Afterword: war:time

Abstract

How should we think about war today? This afterword assesses the impact of using a temporal lens to understand contemporary conflict. Reflecting upon my own work on media and war alongside wider societal relationships to violence, I consider the ways in which new technologies and styles of warfighting change both our view of time and our understanding of war itself. In particular, I show how a shift from space to time helps focus attention on the personal and lived experience of US war, on the importance of routines both in constituting and obscuring wartime, on how many issues of contemporary war have become a matter of digitized perspective, and finally how emergent technologies have unsettled familiar temporal patterns of conflict. War today is media-drenched but struggles to occupy our attention over sustained periods. It remains an epochal political force that we tend to approach through deeply individualized, microcosmic stories. It proceeds at breakneck pace but rarely gets anywhere. These questions and tensions underline the importance of focusing not only on the resolutely temporal aspects of wartime, but also on the way in which shifts in time are changing the very nature and politics of war in the 21st century.

Without fail, the best critical scholarship I encounter leaves me thinking: ‘How could we have missed this?’ The premise of this special issue – that we should think about war through the lens of time – seems as obvious as it is essential. But somehow very few of us were doing it and, if we were, we weren’t consciously centering time and temporality in our analyses of war. Reflecting on my own work, time is everywhere and nowhere. My book, Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone, ¹ considers how direct, instantaneous connection via social media changes what it’s like to be at war for both US troops and civilians back home. I ended up writing more about space and collapsing ‘fronts’ than I did about time, even as I am aware (especially now) of their interdependence. Having read this special issue, I am inclined to modify my argument to acknowledge the significance of time. New technology and new styles of warfighting altered our relationship to time in ways that changed our interpretation of war. We don’t write letters anymore. And we don’t enjoy victories anymore either. Where digital technology tightened our sense of time, war in perpetuity elongated it. The effect, especially for online audiences, is that modern war appears to proceed at a full-speed standstill.

Another telltale sign of good criticism is when you can’t stop thinking about it. I find myself applying a temporal lens to everything now, even things I’ve already thought a lot about. For example, now I hear one of my dad’s familiar anecdotes about his experience in Vietnam as a parable about time and attention. He says that when he went to Vietnam, the Beatles were singing ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, and when he came home, they were singing, ‘Hey Jude’. ² Next, he invariably shakes his head and adds, with a knowing grin, ‘What the hell happened back here?’ As he tells it, and as it surfaced in my own work, much emphasis is on space; being over there or over here. That’s how we often think about war – a division between fronts and a battle over territories. It’s all about space. Recall the old patriotic World War One chorus, ‘Over There, Over There’. ³ But now, I hear my dad’s story differently. The anecdote could also be about time and how for my dad, as a teenager in Chu Lai, time unfolded at the level of the body – breath by breath. Time was deeply personal. The death-defying activities of war drew his immediate attention and time either unfolded or it didn’t. ⁴ The Beatles were not part of his temporal purview. Back home, people were also focused on the war in Vietnam (hence the Beatles new psychedelic sound), but their bodies were not involved so they experienced time differently. It was time for work, time for school, time for church, time for dinner. As the Byrds sang, there was ‘a time to every purpose under heaven’. ⁵ For stateside civilians, time dictated bodily functions, yet it was not a function of the body itself. Domestic time had a tempo outside of the body with a drum beat all its own and a sense of progression as people clocked in and clocked out. Their experience of time was routine, and routine is a very particular experience of time. Routine is repetitive and familiar, allowing a person to move through their lifeworld without thinking. That is one of the things I find so unsettling about the routinization of war. Among other critical ethical questions, it begs an important one: ‘Routine for whom?’

In my work with combat Veterans, I have noticed that no matter how much time passes, their experience of war is very present. I think it relates to their embodiment of time while they were ‘over there’. During dialog sessions, I was always amazed at how easily 70-year-old Veterans conjured specific sounds, smells, and details like the hometowns or names of the girlfriends of the men they served with. They shared their 50-year-old memories with each other and with recent Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who mostly sat and listened. Watching the two generations interact was like seeing someone respond to their own reflection in a funhouse mirror. There was a sameness but not quite. They seemed to recognize in one another a shared essence, an embodied way of knowing war that not everyone has access to. Sometimes civilians sense this distinction and, with good intentions, issue gratitude only to learn that their clumsy ‘thank-you-for-your-service’ can exacerbate feelings of alienation for Veterans stuck in their bodies with their deep knowing of war. As one of the authors in this special issue suggests, quotidian dignity and compassion might go farther than organizing an honor flight. ⁶ Because, again, the critical ethical question is: ‘Honor for whom?’

As I write this, war persists around the globe. On Twitter, news headlines or images about the Russian war in Ukraine whiz past my consciousness like an itinerant piece of shrapnel. The biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two coexists alongside New York Times recipes for grilled tempeh. The pace of life online is misleading and problematic. Digital time is not standardized or domesticated. Things feel like they happen more quickly online because of the speed and volume of content production. Trying to identify and then follow online coverage of a single event is like trying to take a sip from a firehose. What happens is that audiences become overwhelmed and give up. When Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the world was watching. Up went the solidarity profile pictures, the porch flags, the hashtags, and the bumper stickers. Invasions signify a beginning, a start to a story. Humans, by nature, are story-telling creatures. Most stories gain their structure from the narrative function of time. The opening to a fairytale begins ‘once upon a time’, for example, and then follows a version of chronology. Online, however, time exists as a future-leaning present tense. Everything is happening right now or in the next few minutes. A glance in the rearview mirror risks missing what’s ahead.

As the authors in this special issue have noted, contemporary war no longer follows a familiar temporal structure. Since today’s wars are ongoing and resemble a framework of threat management rather than how we used to understand war as a temporary instance of organized violence, all time is now wartime. The elongation of wartime renders war-as-a-subject incompatible with online attention structures. As an event, it is too hard to follow. Circling back to Ukraine, the invasion (just like it did in Iraq and Afghanistan) grabbed our attention because invasions typically signify a beginning and the promise of progression. But as the authors point out, wars do not follow familiar progression structures, nor do they end in clear victory or defeat. This means there is no narrative payoff for attentive audience members. On top of that, real-time progression is too slow for digital audiences. The war in Ukraine is still unfolding but much of the online audience has stopped paying direct attention. There is, however, a form of ambient attention that should not be overlooked. As we’ve established thus far, when war’s timeline is infinite, war becomes ordinary and so do representations of war. For example, the content I see online regarding the war in Ukraine these days reflects a ‘day in the life’ genre. Later images of Iraq and Afghanistan started to reflect this style as well. I’m thinking of a photo I included in my book of four Marines sitting outside an outpost in Afghanistan playing a board game while one of them strums a guitar. I wondered then as I do now: ‘Is this what war looks like today?’

The proliferation of mobile capture and share technology has made civilian/soldier-produced content one of the only windows through which online audiences witness the war in Ukraine. And, as I mentioned, the representations have become increasingly quotidian. A man named Pavel Kuljuk wrote war dispatches for an online newspaper from his home in Eastern Ukraine that consisted of his day-to-day routines like watering his garden and feeding his cat. He also cataloged the different ways people in his village boarded their windows. The newspaper created a gallery of images called ‘The Windows of War’. His editor joked that Kuljuk made life in a war zone seem dull. ⁷ Stories and images of this sort are humanizing with a hyperlocal specificity that, if we allow ourselves to look long enough, can promote a form of digital intimacy. The problem is that they exist within a digital deluge that subsists on skims and glances. In short, we are not looking long enough. There is too much content and it moves too quickly. One of the contributions to this special issue addressed the ‘duration of looking’ regarding drone pilots and how traumatizing it is for them to watch their ‘targets’ for so long. ⁸ But what about the rest of us? Might we stand to experience a little of war’s trauma by steading our gaze long enough to become affected? Let’s not overlook the fact that people are boarding their windows.

War, whether conceived in its traditional form or in what seems to be a more approximate frame of threat management or nation building, is a public enterprise. Yet the public no longer feels wartime in an embodied way. Outside physical zones of immediate conflict, life can go on with relative normalcy. And life online continues to move along at a fever pitch. Coming away from this special issue, I am deeply convinced by the need to think through war in terms of time perhaps especially digital time. ⁹ The authors raise important questions about beginnings and endings, about duration and endurance. How do circumstances of continuous threat impact practices of vigilance? Is there a statute of limitations on counterinsurgency? What does progress look like? What are the temporal boundaries of grief? How and when do we memorialize forever wars? These are big questions with complicated answers. I am humbled by their commitment to studying war from this unique perspective. It takes courage, concentration, and effort to forge new paths of inquiry and to develop new frameworks for war. I see the ground they are making, and I am grateful for their example.