Virtuous War: Mapping The Military- Industrial-media-entertainment Network [Hardcover]

James Der Derian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2001

In the Mojave Desert, off the shores of San Francisco Bay, in the hills of southern Germany, next door to Disneyworld and in the heart of Hollywood, the United States armed forces are preparing for the next war. They are fought by the military in the same manner as they are viewed by citizens, on real-time networks and by live-feed videos, on the PC and the TV, actually and virtually. Enabled by smart technologies yet constrained by political and humanitarian imperatives, a new form of high-tech, low-risk warfare is emerging, Virtuous War. In Virtuous War, James Der Derian takes the reader on a roadtrip through the future of war, where cyborg combat technologies, video games, TV news stories, Army training exercises, and Hollywood movies all blur and converge in a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. He shows us a world in which CNN and Disney are as much a part of the battlefield as Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon, where Marine fire-teams train with the video game “Doom”, and entertainment executives design Army wargames. All the while Der Derian offers tremendous insight on the questions that arise as the tail of technology wags the dog of war: Will killing become easier? Will peace become harder? Will war lose its place as the ultimate reality-check of international politics? The result is the first book to offer a “virtual theory” for the military strategies, philosophical questions, ethical issues, and political controversies surrounding the future of war and peace.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Just months after David Mamet's film Wag the Dog represented spin doctors manufacturing a virtual war to distract Americans from a potential presidential sex scandal, former President Clinton's foreign policy came to be viewed through that lens. This eye-opening, entertaining and sobering study of the increasing "virtualization" of American politics and of war in particular via media manipulation makes an important contribution to political, media and social studies. Picking up cultural theorist Walter Benjamin's 1939 concern about the social impact of a "new and incestuous relationship between mass politics and the mass means of reproduction," Derian explores a wide range of theories and their applications. Dashing from French postmodern theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault and film theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer to such mainstream movies as Diehard, Red Dawn and Full Metal Jacket, Derian offers a sustained, complex investigation of how the "virtual" elements of our culture are quickly having an impact on our actual national policy and imagination. After discussing how famed "mud soldier" General Schwarzkopf was the first "cyberpunk general," using computer war games to plan U.S. troop motions (and how Iran's invasion of Kuwait had already been mapped out on a computer simulation purchased from a Washington, D.C., firm), he moves on to how the 1987 Wall Street crash was a result of "program trading," in which buying and selling was triggered automatically by software programs. No Luddite or isolationist, Derian simply encourages public awareness of how our perceptions of the world can be manipulated and altered, and of how such manipulation smoothes the way for catastrophes like Hiroshima and the Holocaust. (June)Forecast: This fascinating and important material will make a splash in academic circles, but Derian's theoretical approach and dense writing will put it beyond the reach of a general readership.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (June 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813397944
• ISBN-13: 978-0813397948
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,729,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars a pomo book that reads like Kitchen Confidential???? November 9, 2001

By "mark_lacy73"

Format:Hardcover

Few people have been able to translate the ideas of Virilio, Deleuze and Baudrillard into the realm of International Relations with much success. Pomo IR has often come across as self-indulgent and willfully obscure - a clique that writes for the converted...
But Der Derian - who has flirted with rather 'esoteric' writing styles in the past - has produced a book that steps outside the pomo area and gets out the safe confines of the campus for a trip around the sites where virtual warfare is being established.
The book is a pleasure to read (!) and comes across like Anthony Bourdain (author of Kitchen Confidential) writing about Virilio and virtuality - it is personal, sometimes darkly humourous, fascinating and warm...unusual in the cold, neutral world of IR theory (critical or 'mainstream').
The book is the clearest statement of Der Derian's project and clarified what I had always suspected - that he is concerned with developing a 'sociology of morality' (a global sociology that looks at the social production of indifference). In this sense, it is a useful continuation of the project that Zygmunt Bauman initiated in Modernity and the Holocaust and deserves to be read by people outside the IR camp...
Of course, many will argue that he fails to tackle the dynamics of virtual or postmodern capitalism (and Marx and the Marxist tradition is not really considered in his final musings on theory). But the book develops a powerful approach to the dangers of virtual death that can be appreciated by people coming from different angles...
This book is a great read...and it is great to see a critical intellectual in IR writing for a wider audience.... I still would like more on what it mean would to accept Virilio's critique of dromocratic society: how would Der Derian and Virilio imagine alternative to virtual life and death.... Read more ›