The Logistics of Sense: Deploying the Thought of Paul Virilio to (re)Figure a Military Event

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to consider a particular military event and attend to its political potentials beyond habitual formations—to attend to the subtle politics that allows the event to occur, be knowable and become intelligible. Across three methodological moves, an investment is made to (re)figure a military event—the detonation of a high-explosive bomb in a family home in Mosul, Iraq on 13 June 2017. The event is first examined in terms of its status as a tactical engagement. Consideration is then made of the strategic figuration the Australian Government gives to the event. From this, the event is radically (re)figured beyond habitual formations via deployments of the logistic thought and philosophy of Paul Virilio.

The inquiry hinges on the elaborated consideration of logistics developed across Virilio’s intellectual project. Here, logistics is here recognised to be a profoundly transformative practice; its focus is not the separable components of spatiotemporal orderings, but spatiality and temporality themselves. The inquiry offers Virilio's philosophy as a means of attending to the logistics which comes to govern an event.

Across the dissertation, the military event is reconceived as a type of pure logistics and wrested from a discourse of representation. Through a careful folding of Virilio’s theoretical position into the story of the event itself, three (re)figurations of the event are offered. These (re)figurations bring emphasis to the quiet kinematics which at once constitute the event and undermine the sense of completeness that might otherwise be imposed upon it. The (re)figurations open-up the political potential that can be at stake in the most particular of moments. In this way, the inquiry is a negotiation away from the politico-strategic logic of sense, towards a more subtle but equally complex logistics of sense.