MAKING THINGS INTERNATIONAL 2 MAKING THINGS INTERNATIONAL Mark B. Salter, Editor 1. Circuits and Motion 2. Catalysts and Reactions Making Things International 2 Catalysts and Reactions Mark B. Salter, Editor University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London An earlier version of “Barbed Wire” was published in Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance (New York: Routledge, 2015). Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Salter, Mark B., editor. Title: Making things international, 2. Catalysts and reactions / edited by Mark B. Salter. Other titles: Catalysts and reactions Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015044918| ISBN 978-0-8166-9629-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9630-7 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: International relations—Philosophy. | Globalization—Political aspects. | World politics— 21st century. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Services. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization. Classification: LCC JZ1319 .M372 2016 | DDC 327.101—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044918 Contents Introduction: Making Assemblages International vii Mark B. Salter Part I. Territorialization The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter 3 Srdjan Vucetic Military Manuals 20 Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi Barbed Wire 32 Alexander D. Barder Protest Camps 49 Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy Tent 63 Andreas Folkers and Nadine Marquardt Benches 79 Emily Lindsay Jackson Secrets 92 David Grondin and Nisha Shah Grey 106 Shine Choi Orange Prison Jumpsuit 122 Elspeth Van Veeren Flags 137 Rune Saugmann Andersen, Xavier Guillaume, and Juha A. Vuori Container Scanning Unit 153 Julian Stenmanns Diplomatic Cable 166 Tobias Wille Part II. Deterritorialization The Yellow Car 181 Debbie Lisle Smartphone 195 Peter Chambers Hotlines and International Crisis 216 Claudia Aradau Cookies 228 Thomas N. Cooke The Atom 241 Casper Sylvest and Rens van Munster Asbestos 258 Nicky Gregson Dirt 274 Mary Manjikian Shit 285 Sagi Cohen Burning Cars 299 Helen Arfvidsson Tear Gas 313 Miguel de Larrinaga Drones 326 Kyle Grayson 4 x 4s 338 Adam Sandor Acknowledgments 357 Contributors 359 Introduction Making Assemblages International Mark B. Salter The world is made up of things, stuff, objects. Political assemblages can be cat- alyzed by a host of surprising sparks. Global systems are complex and inter- dependent, but the well- worn tools of International Relations seem unsuited to the task of understanding how particular objects, ideas, and people come together to create, dispute, solve, or perhaps cause these political configura- tions. Inspired from contemporary social and critical thought coming from so- ciology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, this project offers some provocative interventions in the debates about causality, connection, and politics through the notion of assemblage. In the companion volume, Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, we used things, stuff, and objects in motion to capture some of the material dynamics of global politics, and in particular to demonstrate that importance of the material. This volume builds on this conversation, and looks at unique objects that catalyze political assemblages. In tracing the history and devel- opment of specific objects, technologies, and tools, we can see not simply the evidence of high- power interstate politics, but also the politics in all its fine capillaries: on the docks, in the walls, as we text or surf the Web, debated in technical subcommittees, discussed in boardrooms, and decided in engineering labs. As Law argues, “nation states are made by telephone systems, paperwork and geographical triangulations points” (Law 1999, 7). Material connections and the circuits and controversies that they call into being catalyze political stakes that are nonlinear, emergent, and unpredictable. The architecture of the Internet and e- mail was a by- product of a military calculus: to enable the trans- mission of a second strike command to nuclear missile silos after a successful first Soviet strike, the architecture of a communication system that allowed the messages to find a path through a broken or compromised system to their recipient (Ryan 2010). The containerization of the global shipping trade, which has led to a radical reduction in the cost of shipping and indeed provided the efficient material foundation for our current mode of globalization, was the vii result of an entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, who sought profit through ratio- nalization of trucking and shipping in the 1950s (Levinson 2006). Histories of specific technologies, commodities, or objects are very popular: cod, salt, the machine gun, barbed wire, telephone, cables, and so on, but too often con- cerned only with how these things relate to humans. Bogost makes the claim most provocatively: “We’ve been living in a tiny prison of our own devising, one in which all that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuff with which we stuff ourselves. Culture, cuisine, experience, expres- sion, politics, polemic: all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff” (2012, 3). We seek to engage this rich world of things. What we add to these discussions, as political scientists and International Relations (IR) scholars, is a sensitivity toward power, authority, control, and sovereignty. This chapter will introduce the concept of assemblage, particularly in the manner used by Actor- Network Theory (ANT) that leverages a flat ontology to trace controversies through the connections between things, people, and ideas. To further our discussion in Making Things International 1, we reengage with the critique of sovereignty from this new materialist position. Because some of the contributions in this volume follow discursive objects as well as material objects, we differentiate new materialist analysis of discourse or cultural prac- tices from other critical discourse analyses. Finally, we provide a survey of the interventions in this volume. Assemblage and Catalysts More and more critical IR scholars are demonstrating interest in new mate- rialism, that is Actor-N etwork Theory, Science and Technology Studies more broadly, and vital materialism (see 2013 Millennium special issue on materi- alism and world politics, 41[3], 2013 International Political Sociology forum in 7[3]; see also Acuto and Curtis 2014; Schouten 2014). Without a minute sur- vey of these distinct fields, this introduction will serve as a brief overview to this approach, and in particular to the role of assemblages within new ma- terialism. This sensitivity toward new scales of analysis, emergent causality, thick description of particular milieus, objects or processes, a flat ontology, and the agential capacity of objects can be derived from two traditions. From Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, there is a philosophical route to new materialism that emphasizes Spinoza and other vitalist thinkers that account for a more dis- persed account of causality. In this view, there is a new kind of realism that takes the world as existing independent of human cognition or interpretation. viii Mark B. Salter “The vital materialist affirms a figure of matter as an active principle, and a universe of this lively materiality that is always in various states of congeal- ment and diffusion, materialities that are active and creative without need- ing to be experienced or conceived as partaking in divinity or purposiveness,” writes Bennett (2010, 93). This realism is not the stark six principles famil- iar to IR scholars, but a philosophical stance that the world, even the social world, is “mind-i ndependent” but not essentialist (Delanda 2006, 1). Thus, vital materialists would accept that there is such a thing as a “market,” but only particular markets, arising in historical and geographical locales with specific practices, resources, and logics. The market is also a perfect object of study for ANT, precisely because “the market is an institution which mixes humans and non-h umans and controls their relations” (Callon 1999, 182). Delanda and Sassen, for example, both trace the evolution of the “national” market, arising from villages, to towns, to cities, to nations. Vital materialists such as Ben- nett seek to describe political ecologies, in which things, environmental pro- cesses, life at all scales, and humans all contribute to particular assemblages, which by their nature have effects greater and less predictable than the sum of their parts. From the other route, work in Science and Technology Studies, and partic- ularly Actor- Network Theory, with the work from Latour, Law, Callon, Mol, Barad, and others, has focused on the role of human and nonhuman actants in particular assemblages. Latour, for example, sets out a program for a Dingpoli- tik or thing- politics: Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else. In other words, objects— taken as so many issues— bind all of us in ways that map out public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of “the political.” It is this space, this hidden geography that we wish to explore. (2005a, 15) In the magisterial Making Things Public, a host of contributors muse on the question of connections between things and democracy. Walters demonstrates the power of this Dingpolitik by looking at how the rubble and residue from drone strikes made claims of responsibility possible (2014). Callon, in a famous example, looks at how preservation debates around the scallops of St. Brieuc Bay must allow for the agency of the scallops themselves, which must interact Introduction ix