Visceral Militarism: Embodiment, Intensity and Experience

This paper provides a critical reconstruction of the notion of militarism that is particularly attentive to how militarism is specifically embodied in specific corporeal dispositions, structures of feeling, bodily performances, and sensory practices that are located both within militaries and beyond.   As such, it attempts to move beyond a cognitivist understanding of militarism in terms of an explicit system of militaristic attitudes, values and beliefs to trace a more embodied and affective genealogy of militarism that emphasizes the often unconscious, corporeal and sensory practices through which war-preparedness and military valorization is felt to be normal and desirable, through which militarism becomes assumed, and unexamined, as an ‘abstract social norm [that] may inhere within the deepest fibres of our bodily being’ (Shilling 2007: 13).

Drawing upon empirical analyses of contemporary phenomena ranging from the growth of ‘British Military Fitness’ as a popular leisure pursuit in the UK, the technologies of affective captivation of immersive military video-gaming, and the intimacies and intensities of helmetcam footage recorded by soldiers in the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, the paper highlights multiple practices of corporeal and sensory militarization that travel beyond traditional sequestered sites of classical military discipline, reshaping the wider sensorium and bodily pedagogics and projects in numerous domains of everyday social life.  As such, the analysis emphasizes how desires for neoliberal self-actualization, thrill and bodily transformation increasingly articulate with wider military imperatives and corporeal practices to produce specific contemporary forms of embodied, voluntaristic and individuated militarism.  The paper concludes by discussing the importance of locating these particular visceral militarisms with reference to shifts in the modes of embodiment, somatic apprehension of the world, and deterritorialised flows of affective experience associated with contemporary transformations in warfighting.