Co-Editors of Encounters
Encounters with military power can happen in the most unusual and unexpected places. Yet they can simultaneously be normal, everyday, and unremarkable. By the same logic, critical engagement with military power might emerge in unexpected places and be enacted through diverse forms. Traditional academic critiques of militarism and militarization have provided a range of approaches for understanding, interrogating, and challenging military power. However, they are also limited by their form, which requires categorization, generalization, and argumentation. Encounters aims to create a space for new critical authorships and readerships in critical military studies.
One of our concerns with the dominance of traditional academic form in critical military studies is that its privileging of the conventions of social-scientific ways of seeing and writing the world can obscure alternative ways of looking at, experiencing and representing military power. Not only does this limit who can engage with the politics of military power (as well as the range of scholarly methods and perspectives that are legitimized by publication in a peer-reviewed journal, for example). Paradoxically, these categorizations can also efface aspects of the power relations they seek to understand: the messiness, the contradictions of scale, the mixing of the ordinary and the sublime.
How then to capture or represent – and leave unresolved – the strangeness of organized armed force? What remains unsaid and unsayable? What escapes, transcends, or confronts the limits of language itself? What about affective, performative, visual, and haptic strategies of critique? Encounters provides a much-needed space for dialogue with innovative forms of critique and critical content. Poised at the end of each issue of Critical Military Studies, the aim of Encounters is to untie loose ends.
The two contributions chosen for this first issue brilliantly demonstrate some of the politics, and politics of representation, presented by encounters with military power, either close-up through the military institution, or more diffusely in the production of security and national memory. Jason Hanasik’s “I slowly watched him disappear” invites the viewer to encounter the making of a military man. The images compel the viewer into an uneasy intimacy with their subject, Sharrod, in his home, rendering militarism embodied, personal, complex, perhaps even benign. David B. Hobb’s “An attempt at an inexhaustible site in Lower Manhattan” is a textual timelapse of “Ground Zero”. In its account of the minutiae of both memory and security – the clumsy banalities through which they are operationalized and understood – it tests our capacity to see power relations as interconnected on a range of scales, as well as the limits of any representation. It cannot go unnoticed that both these pieces originate from the US, flagging up the dominance of a particular filtration – and critique – of militarization post-9/11. Through different creative forms and alternative modes of research praxis, however, both pieces help to reframe and refract such familiar sites and sitings to question how they are inhabited, by people – by us – on a day-to-day basis. We felt that this might be a good place to start.
