to re-narrate their story and endow it retrospectively with meaning does not undermine the original act of agency either but is a new act of agency in itself. Below, I will begin to theorise how all existential investments in war are necessarily acts of (conditioned) agency, and how such acts must not only be incorporated into, but central to, the ontology of war.

As with Narozhna above, Barkawi and Brighton’s disavowal of agency results – by logical implication – in a disavowal of war. If ‘war’ (and ‘War/Truth’) is not theoretically grounded in (agential) human doing, then it necessarily becomes hypostatised as an exogenous structural force/logic.Footnote ⁷¹ To avoid this theoretical implication, it is therefore necessary to recover Barkawi and Brighton’s notion of ontogenesis and reconcile it with a theoretically elaborated agential human body. Indeed, as I show below, ‘ontogenesis’ makes no sense decontextualised from agential human being – that being which is the condition for its possibility. More specifically, the relationship between the epistemic power of war and the human body needs to be scrutinised and the order of logical dependency correctly established. Substantively, this entails theoretically and empirically elaborating how War/Truth is embraced, enacted, asserted, contested, and taken for granted by embodied humans, as the agents of war.

This disavowal of war – exemplified in the works of Narozhna and Barkawi and Brighton – finds its theoretical essence in Nordin and Öberg’s notion of ‘disappearance’. Through the example of modern military targeting, they explore how, in contemporary warfare, ‘subjectivity, social relations and will are essentially liquidated by operational practices’; antagonistic subjects, as such, ‘disappear in the “battle-rhythm” … replaced by the momentum of the targeting process itself’.Footnote ⁷² Moreover, and following the logic illustrated above, the hypostatisation of war likewise finds its essence in Nordin and Öberg’s reasoning – when they suggest, for example, that ‘the “agent” … is the medium itself’.Footnote ⁷³ In stark contrast, I argue below that in order to be effectively interpreted and critiqued, war must be avowed in academic discourse (which is to say, theoretically re-cognised as our doing, as being in virtue of our embodying it). Moreover, agency – however technologically, socially, and historically mediated it is and will become – must be theoretically foregrounded. In his own critical Foucauldian ontology of war (which anticipated much of the debate about ontology above), Anthony Burke recognised this when, in his concluding remarks, he departs from Foucault and looks to agency as a way out of his pessimism.Footnote ⁷⁴ From the perspective developed below, however, agency is not merely – or even necessarily – a way out of pessimism (indeed, our ‘agency’ constitutes the problem). I argue, rather, that agency in and for war is simply an inalienable fact of our kind of existence; it is the ontological ground of war which constitutively mediates discourse – whether that discourse be pacific or bellicose.

The Being of war

In this subsection, I theorise the condition for the possibility of the Being of war through Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology, and particularly through his notion of ‘Dasein’. Dasein is Heidegger’s generalised term for human being in that it is meant to capture that which is distinctive – existentially and phenomenologically – about human existence. Like other things, Dasein exists in the sense that it is a Being; yet Dasein exists in a particular and unique way in the sense that it is the kind of Being for whom its own Being is an issue.Footnote ⁷⁷ Because it has the innate capacity to understand itself as existing, Dasein therefore exists in a ‘constitutive state’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, if ‘ontology’ is that which Dasein perceives as existing outside of itself, as part of its world, then Dasein is itself a kind of ‘pre-ontological’ entity, or a ‘Being-ontological’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Dasein, as such, is the condition for the possibility of ontology in general; without Dasein there would be only a meaningless universe (at least in the unique way that human beings experience meaning, i.e. ontologically). Indeed, formal (academic) ‘ontology’ is simply the derivative formalisation of our essential and inalienable way of human Being. It is for this reason that Heidegger insists that any study of ontology must first understand Dasein ontologically; it is why ‘We are ourselves the entities to be analysed’.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is in this sense, moreover, that we can understand Heidegger’s assertion (cited in the epigraph to this paper) that ‘only as phenomenology is ontology possible’ – since ontology is first and foremost a phenomenon which we live and experientially conceive, both naively (in everyday life) and theoretically.

Even though its essential nature is to be a Being that makes an issue of its own Being, however, Dasein does not spend much (if any) of its time merely concerned with its own existence. On the contrary, it is Dasein’s overwhelming proclivity to be directed away from itself as such, and towards its world. Moreover, it is only from the world that Dasein can recognise that it itself exists as a ‘pre-ontological’ entity – as a Being that makes an issue of its own Being.Footnote ⁸¹ Thus, Dasein cannot recognise itself in universal, timeless, and absolute terms, but only from the vantage point of its everyday worldly existence and its particular historical circumstance.Footnote ⁸² Dasein’s structure, therefore, is Being-in-the-world; ‘world’ thereby becomes the World – an existential milieu in and through which Dasein understands itself, and without which Dasein could not conceive of itself. Thus, World in general can be understood as one of Dasein’s inalienable necessities; while any particular World is – in virtue of its concrete Being – one of Dasein’s possibilities upon which it has constitutively projected itself.Footnote ⁸³

From here, a preliminary ontological statement about war can be made: however we conceive it methodologically, war is – as a possibility/actuality dialectic – in so far as it is one of Dasein’s possibilities; war, as War (in this existentialist sense), is one of many possible Worlds through which Dasein may constitutively project itself. Thus, War is in virtue of its being projected forth – individually, collectively, and intersubjectively – as a social structure of human affairs. Contra recent ontologies of war discussed above, therefore, war is not an exogenous ontic force independent of our existential commitments. Rather, War is something humans do; its continuity in history is constituted only in the continuity of human doing. In short – and notwithstanding the myriad ways in which we are enticed, duped, or coerced into organising, perpetrating, supporting, or merely witnessing it; notwithstanding, moreover, its ‘structure’ – War is fundamentally our doing.

In some sense, this ontological statement reads like a truism; yet, as will be explored below, formulating an ontology of war from this first philosophy of phenomenological ontology opens new research avenues, especially into agency and moral responsibility. Moreover, this Heideggerian ontology of war allows us to categorically reject the disavowal of war in academic discourse – to morally ‘reappropriate’ war. Taken by itself, however, Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is radically incomplete. To be sure, Being-ontological is not merely an idealistic activity but something we do in-the-world (as Heidegger theorises); however, the particular manner in which we are in the world, namely, as embodied beings, is merely a sidenote for Heidegger.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet, if ‘existence accomplishes itself in the body’, as Merleau-Ponty argues,Footnote ⁸⁵ then the body must be at the heart of any theory of Being-ontological, and therefore at the heart of the ontology of war. It is therefore to the Being-ontological of the human body that we turn to advance this phenomenological ontology of war.

The Body of war

Nowhere is the embodied nature of Being-ontological more abruptly manifest than in war – an ontic reality shamefully and tragically outstanding in the degree to which it mobilises and obliterates bodies. As many of the aforementioned CWS scholars have observed, this basic fact has been chronically omitted from academic (and popular) discourses on war. Although it has its own logics, this omission reflects a broader tendency in Western thought which either entirely disregards the body or regards it as a problem to be overcome and transcended (a position essentialised in the philosophy of Descartes). In this subsection, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body to ground the ontology of war in embodiment; I theorise how war is ‘accomplished’ in and through its embodiment. I thereby make the body explicit in the ontology of war, but not merely as an ‘object’ upon which war is inflicted – whether through injury, dismemberment, or annihilation. First and foremost, the human body must be conceived as the Body-of-war – as that which existentially ‘accomplishes’ war as a possibility/actuality dialectic. As we see, this theoretically and methodologically points to the processes through which war is ‘taken up’Footnote ⁸⁶ – embodied, experienced, and enacted – as a way of Being-in-the-world.

To understand Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the body (and therefore his relevance to the ontology of war), it will be useful to broadly contrast his phenomenological method to that of Heidegger. While Heidegger’s foundational concept was being, Merleau-Ponty shifted the focus to perception (and therefore to the body which perceives). Methodologically, this begins with stressing the fact that existence is only known to us through the ‘act’ of bodily perception.Footnote ⁸⁷ Existence, however, is not conceived as ontologically exogenous, merely revealed to us through perception. Rather, in line with Heideggerian-phenomenological reasoning (and in opposition to Cartesian reasoning), Merleau-Ponty theorises existence as dialectically constituted in and through perception; hence, there is an essential (ontological) unity between these two – albethey separately conceivable – terms. This argument hinges on returning to the ‘evidence of the senses’ and rediscovering our ‘naïve contact with the world’.Footnote ⁸⁸ ‘Naive consciousness’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘does not see in the soul the cause of the movements of the body nor does it put the soul in the body as the pilot of his ship. This way of thinking belongs to philosophy; it is not implied in immediate experience.’Footnote ⁸⁹

Throughout his works, the central example Merleau-Ponty uses to illustrate this point is sight, particularly his theory of the ‘eye’. The ‘eye’ is not a window through which consciousness sees (a Cartesian position which merely pushes the mystery of sight further away and does nothing to solve it).Footnote ⁹⁰ The ‘eye’, rather, is that which sees; it actively ‘gazes’ at the world, ‘gears into it’, and, in doing so, ‘anticipates’ it.Footnote ⁹¹ The relationship between my ‘eye’ and the ‘object’, as such, is not a geometrical projection from object to eye but is rather characterised by an essential ‘promiscuity’.Footnote ⁹² My ‘eye’ constitutively ‘holds’ the object; the object, therefore, can be understood as the ‘correlate of my body and, more generally, of my existence’.Footnote ⁹³ In Heideggerian language, we might say that the ‘eye’ – as the metaphor for perception in general – is ontologically (i.e. that it sees that which it itself constitutes); moreover, we can understand Being-ontological as contingent on and emerging from perceiving ontologically. To be sure, this is not to resort to a form of idealism where the external world does not exist beyond what is seen – for there is necessarily a dialectical relationship between matter and sense (as Merleau-Ponty establishes, sense penetrates matter deeply).Footnote ⁹⁴ Neither is it to resort to relativism or individualism – for, as phenomenologists stress, sense is invariably and necessarily intersubjectively constituted.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is, rather, to emphasise that ‘existence accomplishes itself in the body’, that ‘the body is existence congealed or generalized’, that ‘existence is a perpetual embodiment’.Footnote ⁹⁶ From here, we can understand the necessary contingency of ontology on perceptive corporeality.

We can now begin to state, with methodological clarity, the first (ontological) argument of this paper – about Whence, How, and What (existentially) war is: war – as a possibility/actuality dialectic – is in virtue of, and as, embodiment. At this point, we must clarify the distinction between actuality and possibility: pertinently, we must observe that the ‘disembodiment of war’ (in terms of the ‘accomplishment of peace’) is only the negation of war’s concretely manifest existence, and not the negation of its (concrete) possibility – a possibility which, as social beings, is inalienably ours. Thus, it follows that the notion of a ‘perpetual peace’ in this Worldly existence – fundamentally characterised by ever-impending and open-ended possibilities – could at best mean a peace indefinitely prolonged within a continuous present, but never a ‘peace’ conclusively instated.Footnote ⁹⁷ As I show in the following subsection, however, the manner in which this ontological argument (about the embodied being of the possibility/actuality of war) is established is consequential for understanding Whence, How, and Why war is – particularly in terms of agency and responsibility. First, and as a way of distinguishing these propositions from other perspectives in the recent literature which emphasise non-human embodiments of war, a distinction needs to be made between war’s embodiment in inanimate objects and its embodiment by human subjects; following this, an order of existential contingency and dependence needs to be clarified between these two forms of embodiment so that the human genesis of war can be properly grasped.

In terms of inanimate, non-human embodiments of war, we can start by observing that the material and informational world is there (i.e., it is), before us; and except for the infinitesimally minuscule contributions each of us creatively offers to this world, it is (apparently) existentially independent of our own existence – of our own Being-ontological. Such is true of the Sense-of-war, which permeates the material-informational structure of human civilisation. Most explicitly, the Sense of war is manifest in monuments (statues of warriors, battlefield sites, etc.), in war media and art (novels, films, documentaries, paintings, etc.), in military arsenals and equipment, in political and cultural constitutions (broadly conceived), and in technological states, etc. As critical war scholars have shown, however, the Sense of war transcends these explicit embodiments, implicitly and latently infusing the infra-structure of the ‘peaceful’ and everyday world (the military historian barely exaggerates, therefore, when they say that human history is best understood through military history). As relatively transient, fleshy, conscious objects, we humbly encounter this world as it already is – a world already congealed into the ontological (infra-)structures of war. We indulge in war stories, fictional and real, we wield the metaphors of war in our language, and we carry the objects of war with our bodies. In short, we inescapably navigate the material-informational legacies of war.

It would be a mistake, however, to infer that these inanimate ‘embodiments’ possess existential autonomy; likewise, it would be erroneous to construe these war objects as possessing their own agency – as some, influenced by vital materialism, have done.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such a position fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the object and of ontology in general; from our lack of will to individually/collectively determine the sense of the object, it infers the object’s existential independence/autonomy (a more parsimonious solution is that our contemporary power is limited by the sediments of our individual and collective former endowments – that sense ‘sticks’, so to speak). Indeed, from an existentialist-phenomenological perspective, we see that the sense-bearing object – notwithstanding its transcendence of my own, individual, existence – does not transcend human existence in general. In existentialist terms, the sense-bearing object does not transcend Dasein’s perceiving ontologically (which, as we have seen, is the condition for the possibility of ontology in general). Although it is true – phenomenologically speaking – that sense ‘penetrates matter’, this penetration must be understood as phenomenal and not ‘objective’ since the object’s ‘sense’ exists only in and through the human field of embodied experience. In other words, sense only exists – by definition – in virtue of our (actively) sensing it, subjectively and intersubjectively. Thus, although it is necessary to acknowledge that we are inalienably entangled in intersubjective and historically constituted webs of significance, and that we should therefore be humble before the apparently pre-existing world, we should not swing to the opposite extreme by idolising and hypostatising the sense-bearing object or (more generally) the ontological structure – both of which owe their existence to Dasein. In short, existentialist phenomenology teaches us that all inanimate embodiments are, in essence, human embodiments. Thus, we necessarily mediate the Sense of war, and as such we mediate its apparently ‘objective’ embodiments. But what is the moral significance of our part in this mediation? To this we finally turn.

The Agent of war

Hitherto, I have made the following ontological argument: since war is an ontic reality, and since all ontic realities necessarily owe their existence to the condition for the possibility of ontology in general, namely, the embodied human state of perceiving ontologically, we can conclude that war is – as a possibility/actuality dialectic – in so far as we embody it; moreover, this implies that the manner in which we embody it determines the way in which it is. In brief, we have established that war is qua embodiment. This existentialist-phenomenological ontology of war has many potential methodological ramifications; in the rest of the paper, I focus on what I believe is the most significant, namely the normative implication regarding agency – especially because it opens the possibility of responsibility and hence new avenues for critique and intervention.

Let me begin on this theme by outlining an alternative – I contend erroneous – proposition: even though ontic phenomena necessarily flow through human being (that fundamental being to which ontic realities owe their existence), we do not ‘have a hand in’ that which comes to be, ontically, in virtue of our own being. That is, one might grant the existential primacy of embodied human being and still reason that our being is such that it is not active – that we are mere ‘witnesses’ to that which our particular mode of being constitutes. On this account, for example, Barkawi and Brighton might accept one aspect of my phenomenological-existentialist argument, granting that ‘War/Truth’ – in virtue of its existence – necessarily flows through human being; yet they might still maintain that the individual human being is docile and powerless in response to the overarching ‘structural’ logics of this epistemic force. At the level of the atomised and momentary individual, situated in the world as they find it, this might seem convincing – since my power to choose the tradition of war which is ‘handed down’ to me is fundamentally limited, as is my ability to meaningfully choose how I act in each given moment in response to that tradition. However, such a position is problematic for at least two reasons: either because it implies a dualism at the heart of being, or because it negates altogether that which is distinctive about human being (that we are conscious entities, more on which below). The implied dualism would be untenable because it positions the human being as a docile node through which ontic realities (War/Truths) flow; while consciousness may exist, it comes to exist in the form of a mere ‘observer’ to some essentially exogenous (and, I suppose, deterministic) being ontological. Thus, there is a conscious yet docile pilot in the ship that is the historically situated embodied being, fated by War/Truth. In response to this position, it should first be noted that any such implied dualism carries its own burden of proof: how is it possible that we carry forth War/Truth, yet have no hand in it? The basic problem with Barkawi and Brighton’s method – which, in this sense, is somewhat representative of post-structuralist approaches to ontology and corporeality in CWS more generally – is that human beings tend to be spoken of as mere bodies.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet, human beings are not simply bodies – if by ‘bodies’ we mean material entities ‘cast into motion’ by exogenous forces. Rather, and as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have shown us, bodies are embodied pre-ontological beings – i.e. not merely beings for whom their own embodied being is an issue, and for whom the being of the ontic realities in which they exist is also an issue, but also Beings which bring forth and constitute those issues in the first place. On this view, to be clear, there is no dualism: we are that which we carry forth, we are ‘War/Truth’. Thus, ‘War/Truth’ is in so far as we are it. But what does it mean, from a phenomenological-existentialist perspective, ‘to have a hand in’ ontic reality; what, in other words, is the nature of our agency?

In response to this question, it is first necessary to dispel a strawman of freedom contested by rationalist (and many critical) philosophies. The rationalist, as Merleau-Ponty observes, is forced to decide whether ‘the free act is possible or not’ and whether ‘the event originates in me or is imposed from the outside’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Influenced by natural science (particularly, and nostalgically, Newtonian physics), rationalist theorists invariably choose the latter and understand the ‘cause’ as originating outside of the body and thereby understand the body and its behaviour as determined by exogenous forces. For critical theorists (who, in the relevant literature, are predominantly post-structuralist), the result is the same; although the rationalist binaries may be challenged, thereby principally incorporating an ‘agent’ into the structure, the overwhelming emphasis is still placed on exogenous force (in this case, at the level of socio-political symbolic ‘force’, rather than physical/biochemical force). From a phenomenological-existentialist perspective, however, the rationalist notion of freedom is chimerical. As Merleau-Ponty argues, the genuine choice is not the momentary and abstract decisions of the will – for we could not be anything enduring and consistent if we were so radically free (and thus, we could not be anything at all, for being implies temporal-spatial continuity and demarcation). Rather, ‘the genuine choice is the choice of our whole character and of our way of being in the world’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Take, for example, an extreme case: it may be true that the volunteer combat soldier – overwhelmed by the relatively totalitarian social forces of a military institution – could not choose to disobey an order to charge the enemy; nor, perhaps, might they be able to choose, in a given moment, to negate their complicity with such orders (such would entail self-negation). Notwithstanding this temporally local existential impotence, however, this person did choose, over a period of becoming who they are, the life of a soldier – to be/become someone who would be complicit with military orders. Here, crucially, ‘life’ is not an aggregate of impotent ‘moments’; rather, ‘moments’ are inferred (conceptually demarcated) from the prior totality of a life which is lived a certain way, in accordance with a certain will. This hermeneutic notion of freedom is of course context dependent and conditioned (as Merleau-Ponty observes, ‘freedom only modifies history by taking up what history offered’Footnote ¹⁰²); yet, we must bear in mind that ‘history’ (including ‘structure’ and ‘symbolic force’) does not speak for itself. ‘History’, indeed, would not be without the historicising gaze of the historically situated observer.Footnote ¹⁰³

This phenomenological critique of the agent of war has several potential implications for CWS. Theoretically, it allows us to move beyond a mutually exclusive agency/structure dichotomy and instead focus on how agency is historically structured and on how particular structures are manifest – ‘taken up’/embodied – by agential human beings. Thus, instead of asking What are the exogenous logics of War/Truth, we can ask What is the existential appeal, to situated being, of this particular and historically contingent War/Truth? Ontology (and Being-ontological), as such, becomes the arch-methodological notion within which structure and agency are two sides of the same ontological coin (rather than being presented, implicitly or explicitly, as mutually exclusive). Empirically, this notion of freedom allows us to shift the focus from structures per se to exploring how structures are embodied. We might, for example, ask questions about how the aesthetic forms of war influence young soldiers or citizens; but rather than conceiving the aesthetic form as an exogenous force, mysteriously and autonomously ‘flowing’ through aesthetic mediums, it can be understood as something that exists in so far as it is valorised and embraced as a meaningful – and, indeed, often ‘beautiful’ – way of being.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is true that we cannot choose the aesthetic repertoire of war that is ‘handed down’ to us; we do, however, choose from that repertoire which forms to ‘take up’ and valorise in the enactment of ourselves, whether we are perpetrating war or merely reading a war novel. Moreover, this choosing from the repertoire is invariably an interpretative and creative synthesis of the ‘handed down’- however powerless we feel in relation to the ‘author’s’ convincingness. Likewise, we might ask how narratives of war (as ‘War/Truths’) are conveyed through media such as war monuments; but instead of focusing on the ‘objective’ narrative presented to the historical observer, we can ask how the observer, in their Being-ontological, monumentalises the object, thereby constituting its monumentality as such.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The war object and its repertoires of meaning are ‘given to us’, yet we – as embodied agents who make existential investments in the world – are the pivots of its continuity.