JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 26, Numbers 1 & 2, 2006 Page: 51
384 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Susan Searls Giroux
making-those "commitments" you spoke of earlier. Can you
expand on this crucial insight, engaging the ways in which the
cultures of everyday life are both reflective of and implicated in the
processes of militarization-from video gaming to JROTC in high
schools, to the paramilitarizing of the police, even to the militarizing
of emergency response-whether a natural catastrophe like Katrina
or a pending flu pandemic.
DTG: Terrifically interesting question. The first thing I guess I want
to say about militarization is that in less noticed ways (although as
soon as one points to it, people say "yes, of course") militarization
is not simply about institutions that provide or don't provide access
to populations, to segments of populations. Really, it has be-
come-and this probably since the first Gulf War, maybe in more
hidden ways even earlier, but certainly it became visible from the
Gulf War onwards, and it became absolutely undeniable since
then-a regime of truth. It is through both military representatives,
or, which comes to the same thing, retired military representatives
and through the forms of thinking they mobilize that we are
provided the prism through which we have to see the world. It is the
index of truth telling of what is the case and what is not the case,
of friend and enemy, both internally and externally, of views of who
we tolerate and about whom we're intolerant to. So in very
simplistic ways, just to mobilize the thought, one finds on every
newscast literally a retired military person, or commentators from
the military who are or aren't retired, who are fueled by that
modality. Those modalities of thinking become the arbiters of
belief, the warrants of truth, of what is and is not the case, what you
can or cannot believe, of available data, perhaps even of what
constitutes data, of where you can or cannot go, and so on. This
militarization provides the indices of how one is in the world or is to
be in the world. And I mean it both as an epistemological claim,
constituting in a quite literal sense a regime of truth and, you might
want to say, also as an ontology, a way of being in the world that
is diffuse and to which we pay deference. You can criticize a war
in Iraq, but you can't criticize the soldiers. They're defending our51
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 26, Numbers 1 & 2, 2006, periodical, 2006; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28651/m1/49/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .