War machines are polymorphous; diffuse organizations characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis. They are made up of small groups that split up or merge with one another, depending on contingency and circumstances.
Eyal Weizman 1.
Axiom 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
*Proposition 1: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama and games.
Deleuze and Guattari 2.
In June of the year 2000, a few weeks after the Israeli army withdrew from southern Lebanon, I flew into Beirut airport with my friend Anthony. We had been invited by a mutual acquaintance, K., an Irish army officer who was stationed there as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force. We arrived in Beirut at night and K. immediately drove us to a club in Achrafieh, a formerly well-to-do Christian part of the city. The nightclub was in a deconsecrated church but inside it differed little from similarly slick establishments in less troubled European capitals. The crowd was young, stylish and well-heeled, dancing enthusiastically to a mixture of European techno and Arab beats, and knocking back drinks from the fully-stocked bar. When we finally stumbled outside at 4AM I remarked that so far Beirut didn’t seem to be the desolate war-torn ruin we had been expecting. K. smirked and pointed across the street towards a huge dark hulking building. As our eyes gradually adjusted to the lack of light we saw that it was a bombed out shell. Entire floors had collapsed and what remained of the walls were splattered with bullet holes. As we drove back to our hotel in West Beirut we saw that the whole city seemed to randomly pockmarked with these wrecks, with no discernible pattern or sense to their distribution. (more…)
Traces Of The Real 