To/for Syrialism: Towards an ‘embodied’ kind of war story

Abstract

How would what we know about war change if we took seriously the ‘embodied experience’ of its violences? How do we write ‘war’ and ‘violence’ in such a way that we can capture the complexity of what Bousquet, Grove and Shah refer to as ‘war’s incessant becoming’? How do we, as Sylvester puts it, ‘pull the bodies and experiences of war out of entombments created by [international relations] theories . . . into the open as crucial elements of war’? In other words, how do we write ‘war’ as if people, lives, suffering, pain, anger, cruelty, hope, resilience, survival and the creativity of it all – the embodied experience – mattered in international relations? In this essay, I wrestle with these questions by re-creating my encounter with Omar Imam, a Syrian artist whose conceptual photography forms the backbone of this piece, and by fleshing out a conceptual framework through which to explore this ‘embodied experience’: Syrialism. Here, Syrialism, imagined as a ‘machine’ (borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari) declares that war is experienced as an embodied process that is consistently, though not constantly, partially connected to other violence/violent processes, and this refiguration brings the actual machinations of the injuries of war and the particulars of how it is sensed and made sensible into focus.

The Syrialism of Omar’s photography: (Re)encountering surrealism

Or, What the (insert profanity of choice) is Syrialism? ¹

I was sitting in my work-from-home swivel chair, twisting around in the ever so slightly uncomfortable embrace of its salmon flesh–coloured (artificial) leather, warming my hands on a cup of scalding ginger tea, intensely/intently peeling away at space, lulled by the murmuring of abject silence into a paralysed screeching stillness, when the greyed icon of Omar’s Zoom profile flickered on my screen. My heart dove into my stomach.

‘Connecting Audio,’ Zoom declared.

This is how I met Omar.

Inhale. It had been hard to track Omar down, harder to get him to meet, and, despite (or perhaps because of) my desperate attempts, I wasn’t sure if he would make it. I became a little nauseous. I remember being uncomfortably aware of my own breathing, of the fact that I should have used the webcam instead of the inbuilt camera, of the dishwasher I had inadvisably left running, of the Zoom waiting room I should have enabled so I would have had a moment to collect myself, of having left the teabag in the cup just a little too long, of the wall of posters behind me and the ways in which they might betray me, of the lucky bamboo stalk that was growing in a darned Monkey Shoulder bottle, of the blanket I should have kept handy. I had goosebumps. It was April in Geneva after all.

Maybe I was just uncomfortably aware of the violence of this encounter.

I was asking someone (Omar) to speak to a complete stranger (me) about the intimacies of their lived experience and, no matter how much care, kindness, respect and vulnerability I could garner in reciprocation, no matter how hard I worked at making it a conversation instead of an ‘interview’, or at subjectivizing him as an ‘interlocutor’, no matter how much reflexivity I could perform, there was an unrelenting apprehension I couldn’t shake: I was ‘studying’ Omar. Not that Omar was un-agentic in our interaction at all: what he chose to reveal to me would shape my work. But there is a directionality to ‘studying’ that is rather extractive, I think, and I wonder if it is perhaps ingrained in the physical machinations of ‘doing research’ as such.

Exhale. I reminded myself of Veena Das, her engagement with Wittgenstein, conjured the image of her twisted pen and her gestures of waiting, and I pressed on ² before the caution of care-full ³ research became the crippling paralysis of over-dissection.

Death by a thousand cuts is still death. Two seconds(?!) later, Omar appeared at the window himself, and for the next 3 hours and 37 minutes we spoke about family, home, love, children, trauma, pain, violence, anger, media, photography, films, vision, reimagination, activism, Damascus, Beirut, Amsterdam, One Piece, and how we were twinning in blue and white. Mostly we spoke about surrealism and Syria.

Surrealism + Syria; Syria + Surrealism.

Surrealism in Syria.

Surrealism by Syria.

Syrian Surrealism. The Surrealism of Syrians.

Surreal Syria.

Syrialism.

Omar (pseudonym, more of a sobriquet really) is an Amsterdam-based photographer and video/installation artist from Syria. He first took to the camera in 2002, ‘inventing his own brand of dark ironic personal work in his hometown of Damascus’ (Gottesman, 2016). That was the era of black-and-white films and manual cameras for him – a time when photography was ‘just a hobby’ (Interview 1). The ‘Uprising’ ⁴ changed that. For the majority of 2011, then, Omar found himself creating Facebook posts starring his photographs alongside small captions that helped him discuss the ‘new normality we were facing in Syria, about what to expect, and what is revolution, and what is war’ (Interview 1).

I thought I heard hiccupped pride in his voice – the hiccups, as I soon realized, were a vestige of the injurious realities that came fettered to these gestures of activism. About a year after Omar started sharing his work, in September 2012, he was abducted and tortured by ‘a small group of unofficial fighters’ (Interview 1). Those 24 hours continue to shroud his living sporadically. Later that year, Omar left home, his camera, his irony, this shroud and him making their way to expatriation together.

And somewhere through the next/last 11 years, 2 countries and 14 exhibitions, Omar and this camera of his created something that traversed well beyond irony and Damascus into the bordering lands of surrealism and Syria: Syrialism. That is where I encountered Omar.

‘Encountered’. . . . I have always rather liked that word. Though I met Omar only on 29 April 2021, I had encountered him already in 2018. I make this distinction between meeting and encountering because the latter – this instance, this moment, this process of encounter . . . a weighty stumbling upon – is one of the ‘foundational (implicit) assumptions’ of this text. I think, with Deleuze here, that we think, conceptualize, research, write and live through encounters: through moments that force us to think. ⁵

Syrialism, even before I met Omar, did just that. This collection of photographs (so ingeniously – I think – titled ‘Syrialism’) is a montage (almost) of a rifle-bearing goat, a teddy bear–beheading ‘terrorist’, a morbid gondola ride, an exploding superman, a photographer developing photographs on a barricade, and so much more, that toys with our understanding, our conceptualizations and/or our ‘figurations’ (Haraway, 2004; Weber, 2016) of war and its violences – it toys with our sensibilities towards them by crafting a Syrial worlding. ⁶

In this collection, banal objects, regular people, mundane spaces – the carefully designed pegs on which we hang our socially constructed realities – stand in bizarrely (?) harmonious juxtaposition with brutal objects, petrifying characters, terrifying spaces, all markers of violent conflict. At first, this juxtaposition was a little incapacitating – intuitively we might think, or at least I did, that these worlds should not be meeting. These objects, these places, these materials, these people should not be doing what they are doing: teddy bears do not belong on Charon’s ferry, and mannequins decked in orange prison suits do not model among wedding dresses. It feels unnerving, unsettling, twisted. But intuitively, as well, I think, these worlds have always met – they have always been connected no matter how thin and/or tangled the tethers are. Rifles inhabit the rural combat space just as goats do; barricades are populated by CCTV cameras; anti-aircraft guns and photographers both point and shoot; and IEDs go off in urban-ish underground passageways – there is a different framework within which these twistings don’t feel so twisted; that is, within the ‘new normal’ (of Omar’s descriptions) of war, this surreality isn’t so surreal.

In (re)creating these surreal landscapes, then, Omar is showing us a surreal kind of war story, ⁷ one that is primarily affective, sensory, aesthetic, material and corporeal – embodied. These are not stories about war, but rather about the experience of war: what war feels like, how its violences are sensed, how it materializes, and/or which technologies it latches on to. These stories are about what war feels like as a ‘dimension of living’ (Nordstrom and Robben, 1995: 5), giving us a lexicon of sorts, an affective grammar, with which to engage with the corporeal, the sensory, the affective, the material, the technological, the temporal and the spatial dimensions of war. They allow us to engage with the daily machinations of war, the politics these machinations (re)produce, and how all this becomes intelligible – or, rather, sensible – through lived experience.

Different from scopic regimes ⁸ that see war through statistics, or narratives that focus on structures, groups and institutions, or lexicons that (in)advertently regurgitate justifications for this martial practice (among others), the Syrial worlding treats this lived experience as a form of experience-based knowledge – Omar’s situated knowledge about what war feels like as a Syrian, as an artist, as a refugee, as a person whose home continues to be assaulted every single day, as it has been for the past 11 years – and in that is a site worthy of care-full investigation. It acts as a theriac of sorts for the myopia (re)produced by those structural/institutional scopic regimes. For instance, within those regimes, the plurality of actors that are affected by/affect the daily performance of war is obscured; or, the entanglements war’s violences have with violences of everyday governance and politics (which effectively deconstruct that dichotomy) are rendered invisible, as are the legacies/durabilities of different violent/violence ecologies on the daily minutiae of the performance of war. Here, the ‘enactment of injury’ (Scarry, 1987: 63–81) – war’s primary task – somehow loses its corporeal, experiential dimension in such a way that this ‘injury’ becomes a logistical aftermath, an unfortunate necessity that takes the shape of justifiably collateral damage (and can be measured as such), a sociopolitical residue or an afterthought in analysis. Knowingly or otherwise, these conceptualizations, these structural/institutional scopic regimes, have created a repertoire of surreptitiously sociopolitically contingent theoretical models/universes that have systematically evicted theorizing the processual nature of war (and violence) from the domain of {capitalized} International Relations. As a result, as Christine Sylvester, Elaine Scarry, Carolyn Nordstrom, Veena Das, Tami Jacoby, Tarak Barkawi, Shane Brighton, Swati Parashar, Antoine Bousquet, Jairus Grove and Nisha Shah (among others) have pointed out, there is a ‘conceptual black hole surrounding the notion of war’ (Barkawi and Brighton, cited in Bousquet et al., 2020: 100).

Omar’s work, Syrialism, on the other hand, gives centre stage to this ‘injury’. It cajoles, compels, coerces us to see how war is sensed – both sensed/felt and made sense of – through the body; through noise, sight, sound, smell, touch; through materials, technologies; through cruelty, duress, ruination and fear . . . how war is an intensely embodied experience/process. ⁹

Here, Omar’s Syrialism lays bare how war, through its violences – its trauma, its grief, its cruelty – is felt – that is, sensed and made (un)sensible, as an unrelenting onslaught on an individual’s body, mind, emotions, sensibilities (aesthetic and otherwise) and materials through (other) bodies, (other) minds, (other) emotions, (other) sensibilities and (other) materials. Pliers, teeth, toothbrushes (Interview 1), hands, chairs, basements, hallucinations, confusion, pain, death, contemplating death – these are the registers through which this war/violence is perpetrated and endured. Any act of violence, then, is experienced as an avalanche of complete and utter mutilation across every dimension of living. In Omar’s worlding, and mine, violence ‘“unmakes” worlds, both real and conceptual’ (Scarry, 1987: 19–23) and remakes them in/through injurious surreal twistings that reveal the mangle of sociopolitical processes that participate in its becoming. In Omar’s worlding, and mine, ‘Syrialism’ is what best captures and communicates this ‘unmaking’ and ‘remaking’. . . this twisting. It is a lens, a gaze, an aesthetic, an aesthetic technique, a methodology, a positionality, a particular way of thinking, an imaginary, a worlding and the process through which that worlding generates . . . it is a ‘machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009) that fractures our understandings, our conceptualizations, our sensibilities towards war – ‘real and conceptual’ – and reassembles them to ablaqueate the lived experience of war.

I think by focusing on this surrealism in the lived experience of war and its violences, Omar’s work, and this collection in particular, make excellent expats in the worlds composed as corollaries to Sylvester’s 2012–2013 clarion call: ‘to pull the bodies and experiences of war out of entombments created by [international relations] theories operating at higher levels of analysis and into the open as crucial elements of war’ (Sylvester, 2012: 503). In fact, I think Omar constantly, and consistently, reminds us that ‘war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people’s physical, emotional, and social experiences, not only down from “high politics” places that sweep blood, tears, and laughter away, or assign those things to some other field’ (Sylvester, 2013b: 2). I am willing to bet that if we can take his work – and the embodied experience of war – seriously, we can access ‘the in-between moments (of war) after causes and before endings’ (Sylvester, 2013a: 672). After all, ‘for many of us, those in between moments that Parashar refers to ¹⁰ – when war has started and has not been declared over – are the guts of war, not the wastelands of war refuse’ (Sylvester, 2013a: 671).

And these guts are wailing, waiting to be heard.

This is not Syrialism/Ceci n’est pas un surréalisme Syrien: (Re)situating surreality

Or, Fine. War in Syria feels surreal. But what the (insert profanity of choice again) is surrealism?

The whole thing [not just the art] is goddamn surreal isn’t it? (Interview 2)

It is like the surrealism of Orwell. (Interview 3)

I feel even we [Syrian artists] are not even getting . . . I don’t know . . . to like 10 % to how . . . to the extreme of it . . . or how surreal it is. (Interview 4)

Omar is not alone in (his) Syrialism. Ayham Jabr, for example, has also been marrying surrealism to the experience of the Syrian revolution, particularly from the collection he released on Instagram in 2016, ‘Damascus Under Siege’. In these collages, we see spaceships sailing across the skies in Damascus, alien architecture (the soaring towers that populate futuristic sci-fi vocabularies) occupying its urban landscapes, and Martians inhabiting, or rather invading, its alleyways. For Ayham, who ‘loves science fiction books, films, and theories’, ‘Damascus is still under siege (sanctions) to this day. . . . [T]he Martians are governments that are paying loads of money to destroy us. . . . Yes, they are trying to destroy and kill the civilians in my country not the system or the officials’ (Interview 5). These collages, then, and the surreal juxtapositions at their core, I think, are a way for Ayham to tell stories about what the war looked/looks like, or felt/feels like, in Damascus when he couldn’t ‘express that (experience) with any language or word’. They show us a world in ruins, a world whose fragmented cadavers have been erratically sutured together to (re?)create a (Frankensteinianly) monstrous reality: one where living owes its life to death.

Or, I am thinking of Sulafa Hijazi’s digital illustrations in Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (Halasa et al., 2014) and in her project ‘Ongoing’, through which she explores how, ‘suddenly, death in Syria became a fact of life’ (Hijazi, 2014: 11) owing not just to the ongoing conflict but to a larger circuitry of a hyper-masculine militarized society that is constantly reproducing cycles of violence. Her illustrations, for instance, show a ‘sewing machine making use of a human being for thread’ (see ibid) stitching together a military uniform or a naked agonizing man in labour, giving birth to an assault rifle.

These stories that Ayham and Sulafa are composing stand in strong solidarity with Omar’s Syrialism. Though they differentially rely on juxtaposition (/other forms of twisting) as a poetic, that is, world-making, or rather world-reassembling, technique – focusing on different aspects, dimensions, processes and/or stories of the embodied experience of violence – this technique is repetitively geared towards (re-/co-)producing a pluralistic dynamic imaginary of violence through which war is surreally sensed, and made sensible, at the very least within the context of the Syrian revolution.

Difference and repetition.

Different repetition.

Differently repeated.

Repeating difference.

Repetition and difference.

These sensibilities of plurality/multiplicity, of hiccupped, partial connectivity, processual-ness, of the twistings and the Syrialism of it all, also animate the stories being told by many other Syrians besides Omar, Ayham and Sulafa. I am thinking here of Ossama Mohammed’s (2014) story ‘The Thieves’ Market’, ¹¹ or of Goats – a play by Liwaa Yazji, ¹² of Hello Psychoaleppo’s (Samer Same El-Dahr’s) music, ¹³ of the cartoons from Kafranbel, ¹⁴ of the memoirs of Dara Abdullah and Faida Lazkani, ¹⁵ of the remixes of Karem Farok, ¹⁶ of initiatives like SouriaLi (the name itself a double entendre that roughly translates to both ‘Syria is mine’ and ‘surrealism’), ¹⁷ of the ‘Land of Childhood’, ¹⁸ and the list goes on.

In fact, I think we can see this intimate entanglement between surrealism and Syria (or, more accurately, between surreal lexicons and the embodied experience of the Syrian revolution) even in the user-generated footage that has been streaming out of the country. Whether it takes the form of videos, photographs and/or posts that platform ‘open-source intelligence’ identifying equipment and providing advice and insight into military tactics and weapon use, essentially creating a cottage industry of sorts, or it details stories of hope, laughter, ¹⁹ joy, solidarity – stories of survival that stubbornly continue to inhabit the martial landscape – there seems to be an element of surreality to all these narrations. Even BuzzFeed has curated a catalogue of ‘33 surreal photos of the civil war in Syria’ (Johnson, 2013).

This entanglement – this Syrialism, as Omar so ingeniously put it – is what I am (perhaps morbidly) fascinated by and, echoing (and extending) Mitchell’s (1996) original call, I am hoping to trace its intricacies by focusing on what Syrialism wants – that is, what Syrialism does, which realities it draws out, which experiences it intensifies, which war stories it (re)makes – how it affects the way we engage with war and its violences.

Towards the end, I think, in/through these stories three things become clear.

First, surreality is the texture of the lived experience of war and its violence – a texture that we can map, trace, feel, and therefore investigate; ²⁰ a texture that allows us to ‘stay with the trouble’ of looking at/through the embodied experiences of war’s violences. Think here, for example, of how this entanglement between surrealism and war is not unique to the Syrian context – that is, their entanglement is not necessarily always (shaped as) Syrialism. Instead, their peripatetic affair stands well documented. Journalists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, investigators, soldiers, victims, witnesses, perpetrators – anyone and everyone in the business of (re)collecting and (re)producing ‘testimony’/intimate stories of war’s violence – all tell us that war and its violence in/from the ‘frontlines’ is chaotic, absurd (Arendt, 1970), slippery (Taussig, 2007) and has an abundance (Bousquet et al., 2020) – or, at the very least, it feels chaotic, absurd, slippery and excessive – surreal.

For me, the presence of this lexicon of surreality that captures the embodied experience of martial violence – this notion that there was an ‘excess’ beyond sense/meaning to its affective, sensory and narrative experience – was/is rather intriguing. If war – as I had mentioned above, expanding on Scarry and thinking with Sylvester – ‘“unmakes” worlds, both real and conceptual’ and grotesquely reassembles the cadavers, the relics, the detritus, then surreality, in these stories, is the mechanism of generative unmaking (of an ‘uncanny reversal of worlds’ [Hirsch, 2014: 289]), of twisting, through which the lived, embodied, excessive, ‘surreal’ experience of war becomes intensified. It is about thinking with Bousquet et al. (2020: 111) that, ‘in war, through war, beyond war, the tumult of conflict periodically unsettles and shatters the reality principle of our understandings’. These surreal stories derive their lifeblood from the ‘stream of consciousness that experiences war’; that is to say, their power, their affective potential – their potential to affect – lies in their ability to tap into and magnify moments/experiences/slices of life where war and its violences are made sensible through an ‘unbridled deregulation of the senses and emergent subjectivities’ (Bousquet et al., 2020: 112), through an utterly violent, and violating, twisting.

Second, as practice, this Syrial storytelling wants to emphasise particular things when it comes to this lived experience. It wants to emphasize that the twisting of the relationalities between materials, spaces, temporalities, technologies, bodies, affects, senses and sensibilities declares that war and its violences are felt/sensed/experienced as (1) embodied (co-produced) processes that are (2) multiple in texture and (3) consistently, though not constantly, partially connected to other violence/violent processes. Through expository (4) defamiliarizations and (5) critical reimaginations, these surreal stories widen the apertures through which we understand war, allowing for a (6) refiguration that brings the actual machinations of the injuries of war and the particulars of how it is sensed and made sensible into focus.

And why shouldn’t they? The aetiologies of the artform itself stand embrangled with the history of World War I. From what I understand, beyond/beneath/beside the totems of the bowler hat man of Magritte and/or the moustache of Dali – and perhaps his melting clocks – surrealism’s skeleton is seared with poetry, revolution, military service, psychoanalysis, medical science and manifestos, and forged in the sociopolitical ecologies of 1920s and 1930s Paris. ²¹ The ‘movement’ was formed around a reaction almost, a response, a rebellion, against the structures of thought and social life that certain artists (who had lived through the war) believed had led the world to this war in this first place: structures of control grounded in (Western, modernist) rationalism.

Tinted by the political alignments of these artists – most of them identifying as Trotskyist, communist or anarchist – the movement was designed to reimagine the very metaphysics of our worlds and the manners in which we engage with them in such a way that surrealism became a modality of being more than just a form of aesthetic expression. Artists, poets, playwrights, literary critiques of this bent were all aiming to somehow ‘resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality’ (Breton, [1924] 1969: 10), or sur-reality, because their lived experience of the war had itself eroded these boundaries. What these works then had in common was an ‘insistent obsession with rendering the supposedly self-evident strange, of transforming platitudes into paradoxes through contortions, and rhetorical twists and reversals’ (Hirsch, 2014: 302). The ‘object was to undo the reigning bourgeois mentality of order and luxury and to replace it with aesthetic forms derived from the deepest depths of the human imagination’ (Hirsch, 2014: 302). The movement, then, I think, desired to make visible and render absurd – among other things – the naturalized, internalized control structures of our societal infrastructures, borrowing visions from what could have been and can be. In this regard, beyond/beneath/beside dreams, automatism, the sub/unconscious and absurdism, surrealism, Hirsch (2014: 289) thinks, and I wholeheartedly concur, ‘is first and foremost, about the uncanny reversal of worlds’; about the experience of twisting and the deductions and excesses born of it. It was born of, expressed and found expression within a moment where a world war and its violences reassembled worlds, individual and collective; and it is in that capacity that I think it finds putrefying symbiosis with any expression of the lived experience of war.

This relationship between surrealism and the embodied experience of war becomes even more pronounced perhaps in the more recent, and more global, histories of surrealism. Looking at the encounters between surrealism and Haiti, Martinique, Cuba, Egypt, ²² Turkey, Lebanon, Algeria and, of course, Syria, art historians and critics seem to find some consensus in the notion that while surrealism remains ‘multiple’ (Mol, 2003) – its manifestations unique at every juncture, its semiotics deliciously diverse and divergent – there is an echo, a refrain of two themes. For one, as described earlier, surrealism was birthed as a form of expression, a way of seeing the world, a way of experiencing it – and giving voice to that experience all at once – where embodied reality constitutes not just the rational (or often not the rational at all) but also the sensory, the affective, the corporeal, the material and the technological – all as equals. Reality itself is seen, experienced and expressed as Frankenstein – especially violent reality, especially the reality of violence.

And, second, as Ahmad Saʻdāwī ²³ and Hassan Balāsim ²⁴ so poignantly make clear, and as I alluded to earlier, this embodied experience shares a thematic – it is an experience of constant processual unmaking and grotesque reassembling . . . a ‘derangement of the senses’ . . . a surreality born of twisted relationalities, creating an alternate ordering. Surrealism is/has always been a highly populated affective worlding, and Syrialism and the violences of war are but one of its inhabitants.

Syrialism.

Surrealism in/by/from Syria.

Syria’s surrealism.

Omar’s surrealism/ Omar’s Syrialism.

My/whose Syrialism?

And, third, Syrialism is a ‘machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009: 36–42).

The exquisite corpse of surrealism/The surrealist machine: (Re)conceptualizing Syrialism

Or, Fine. War is surreal. And surrealism is an ‘affective’ artform. What the (insert profanity of choice) does that have to do with international relations?

Surrealism ‘is’ . . ., Syrialism ‘is’. . .. ‘Is’, here – and perhaps everywhere – ‘is’ a treacherous word. It implicates subsequent words in the definitional process, somehow implying that the subject in question has a particular essential characteristic that can be methodically drawn out, effectively bound and functionally communicated as the object of said sentence. In that regard, it is safe to say, that, prima facie, surrealism/Syrialism – which, as its histories betray, has always been an asignifying signifier – ‘is’ nothing, not within the parameters of this essay anyway because, as mentioned earlier, the argument here isn’t about what surrealism or Syrialism ‘is’, nor about the bramble of what it means, but rather about what Syrialism wants – what effects does Syrialism produce, how it affects the politics of the things it finds itself entangled with. In this reading, surrealism – or, rather, Syrialism – ‘is’ – or, rather, wants to be – a machine.

According to Deleuze and Guattari:

A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures). These breaks should in no way be considered as a separation from reality; rather, they operate along lines that vary according to whatever aspect of them we are considering. Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow (hyle) that it cuts into. It functions like a ham-slicing machine, removing portions from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off, for instance; the mouth that cuts off not only the flow of milk but also the flow of air and sound; the penis that interrupts not only the flow of urine but also the flow of sperm. . . . In a word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009: 36, emphasis in original)

There is quite a bit to unpack here, but, I think, what is perhaps most useful for us is the idea that this ‘breaking’, this ‘interruption’, that a machine produces/generates/creates, ²⁵ this slicing off, is simultaneously a moment of rupture and, in that it breaks away from something and is a moment of reassembling/re-production/re-creation, of suturing, and in that it generates something new/different/else . . . something twisted. From where I stand, Syrialism is a machine – in fact, I would argue that it is a desiring machine – that slices us off from certain war stories (and the machines that produce them) and instead generates an affective kind of war story: a chimeric account of the embodied experiences of war, allowing us to feel war differently. Perhaps, this – at least for me, for us – is the most crucial ‘affect’ of Syrialism: it is an avenue/a tool/a machine through which we can attempt to ‘translate war experience into war knowledge’ (Sylvester, 2013a: 673).

Refrain.

Syrialism, then,

is an analytical lens but ‘not only’ (De la Cadena, 2015);

it is a particular gaze but ‘not only’;

it is particular aesthetic and/or

a particular aesthetic technique but ‘not only’;

it is a methodology but ‘not only’;

it is a particular positionality but ‘not only’;

it is a particular way of thinking but ‘not only’;

it is a particular imaginary but ‘not only’.

because it is at once a worlding/a war experience that is generated, the process through which that worlding/war experience is generated, and the epistemological tool through which this worlding/war experience is generative of war knowledge; it is all this and more – it is a desiring machine. And its desires have shaped this text.

Syrialism desires a worlding wherein war is seen, felt, understood and analysed as an acutely social and embodied process that intensifies the multiplicity and (partial) connectivity of the actors (human, non-human, technological, material) that shape/inhabit it in such a way that its politics are sensed/become sensible through iterative (re)entanglements with practices, logics and affects of violences that are considered discrete and ecologies that are considered removed from the war front. It (re)creates an affective story of war that essentially erodes figurations of sanitized-war-as-an-extension-of-politics, instead insisting on its messiness – on the dissolution of dichotomies such as exceptional–mundane or home–war fronts or its different typologies. War becomes about injury, about harm, and the daily machinations of these violences, because war is felt through this injury, this harm. Its sociopolitical register then shifts from a focus on groups, military tactics and/or cause–consequences to processes, practices, performances, their embodiment, aesthetics and affects: an image more akin to ‘gore capitalism’ or ‘racial surveillance’.

This machine, this Syrialism, then – Omar’s and mine, differentially, but repetitively – elicits ‘war’s incessant becoming’ (Bousquet et al., 2020: 99), insisting that war and its violences be ‘studied’/‘understood’ as they are sometimes ‘felt’ – as intensely embodied, aesthetic and affective processes that violently ‘unmake’ – and ‘remake’ – ‘worlds, both real and conceptual’ (Scarry, 1987: 19–23) so we can trace the politics of their daily machinations . . . the politics of injury and harm.