Spaced out: post-modern spaces in Ridley Scotts Black Hawk Down

Michael Boughn
Tuun me loose, fo I kick the natal stuffin outen you, sez
Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she aint sayin nuthin.
She des hilt on . . ..
Space is as fundamental to war as war is to space, though we dont
always think of it that way. We think of war as the extension of politics,
or, more recently, politics as the extension of war. But however we
choose to think of the meaning of war, of its content, it remains in
every case determined by, even as it determines, fundamental
qualities of space. Space, in that sense, is not a container for war. It
determines the nature of war. Clausewitz, the great analyst of modern
war, understood war in the context of a world in which nations
competed for territory. The goal of war was the occupation, integration,
homogenization, and disciplining of space. In order for those tasks to
make sense, space needed boundaries, surface, and depth. It was
penetrable. It was capable of holding or containing fluid formations
that became stable formations once the space was occupied. It was
commensurable using Euclidean measure.
But space is both taken and given in equal measure. The shapes,
textures, and folds of space, its emptiness and vastness, its
crowdedness and its intimate closeness are functions of imagination,
and imagination itself is implicated (and explicated) in shared modes of

Boughnwar2
being in the world. When decisive changes have been made in the
thinking and practice of war, it has involved the recognition and
creation of new space. Oliver Cromwell, a new kind of warrior grounded
in a new set of relations, could see the space of battle as a field of
dynamic forces rather than a container of fixed positions as it had been
seen for millennia. He altered the organization of the military, its
technology and its tactics, to successfully maximize the use of that
space at Marston Moor and Naseby. The new English bourgeoisie never
looked back.
As an institution and as an organization, the modern military is
highly mobile, technologically complex, and overwhelmingly powerful.
But its differences from Cromwells New Model Army are quantitative
rather than qualitative. Although bigger and faster and saturated with
information, it still operates in the same space as Cromwells army.
Paul Virilio argues that instant communication has led to a new kind of
war, sometimes called post-modern, determined by speed. That may
be, but as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the objectives
and the strategy remain determined by the States push to penetrate,
occupy, and homogenize space, and having done that to then recreate
itself in viral and geometric fashion. It just does it faster and more
efficiently, and always against someone who has no hope in that space
of standing up to its overwhelming force.

Boughnwar3
In Ridley Scotts 2001 film, Black Hawk Down, the modern
military machine finds itself engaged in conflict in a different kind of
space. Filmed in 2000, the movies general release was held up until
January 2002 because of worries about how it would be received after
the events of September 11, 2001. Even so the film opened to
extremely mixed reviews. Largely viewed as an action movie, it was
criticized from all political positions for lacking a political viewpoint,
mostly because Scott never makes any explicit moral judgements or
claims in film. Rather than an epic tribute to the sacrifice made by
soldiers a l Saving Private Ryan (Stephen Spielberg, 1998), or a moral
condemnation of violence of war in the tradition of Apocalypse Now
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Scotts film explores in minute detail how
the States military is undone when it attempts to use its mobile
technological might to penetrate Mogadishu.
It is undone because it is unprepared to deal with the spaces of
Mogadishu which are neither the space of modernity, the space of
nations, nor the tribal spaces the colonialists encountered in their first
occupation of Africa. Scott re-contextualizes the notion of postmodern
war imagined in terms of the U.S.s advanced technology and
information control. All that is there in spades, and arguably much of
the trouble that enmeshes the U.S. forces is due to the arrogance
overwhelming technological might breeds. But Black Hawk Down
proposes that whatever changes make this war other than modern,

Boughnwar4
changes in equipment, logistics, and communications within the
modern States military are only a part of it. Scott represents the very
ground the war is fought on, both literally and figuratively, as of
another world and another order, an order that cripples the modern
States might.
The spaces of Mogadishu in the film are the antithesis of the
isotropic, homogenous spaces of modernity as experienced in the
broad open spaces of the U.S. military base, largely determined by the
needs of its technology. The hygenic, smoothness of those modern
spaces are elaborated in the brief images of suburban America itself
during a scene where a soldier attempts to phone his wife before the
mission begins. The spaces of Mogadishu are cramped, close, filthy,
ruined, indeterminate, shifting, and hostile to communication. They are
fold upon fold refolded. The fluid channels constantly move. A street
becomes a dead end. A cul-de-sac becomes a passage. The place
makes the progress of fighting fickle and unpredictable, moving in fits
and starts and swirling bursts. In one of the films darkly comic
moments, two American soldiers who have dug into a classic defensive
position find themselves suddenly abandoned by the war which has
swept around them in a chaotic tumult. They have to reluctantly
abandon their fixed position and chase after the fighting. Stability
eludes these spaces. The line of sight reaches only to the other side of
the street or across the square. No one can see the big picture.

Boughnwar5
Increasingly, and significantly, this includes even General Garrison/Sam
Shepard, the U.S. commander, back at the base watching the events
unfold through his not-so-panoptic eye in the sky.
These unsettled spaces of flows, blockages, and interferences
and unpredictable discharges are unrelated to economic
developmentas in not enough, as if there were only one possible
mode of becoming developed and ordered with all human worlds
stretched out along its singular line. These spaces have been formed
not out of want (not that there isnt want) but from the multiplicitous
energies growing out of Europes great sweep across the globe. They
do not precede the space of modernity. They follow from it, multiplying
in its wake. Postmodernity in the Mogadishu represented in Black Hawk
Down has its own measure, one whose trajectory is heavily inflected
both by its tribal heritage and its influences from Europe, but which is
other than both.
This Mogadishu is anything but primitive, undeveloped, or
unordered as the Americans tend to think. The Somalis access to
technology, markets, and media all tend to level out many of the
disparities that once characterized their relationship with the European
powers. The film Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964) depicts a crucial moment in
the European colonization of Africa where the Africans, though vastly
outnumbering the English, are unable to overcome them, mostly
because of an enormous gap in technologyrifles against spearsand

Boughnwar6
a different discipline of warfare. Black Hawk Down depicts a similar
moment some 150 years later, the main difference being that the
African warriors are now armed to the teeth with many of the same
weapons that the U.S. Americans have, including most significantly
rocket-propelled grenades, the Colt Single Action Army Equalizer of
postmodern warfare. Other factors contribute to this equalization of
spatial/field power: international markets in which the Africans
purchase arms; changes in organization in relation to new
communications technology including, conspicuously, communication
devices (cell phones); and knowledge and manipulation of the panoptic
attentions of the international media. All contribute to an
overwhelming sense of the sophistication of the Somalisa
sophistication all the more sharply etched for its contrast with the
Biblical conditions of their circumstance.
Bruce Sterling, in Islands in the Net, an early dystopian novel
about globalization, ended with a despairing vision of the Globalized
Corporate State absorbing and commodifying the very technology that
the resistance developed to fight it.1 Scotts film proposes that the
opposite actually has become the case in postmodern warfare. The
enormous technological advantage of the State turns into its crucial
weakness in a double sense. The State, even as it relies on technology
to provide an advantage of force, cannot control the dispersal of that
technology among those it intends to overcome. This is not an issue of

Boughnwar7
the so-called weapons of mass destruction that became an obsession
with the Anglo-American axis during the invasion of Iraq. Its a matter
of cell phones and rocket propelled grenades. Because technology
itself is out of control, the resistance to the homogenizing push of the
State gains access to critical means of communication and force that
tend to equalize its relation with the States war machine. The other
problem for the State is that the more complex and powerful the
technological force it mobilizes (and at the same time becomes
enslaved to, as Heidegger pointed out), the more vulnerable it is to the
uncontrollable distribution and circulation of that technology. All it
takes is one child with a cell phone to alert the warriors in Mogadishu
to the impending U.S. attack, neutralizing the elements of speed and
surprise the U.S. forces counted on. All it takes is one guy in a cheap
nylon shirt with an RPG to bring down the first Black Hawk, causing the
entire American operation to screech to a halt.
In one of the early scenes in the movie the Americans capture a
Somali arms merchant, Osman Atto/George Harris. A fellow clan
member with Aidid and a businessman who supplies Aidids militia with
weapons purchased in international arms markets, he is interrogated
by General Garrison. Most of the scene is shot as a close up of Attos
perspiring face as he smokes a Cuban cigar and verbally jousts with
Garrison over whether or not cigars made in Florida (which Garrison
smokes, having declined Attos offer of a true Bolivar) could ever

Boughnwar8
match a real Cuban. Implicit in the exchange over cigars is a debate
about international politics that sets up the extraordinary tension
between these two men. The intensity of Attos gaze, the sense of
intelligence and malice that haunt his voice and eyes, position him not
as a prisoner but as an opponent, and one who may very well have the
better hand. At one point Atto admonishes the American:
Dont make the mistake, General, of thinking because I grew up
without running water I am simple. I do know something about
history. See all this? [He gestures toward the outside.] Its
simply shaping tomorrow, a tomorrow without a lot of Arkansas
white boy ideas in it.
But in fact, Garrison does make that mistake. In a response that seems
prophetic given what happened in Iraq, Garrison condescendingly
replies, Well, I wouldnt know about that. Im from Texas. Its a
moment that comes back to haunt him when he finds his precision
operation suddenly entangled in a space it cant extricate itself from.
This space is all surface. It has no heart to penetrate. No Kurtz
dwells hereneither Conrads or Coppolas. Conrads Kurtz embodies
the madness that flows from the revelation of the artificiality of good
and evil, civilized and primitive, the whole structure of thinking that
justified Europes arrogant violence. Coppolas Kurtz/Marlon Brando
embodies a revelation of delusional frenzy at the heart of imperial
American culture at that relatively recent moment when it re-

Boughnwar9
encountered its deep internal division as a kind of self-devouring
psychosis. He anticipates Gilles Deluezes and Felix Guattaris vision of
the war machine, a nomadic remnant of a pre-State warrior culture
that not only exists outside the bipolar axes of the State (they cite
Dumzils jurist-priest and magician-king), but in so doing acts to
challenge the States self-determined authority, including its military
institution.2
The most telling revelation of this force in Coppolas film comes
in Kurtzs camp. Sailing up the last leg of the river, Willard/Martin
Sheen finds himself thrown into in an archaic hell. The boat encounters
a final boundary of white ghost-like figures in dozens of primitive
canoes that close behind the U.S. soldiers as they pass through. They
finally penetrate the heart in which bloody bodies dangle from palm
trees, and anonymous dead drape the terraces of an ancient temple. It
is the realm of the dead and the technology is primitive and direct
bows and arrows, spears, machetes, some small arms. warriors in loin
cloths squat with spears held loosely between their legs next to
severed heads that dot the temple steps. Next to them are U.S.
soldiers (Willards predecessor) and regular NVA holding M16s and AK
47s.
The war machine Deleuze and Guattari propose is an
undisciplinable force. Nomadic, it exists on the borders of the States
order. Originally warriors and herders whose mode of being was an

Boughnwar10
itinerant territoriality, they became part of a tradition realized in the
unsystematized, skilled knowledges of itinerant labourers. Kurtz
embodies the recognition that this war machine, deterritorialized and
unrestricted by the various disciplines of the military, constitutes a kind
of pure violence untainted by the bureaucratic and political
contaminations that can cripple (or pollute) the military, making it the
stereotype of absolute might and development.
Imagined as a heart, Kurtz both establishes the space of war as
classically Euclidean in its penetrability, and at the same time sets in
motion and maintains the physical and mythic action and their
revelatory relation to one another. He doesnt move beyond Conrads
radical bipolarity. He embodies its revelation in revelations very
possibility, the possibility of the visible and hidden, the surface and the
depth, the revelation of the heart as war machine. He sets up a
metaphysics of war that determines the fundamental nature of the
agon.
Mohammed Farah Aidid, the object of American desire in Black
Hawk Down, is, in contrast, nowhere. Throughout the film he seems to
float in a featureless room, never encountering anyone, never
speaking. He sits and smokes. He is the counterpart, the weight of
another world, the other player to Garrison in his panoptic war room.
But whereas Garrison becomes increasingly frantic as he helplessly
watches his forces become entangled and savaged in the complex,

Boughnwar11
incommensurable spaces of Mogadishu, Aidid rocks and smokes alone
in a room, preternaturally aware of the events unfolding outside.
In this mode the war machine takes on a different sense than it
does in Coppolas film. It is not a heart, not a revelation of some
foundation, but a kind of remnant, a minus-1, as Deleuze and
Guattari might put it, a wild, diverse, antithetical force that actively
resists the States homogenizing might.3 In Coppolas film, the war
machine is represented as a purity, an horrific purity, but a purity that
both reveals the source of the states might and the limit of its control.
Willards State sanctioned murder of Kurtz is required to return the
State to the illusion of unfounded unity. The foundation must be
obscured, though it remains the foundation. In Black Hawk Down the
war machines antithetical trajectory is of another order. It exists
utterly outside the States parameters. It is another world, another
space and a present time.
Aidid resembles a heart, but the resemblance is misleading. He is
the trigger to the Americans unilateral action and the focus of their
animus. The operation represented in Black Hawk Down is one piece of
a larger plan to capture or kill Aidid. But he is not locatable because
the Americans think they are in one kind of space, but in fact are in
another. Even if he was locatable, as Atto points out, it would make no
differencebecause there is no heart. The initiating penetration of
Mogadishu falters when it becomes entangled in the complications of

Boughnwar12
that space without a heart. The American force seems to penetrate the
space, but then its thrust is blunted. The helicopters land on the roof
and the U.S. warriors, moving like a machine, set up a perimeter,
searching the building and securing the captured clan heads for
transport back to the U.S camp. They do all the right things. But then
comes the guy in the nylon shirt with the RPG. Suddenly the nature of
the space is revealed as other than what the Americans thought it was.
The surfaces, eddies, bursts and folds proliferate and circulate
becoming a Tar Baby, an endless pellicular entanglement, the
confounding of communication.
At that point, for all its pan-optic power (embodied in the image
of Garrison back at the U.S. camp watching every move unfold on a T.V.
screen with a live feed from a helicopter hovering over the action) all
illusions of the invulnerability of the State vanish in an explosion of
chaotic, random, uncontrolled force. And even though the Americans
eventually extricate themselves (at the cost of 18 dead Americans and
hundreds of dead Somalis), they have lost not just the battle but the
war because the very measure of whats winning and whats losing
has shifted into a new modality.
The old modality was determined by the penetration of space
and its eventual occupation, manipulation, homogenization, and
stratification, all geared toward the reproduction of the State on its
pacified body. The essence of this modality is might, overwhelming

Boughnwar13
power. This is the mode of the American assault. In the multiplicitous
warrens of Mogadishu the US troops discover that this modality no
longer functions in strange spaces where all attempts to penetrate,
whether successful or unsuccessful come to naught. They come to
naught because the depth becomes an endlessly unfolding surface that
generates an unpredictable circulation of force that in turn endlessly
occupies the occupiers.
In Black Hawk Down, even though the mission is successfully
completed (the tribal leaders who were the object of the attack are
captured and removed), and the U.S. Americans kill hundreds of
Somalis for every one of their own casualties, the battle is lost, and
beyond that, so is the war, because the States ability to continue its
action is determined by a kind of late capitalist, neo-liberal, bottom-line
contract with its population; e.g. it can do whatever it wants as long as
the cost (lives, money) remains within a manageable budget, and
the loss of eighteen lives (and more importantly, the public humiliation
that flows from the entanglement) constitute an immediate and
decisive deficit.
A similar situation occurred in Iraq, though the lessons of
Mogadishu allowed the U.S. Americans to more successfully disguise
their defeat. The initial plans of the Bush administration called for
recreating the State in Iraq specifically in the image of the U.S. State,
the fantasy of all American international policy since Thomas Jefferson.

Boughnwar14
Iraq was to be transformed into a secular, pluralistic, market drivennation.4 This proposed transformation was not simply the gratuitous
desire of ideologically driven theorists. It was the crucial foundation of
a strategy to deprive Islamicists of a possible base and recruiting
ground by transforming a large Arab country into a clone of the United
States, imposing a State on it whose form was derived from the
principles of the European Enlightenment as developed by the theorists
of the U.S. American revolution.
But the jubilation and triumphalism that followed the initial
penetration of Iraq gave way to the recognition that the U.S. was
entangled in another kind of space and that in order to extricate
themselves (especially before the Presidential election in November
2004) they had to abandon their scheme, jettisoning plans for free
markets, a constitution, the abolition of militias (a.k.a the war machine
that operates within the dynamics of the anti-State forces of tribe and
family and that is both the foundation of the resistance to the
occupation and a significant enabling condition of the future civil war),
the overhaul of Saddams national food rationing program, and the
privatization of State owned businessesin other words, the Works,
the whole caboodle of born-again neo-liberal recipes for Utopia that
were to have transformed Iraq into America-lite.
Scotts analysis of this situation extends from the external spaces
of Mogadishu to the internal spaces of mind/self of the warriors

Boughnwar15
engaged in this decisive battle. Kurtz as heart holds space to an
economy of repression and revelation in which subjects, like the space
they are in, are informed by a dark heart. They are both implicated
and explicated in that space. They have depth, character and act
autonomously, though each of these terms signifies only within a
specific kind of space. This is the case as well with the Americans in
Black Hawk Down. Identity confusion at the beginning of the film
caused by all the identical haircuts, quickly resolves into the
recognizable personalities of a classic war film. The soldiers are
proposed as persons, important to the State, as is asserted in the
often-repeated slogan, No one gets left behind. This is in sharp
contrast to the Somalis of whom only three are ever identified as
persons. Aidids space leaves no room for the illusion of the depth of
subjects. Instead they are represented as what might be seen as a
mass.
But not all masses are massive, nor do we necessarily
understand what is involved in being individuals. Farimbi/ Treva Etienne
draws attention to the complications of these concepts in his interview
with the captured pilot, Michael Durant/ Ron Eldard. After asking Durant
if he is one of the Rangers who has been killing his soldiers, Firimbi
appeals to something very like individualism (whose absence among
the Somalis some critics of the film deplore), suggesting that he and
Durant can negotiate soldier to soldier. Of course Durant cant, and

Boughnwar16
his obvious inability to do so reveals the illusion of individualityor
perhaps more accurately reveals the price the Military extracts from its
soldiers. The U.S. Americans are of course all individualsthey have
names, faces, play chess, call their wives, make fun of each other,
debate the purpose of the warbut there is cost for this individuality
and one measure of it paradoxically is that they must become part of
the machine, a cog in a hierarchical Institution with carefully and
precisely defined roles.
Its as if the individuals arent really individuals, or as if being an
individual is not quite what we think it is, that in Derridean parlance it
is to be individual. In the same sense, then, perhaps the mass of
Somalis is not a mass, at least not as we have been trained to think of
it in relation to individuals, but something else. The very idea of mass
is determined in the sense of a loss of something and so tied to an
implicit defense of the presence of that thing. The OED has mass as
a multitude of persons mentally viewed as forming an aggregate in
which their individuality is lost. That loss, at its most obvious, has
been represented in war films largely through caricature that renders it
grotesque, simultaneously laughable and despicable. Thats the stuff of
open propaganda. Think of the representation of the NVA in Green
Berets (Ray Kellogg, John Wayne, 1968) a movie whose determining
gesture, following the propaganda films of WWII, was to caricature the
enemy as mindless and soulless and the U.S. soldiers as having

Boughnwar17
inherently special, almost supernatural, human characteristics.
Somewhat more subtly, We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002),
rises slightly above caricature, but still manages to imply a kind of
implicit evil to the faceless enemy.
These images differ significantly from those Scott creates, with
their extraordinary energy and seemingly undirected intelligence.
When the Somalis pour out of various buildings to seize the second
downed helicopter they flow like water from the structures surrounding
the Black Hawk, a pliant force that erupts into uncontainable and
unpredictable flows of bodies riding untranslatable energies. Rather
than singular Might directed by pan-optic vision, Scott gives us an
image of an a-centeric force in which all individuals are
interchangeable. They are a multitude, not a mass. Their
numerousness is not to be confused with facelessness or unity, and
especially not with the loss of something. They are another kind of
force. We could say tribal if thats understood as a fundamentally
different form of social organization, a different kind of machine, say,
than the Military Institution of the State. Its not a question of
mechanical as opposed to organic, but rather of different modes of
connection (industrial, tribal), different machines, unfolding into
different modes of force. One is orderly, disciplined, and requires
individuals trained and drilled to work as a unit, while the other is

Boughnwar18
random, spontaneous, and chaotic and requires members who respond
with absolute precision and knowledge to unpredictable flows.
The entire body of the peoplemen, women, and children
comes alive in this space to maul and expel the Occupiers, something
the Americans never understand. In a remarkable scene at the
beginning of the U.S. operation, a number of children call in to report
the approaching Black Hawk squadron. One holds up a cell phone to
transmit the sound of the helicopters back to the city, and an American
soldier, misinterpreting the gestures as a sign of welcome, waves at
him in a moment that reveals the incommensurability of the two
worlds. These children are everywhere. As the fighting intensifies,
every member of the community seems to join in, picking up the guns
of the fallen to continue the attack.
Farimbi says that in this world, to kill is to negotiate, and that
there will always be killing, you see, in our world. Whats at stake
here, then, is the question of killing that has not been appropriated and
legitimated by the State but remains the provenance (and
responsibility) of the multitude. The Somalis have what might be
characterized as an active, social relation to death, or perhaps even an
intimate relation. Within that relation resides the ability, even the
responsibility, to negotiate. For the Americans that relation has been
co-opted by the State in exchange for the promise not to be left
behind. But even that promise, Farimbi points out, is part of a world in

Boughnwar19
which the Americans lead long, dull boring lives which to each of
them is divinely unique, preordained, dramaticand fatal in any
deviation from the prescribed norm.
Atto suggests that the U.S. attempt to capture Aidid, while
ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, is actually governed by the
mythologies of individualism associated with the American west. What
do you think this is, he asks Harrison, the K.O. Corral? He implies
that the American strategy of getting Aidid is governed by a deep
mythic compulsion toward individual shoot-outs, that the Americans
see themselves in the position of the Earps in a showdown with the
Clantons, and that such a mythos will not signify within the space of
Aidid. Harrisons response, a condescending snigger and a smug
correctionYou mean O.K. Corraldismisses Attos critique by
asserting his own superior knowledge of American pop culture, while at
the same time ignoring the meaning of it.
Apart from raising the issue of the ways in which differing
illusions of forms of subjectivity affect the strategies of the opposing
forces, Attos comments also raise the question of the role of governing
narratives in the film. Perhaps hes right, and at some deep level, the
OK Corral lurks as governing narrative for the Americans. But its not
one that circulates openly as rationale for the military adventure. It
doesnt serve as master narrative in the sense that Lyotard has
proposed.5 The fundamental arguments for the American presence are

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covered in an informal exchange between two soldiers, Eversmann/
Josh Hartnett and Hoot/Eric Bana, just before the mission is
launched.Erersmann, characterized by his comrades as an idealist,
articulates the idea that the U.S. must act to relieve the suffering of the
Somali people. Hoot, the hardened warrior, counters that all that
matters once the fighting begins is to take care of yourself and your
comrades: They wont understand its about the man next to you,
thats all it is. These attempts to provide narrative coherence are
supplemented by others during the course of the combat: watch out
for the man next to you, nobody asks to be a hero, they just are, it
aint up to you, its just war, no one gets left behind, and so on.
Each of these narratives in turn has been put forward by various critics
and marketers as the master narrative for the movie. Yet their sheer
plenitude makes it impossible to single out one to play that role. No
one of them dominates the discourse and provides coherence. Instead
they all circulate freely, contesting and competing for legitimacy.
Strangely missing is the master narrative that informed the last
50 years of American military and political mission: the defense of
liberty and freedom in the struggle with fascism, communism,
and/or barbarism. That defense focused on a real or perceived threat
to the security of the State and established a space of unity within
which the State could reproduce and introject its singular self under
the rubric of defending freedom. The resulting massification of

Boughnwar21
fractured American experience continues to serve, as Fredrick Jameson
has argued, as the great Utopian moment of national unification.6 In
Scotts film, the absence of such a master narrative is glaring, though
the nostalgia for it is everywhere. There is simply no way to mobilize
that narrative in this space. The local stories that circulate among the
soldiers do not replace that master narrative. Instead, they circulate
within the space left void by it and draw our attention to the black hole
of its absence.
In that sense Black Hawk Down, unlike Coppollas film, has no
interest in moral judgments about war and violence. If theres a sense
of horror, its local rather than global. Rather than the horror of
violence, its about disaster, the disaster the States military institution
faces when it engages the war machine in the territory of postmodernity. The war machinetribal and nomadicalthough responding
to the conditions of modernity, exists outside its parameters and
structures and so evades its symbolic metaphysics of emanation and
penetration. Scotts sense of the war machine is not as a deeper or
more penetrating moment of violence, a revelation of primal integrity.
It is of another order, one that is impenetrable to the State because it
is all surface. Its organization is anarchic and spontaneous,
unpredictable and contingent rather than technological and
disciplined.7

Boughnwar22
Absent any rationalizing uber-narrative, whats left is the viral
drive of the State to recreate itself. The pursuit of Aidid is part of a
larger plan to remove power from the competing (and brutal) multiple
centres of the war machine and resettle Somalia in the form of a
unitary State within the narrative of a transition to democracy.
Although its not part of the material of the film, such a move
presumably is a step toward integrating Somalia into the globalized
Empire of capital. It is as simple and blunt as that. Everything about
the American undertaking is geared toward and defined by the
massive unity of the State, the States desire to eliminate difference
and to reproduce itself: E pluribus Unum. But in the end as the
American troops run through the gauntlet of the Mogadishu Mile, Attos
observation about the future hovers over them.
If his reference to Arkansas white boy ideas refers specifically
to William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. president at the time of the
Mogadishu events, it also resonates beyond that to challenge the
assumption of those representing the State that the political
institutions of Euro-American modernity are universally applicable and
desirable. This Utopian vision of a single world united by one
(democratic) market and one (democratic) State form has, as John
Gray has eloquently argued, unleashed as much violence on the world
as any of its competitive utopian visions, including Marxism and
Islamism.8 Like any utopian movement, its greatest weakness is its

Boughnwar23
belief in its Truth. In Black Hawk Down, that belief staggers and
stumbles in the final scenes of the film. Its an astonishing moment.
Finally rescued by the Pakistani U.N. forces that they initially dismissed
in their unilateral assault (in another of Scotts prophetic moments),
the American Rangers and D-boys are forced to run out of Mogadishu
on foot pursued by the Africans. Its a running battle in which men,
women, and children pick up the guns of the fallen to join the pursuit.
In one telling scene, an African-American soldier shoots down an
African warrior, and then watches as a black woman in a chador runs to
pick up the fallen mans weapon. Dont do it, he mutters, dont do
it. But she does reach down and pick up the gun, as she must. And he
does shoot her, as he must. The film makes no judgment. It doesnt
question the integrity of the soldiers plea. But the disaster of the
moment is absolute and unspeakable.
The U.S. Americans are stunned. Jogging in full gear out of the
city, dogged by African warriors in techs, they find the road lined on
both sides with men, women, and children hooting at them, mocking
them with what we finally realize must be traditional tribal gestures
meant to humiliate a defeated enemy, gestures whose origins for the
Americans lie in some alien and inaccessible world of ritualized war: a
hand raised just so, the brushing of the hair with the hands, a certain
movement of the feet. These are the same people shot down by Aidids
men in the opening sequence, the people one of the minor narratives

Boughnwar24
claims the Americans are there to feed. Its a moment in which the two
worlds confront each others utter incommunicability in a space that is
all difference.9

Sterling, Bruce. Islands in the Net. NY: Ace Books, 1989.

1227: Treatise on Nomadology:--The war machine. In A Thousand Plateaus. Tr.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987 [1980]: 351-52. Coppola
earlier develops the same thread in The Godfather (1972) where the Mafia
families take on the same weight and significance.

The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but
rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions
one already has available, always n 1(the only way the one belongs to the
multiple: always subtracted). A Thousand Plateaus, p. 6.

Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Threats Force Retreat from Wide-Ranging Plans for

Iraq. Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003: A01.

Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmpdern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tr.

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, Volume
10. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Jameson, Fredrick. A Singular modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.

London: Verso, 2002: 212. More recently, the current representatives of the
American State have attempted to renew this narrative in an attenuated form by
raising the spectre of terrorism and claiming that exporting freedom and
democracy can undo its breeding grounds. While superficially similar to the
much disparaged root cause argument, this argument differs in proposing the
root cause as being the absence of the State rather than some injustice or
exploitation caused or supported by the State.

Its not a binary division. The State has access to the war machine it contains,
and vice versa. This occurs in the film when the panotptic power of the State

breaks down in the chaos of Mogadishu and the Delta Force platoon attempting
to reach the surrounded Rangers abandons the States technology (and plan)
and enters the city on its own terms.
8

The era of globalisation is over, The New Statesman, 24 September 2001.

Although Black Hawk Down is based on Mark Bowdens remarkable account of
the events first published in a series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer and
later expanded into the book, Black Hawk Down (Berkeley: Atlantic Monthly Pres,
1999) this scene, as well as the other crucial scenes I have described, especially
those in which Atto and Farimbi converse with Garrison and Durant, are not part
of Bowdens narrative. They are the work of Scott and script writers Ken Nolan
and Steve Zaillian.