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Unstaging War,
Confronting Conflict
and Peace
Tony Fry
Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict and Peace
Tony Fry
Unstaging War,
Confronting Conflict
and Peace
Tony Fry
Architecture and Design
University of Tasmania
Launceston, TAS, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-24719-5 ISBN 978-3-030-24720-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24720-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2019
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Preface
The late modern age is unlike any other. Life, at least for the population
of the electronically connected, is now lived in the shadow of multiple
fast and slow forms of total annihilation, with the facts, images and
fictional plays on this end-time continually arriving in a stream rep-
resentational forms. This assault of the terminal thus arrives via the daily
news, topical documentaries, movies, Internet content, social media and
video games. The remarkable thing about it is while it unsettles some
it is dominantly ignored my most. In fact seeking out the image of the
end has become the ‘stuff,’ and a particular genre of entertainment. War
of course figures in the end-times: as nuclear wasteland, the permanent
condition of conflict in a post-apocalyptic world, the instrument for
holding a new savagery at bay, and more.
The dangers of an impending end are real, and they are crises.
Likewise so is the possibility of sliding into hegemonic war as a nor-
malised condition of being. The refusal to confront the reality of crises
is itself is a crisis. ‘Unstaging war’ is situated in the nexus between the
presence, and also the negation, of crisis, the changing nature of war,
and the imperative to find ways to respond to this nihilistic situation.
v
vi Preface
Not with the fiction of a proposed solution but with a tentative starting
point towards creating one (of many needed) transformative processes.
While what has just been outlined reflects a state of mind lived with
for some time, now more a immediate question claims attention. Where
does this book actually come from? It’s hard to know when and where
it began. Existentially it has one history, intellectually and politically
another. It’s also a book that friends and colleagues over the year have
suggested I write, so in this respect it is partly a product of prompting.
Certainly it was destined long before the idea arrived or so clearly well
before the first word was laid on the page. In fact, a retrospective view
suggests it was prefigured by accumulative experiences.
The first experience, of which I have no memory, but which had, so I
was told, discernable affects upon me, was that I was born in war, a few
weeks premature. This was due to rocket attack that caused a truck to
crash and pin my mother, who was not seriously injured and my grand-
mother who was, against a church wall. The human and environmen-
tal aftermath of war provided the background to my early childhood.
My father came into my life when I was just over a year old, returning
home with a broken body. I had one uncle who was a fighter pilot and
another who was a highly decorated ‘hero.’ Stories of war were legion.
Bombsites were our adventure playgrounds. But there was also the dark-
ness of war-related suicides. The first was when I was with my primary
school best friend when his mother told him that his father, a former
Korean prisoner of war, had jumped off a bridge and killed himself. At
the age of eighteen I joined the army in which I served six years. It was,
for the most part, a negative experience to be endured, that nonetheless
it gave my life three affirmative directive qualities: resolve, resilience and
a work discipline.
Without the narrative being entirely clear, I was politicised by many
events in the sum of this history, including how I viewed war. Not only
has this marked what I have written but it has also influenced my prac-
tice and action. For example in the last decade, for four years I directed
a post-conflict cultural research project in Timor-Leste. Subsequently I
have been working on projects before and after the formal end of the
war in Colombia, one of these is ongoing. What can be learnt from
Preface vii
these environments, in contrast to the expectation that war arrives as a

violent eruption that shatters normal life, which sometimes it obviously
does, is that it also and increasingly it is insinuating itself into everyday
life and becoming elemental to an abnormal normality.
There are two features of my intellectual history that have inflected
the writing of Unstaging War. One is that it brings together thinking
over several decades, registered by lectures, conference papers, essays and
book chapters on war and modernity, conflict and cities, the concept of
warring, climate change and conflict. This work, in almost all cases, has
been linked to four issues: unsustainability, unsettlement, Sustainment
and futures. The other feature is the inter-disciplinary nature of my edu-
cation and professional practices. Originally educated as a designer I
was never constrained by one design practice, more significantly both
my higher degrees were in cultural studies and, as such embraced phi-
losophy, anthropology/sociology, history and literature. This history
completely merged with the development of a cultural politics that now
underscores this book and the critique its argument carries.
What this argument does is to situate war in the disjuncture between:
the very limited capabilities of contemporary political institutions
across the entire ideological spectrum, to deal with global crises; and,
the complexity and depth of the relations between critical geopoliti-
cal, enviro-climatic, biophysical, economic, population, global secu-
rity and natural resource planetary problems—now and in the future.
Confronted with the scale and complexity of these problems and the
challenges they pose, that entity euphemistically named ‘world leader-
ship’ appears to be hapless.
One doubts if this situation is going to change anytime soon. Yet
if ‘we’ in all our difference are to have a future it has to be faced and
engaged. But ‘facing’ as a confrontation with visible symptoms, which
are mostly veiled and covering over fundamental causes and complex-
ity, is not easy. Without any immediate expectation of that which needs
to be seen (heard and felt), the project of disclosure has to be rendered
as, and become, unavoidable. ‘Unstaging War’ names a proto-practice
that goes to this imperative. It aims to move a critical gaze from the
scene of familiarity constructed by the ‘set’ picture of war that allows
viii Preface
the concealed to ‘hide in the light’.1 As such it aims to take down, deac-
tivate, delegitimise and usurp the familiar. It is not simply satisfied with
the avant-garde practice of ‘making it strange’. The concept of unstag-
ing expresses and exposes dissatisfaction with how war is presented,
perceived and understood. Clearly this view implies the insufficiency
of the perspective adopted by a great deal of material written on war,
notwithstanding some of it is pertinent and insightful. However, what
is so often lacking is a willingness to risk presenting ideas that attempt
to respond to what can be shown to be absolutely the critical condition
in which war figures within the current ‘state of the world’ and global
futures.
Dealing with the situation underlying a great deal of conflict is not
just a matter of more adequate policies, better political organisation
and more effective practical action. What it actually demands are new
ideas, thinking, knowledge, transformative agencies and a great deal of
imagination. This work is but one modest response to this imperative.
As this it begs to be seen as a starting point able to initiate a creative
process and prompt action rather than being seen as a text that strives
to resolve argument and draw a line under it. The ideas and knowl-
edge to be presented have no power in themselves unless grounded in
a deployable praxis. So positioned, the basic ambition of Unstaging War
is to initiate a process that aims to reconfigure how war and peace are
mostly understood, in order to establish a new basis to think and create
what, as will be argued, are more appropriate pathways leading towards
a counter-discourse and critical practices able to help divert, diminish,
shorten and constrain war.
Not taking the elemental language associated with war as given
is fundamental to this task. The meaning of war, violence, aggression
and peace are all examples of a continual error in the mobilisation of
language that is so often taken with meaning as self-evident. All these
terms, including war itself, are now contestable. Consider: war has
become a plural, complex and unstable category, while peace now lacks
coherence, definition and strategic practices adequate to the demands of
1This notion comes from Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, Comedia/Routledge, 1988.
Preface ix
the multiple and extremely complex contexts in which it is employed.

As for the relation of war and peace it is now by no means a natural
union in binary opposition. The relation is actually more appropriately
seen as aporetic. By implication this approach requires working against
dominant assumptions and towards an exposure of their phenomenal
constitutive conceptual, instrumental and institutional elements and
limits. Obviously to elaborate a theory and practice of unstaging, what
is to be unstaged has to be made clear, beyond just a generalised cate-
gory: essentially, war as totalised, cannot be unstaged.
While there will be readers who want it instantly defined, the mean-
ing of unstaging will only really make sense when filtered through the
critique that precedes it. Hence why it is predominantly elaborated in
the last chapter. Moreover, as a principle upon which to build prac-
tices, and create in specific contexts, it does not arrive as a ready-made
method, instantly deployable. Rather it is the first step in the com-
mencement of an invitational, appropriative developable process. In
embarking upon this exercise there is no way to assure that it will suc-
ceed, but in the context of the fatalism and nihilism that has become
intrinsic to the status quo, the attempt is deemed to be essential.
The merit of the verb ‘unstaging’ is that it connotes an active engage-
ment. It suggests a playing down, a process of dismantling the drama, a
clearing. By implication it places ‘an act of unmaking’ before embracing
the danger and conduct of ‘making war.’
Often unbeknown to many of them for their contribution in
bringing this book into being, a few who sadly have not lived to see
its arrival, I want to acknowledge and thank: Roger Cranshaw,
Michael Green, Phillipa Goodall, Paul Willis, Derrick Price, Mark
Jackson, David Palazón, Cameron Tonkinwise, Duncan Fairfax, Eleni
Kalantidou, Arturo Escobar, Daniel Lopera, Alferdo Gutierrez Borrero,
Fernando Alvarez Romero, Madina Tlostanova, and especially Anne-
Maria Willis whose support has been always been unwavering.
Launceston, Australia Tony Fry

Contents
1 Introduction: Setting the Stage 1
Part I Facing Conditions of War
2 History and the Genealogy of Violence 21
3 War as Event(s)ing and Case Study 51
4 War Philosophy, Reason, and the Irrational 103
5 Law: The Breaking and End of Rules 137
6 Climate, Change and War 155
Part II Being Without Peace
7 Peace, Learning and Unlearning 191
xi
xii Contents
8 Peace and the Unobtainable Unity of Being 209
Part III The Power of the Imperative
9 Unstaging War: The Opening of an Idea 227
10 Unstaging War and the (Post)Human 251
11 Unstaging War: The New Discourse 267
A Closing with an Opening 297
Bibliography 301
Index 321
1
Introduction: Setting the Stage
One of the most disturbing features of the world in which we all now
inhabit is that the speed and nature of change moving at a velocity
beyond our ability grasp its implications. Not only have many of the
conceptual means available to make sense of what is occurring become
redundant, but so too have the responsive actions to change.
This situation especially, if not exclusively, applies to war. In particu-
lar, it is subject to significant and far reaching change from three major
global dynamic forces: the reconfiguration of geopolitical power struc-
tures that unevenly will effect everyone everywhere; growing planetary
population and natural resource pressures combined with increasing
enviro-climatic impacts, all with long term future consequences for life
on Earth; and an ever more rapid process of the transformation of mul-
tiple technologies with often ill-understood psycho-social affects. These
multiple forces have created critical conditions that have the possibil-
ity to slide into a catastrophic crisis. It against this backdrop that the
concept and proto-practice of Unstaging War arrives, and in doing so
it asserts the need for appropriate, effective and imaginative ideas and
responsive action to change as characterised.
© The Author(s) 2019 1

T. Fry, Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict and Peace,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24720-1_1
2
T. Fry
What Unstaging War offers is one fragile starting point that is still
‘work in progress’ created with the intent of initiating a developa-
ble process of critical review, conceptualisation and proto-practice
advancement. In doing this the well-worn practice of putting forward
a ‘resolved’ model of an abstracted theoretical solution is rejected. It is
viewed as a form of utopian fantasy, as there is never a solution with-
out an agent of realisation. Saying this does not imply a turning away
from theory, but directing it toward understanding ‘the problem’ at a
fundamental level before any pursuit of solutions, which is something
the desire for a solution often fails to do.
The Changing Nature of the World:

A Brief Outline
Geopolitically, the on going reconfiguration of the geometry of power
between the world’s power blocs is creating a more uncertain and poten-
tially dangerous future. The contraction of the role of the U.S. in the
world, its disposition toward economic protectionism, and a weaken-
ing of its security ties to its global allies; the territorial expansion and
sphere of influence of China in the East and South China Seas; Russia’s
regional ambitions and international destabilising actions; the pros-
pect of increased contestation by global powers over natural resources,
especially as global warming continues to bring previously unreachable
minerals within the reach of exploration; and the prospect of greater
nuclear arms proliferation and a new nuclear arms race—these are but a
few examples of a fluid and very complex geopolitical dynamic, within
which there are existing and potential flashpoints.
Layered over this situation are the serious and still only partly
known consequences, including the impacts of climate change upon
a whole range of critical factors including biodiversity, sea level rises,
global food security with agricultural systems under stress, popu-
lation displacement and problems of mass migration, and public
health risks from increases in vector carried disease. Not only do the
1 Introduction: Setting the Stage
3
impacts well exceed this sample but also they are likely to increase
in number and severity over time irrespective of tardy and insuffi-
cient mitigation measures that have been, and are being, taken.
Additionally, as will be seen later, climate change poses major dangers
as a cause of conflict.
As for technology, its transformative effects are destined to increas-
ingly change our being, lives and future at a profound ontological level.
The very nature of our being appears to have started to fracture with
at one extreme a synthesis of biology and technology underway, with
designed forms of the post-human being claimed as in process. Such
transformations of the de-naturalising nature of ‘our’ essential being
are also seen as extending to physiological, cognitive and psychological
dimensions. At the other extreme there is the abandonment of a signif-
icant segment of the human population to a condition of de-human-
isation as new structure of inequality starts to arrive. More prosaically
technology has, and is, changing the nature of work, social relations,
communications, transport, education, knowledge, intelligence, mem-
ory, medicine, materials, food, and of course war and its weapons of
mass destruction—not only can such a listing continue, but everything
on it feeds back to contribute to the differences of ‘our’ ontological
transformation.
The complexity of what has just been outlined is not only far
greater than has been briefly detailed but is not contained by the cat-
egories employed. The complexity of this complexity is relational.
Effectively our species has created a world of complexity within ‘the
world’ of a complexity beyond its comprehension as a condition of
existence. The fundamental contradiction of so much of what was/
is created to constitute and protect our material future is negating it,
and so is effectively defuturing. War placed in the contradiction of
this context is a very crude and ambiguous instrument indeed to ‘deal’
with problems of this world, be it delivered with extremely sophisti-
cated organisational and technological means in support of ‘resolving’
a crisis.
4
T. Fry
The Challenge
The present age has been defined as the Anthropocene. It names that
moment in planetary time of the displacement of the Holocene in
which the totality of the impacts of our species has put life on Earth
itself at risk. Such negation can be seen to arrive from various direc-
tions: the sum of all that forms the collective effect of defuturing is
one characterisation. Another is the announcement by evolution-
ary biologists that the planet’s sixth extinction event has commenced,
as an event initiated by us.1 Although the number of people on the
planet who know of the planetary conditions gathered under the name
Anthropocene is still small, the numbers who experience these con-
ditions as they specifically arrive in a situated local context is becom-
ing very large. As a result there are many millions who are physically
unsettled by what is happening, but hundreds of millions who witness
what is changing and as a result are by degree experiencing unsettlement
psychologically.
The situation is critical, the dangers are huge and the risk of con-
flict sparked by them high. If we as a species are to survive the
enormous challenge to be confronted unquestionably means fun-
damental changes in our mode of earthly habitation and conduct.
Currently world leaders, and their governments and international
organisations, are failing to recognise and respond to the scale this crit-
ical situation. They are unable to transcend existing agendas, and go
beyond pragmatically adjusting their particular relation to maintaining
business as usual. The complexity they confront simply does not, cannot
or will not recognise the extent of the actual complexity of our species
condition as progenitors and victims of a wider and increasing crisis of
life on Earth.
1Elizabeth Kolbert (2014), The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New York: Henry Holt.
See also ‘Stanford Biologist Warns of Early Stages of Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction Event,’ Stanford
News, July 24, 2014, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/sixth-mass-extinction-072414.
html (accessed April 2, 2015).
5
Obviously meeting the challenge our species faces will require a mas-
sive transformative and adaptive effort over an extensive span of time,
even though it’s short as crisis looms. Whatever action is taken it has
to be substantial, cannot be painless, and will be fraught with danger.
The message is simple: if ‘we’ are to have a future there is no choice
but to act, but the action is extraordinarily difficult. In such global
circumstances where a large-scale escalation of defuturing problems is
underway, the risk of conflict is high. It follows that it is vital to prefig-
ure ways to avoid this happening while also de-escalating any violence
already occurring. The imperative has to be to make time toward estab-
lishing more sustainable futures by slowing down, or halting, all that
defutures.
Unstaging War
The case for Unstaging War first comes with the recognition of, and
then a move toward responding to, the context outlined. It asserts that
it is vital to create new ways to reduce risks of substantial and poten-
tially catastrophic conflict over coming decades and beyond. The case to
be made equally understands that while the rhetoric of peace endures,
the actual binary relation between war and peace is now broken—this
is a problem begging address. Appeals to peace, and its international
instruments and institutions, have demonstratively shown themselves as
lacking the agency to deal with extant conflicts, let alone those com-
ing from greater risks implicit in now changing global circumstances.
So positioned as affirmatively reactive, how Unstaging War will be
approached needs qualification.
As a potentially major new proto counter-discourse in early forma-
tion, with a central idea grounded in process and innovatory practices,
Unstaging War aims not only to challenge many currently held views on
war and peace but proposes a very different way to counter a historical
and internationally widespread propensity to war. More than this it also
confronts the abysmal relation between war and the unsustainable while
affirming the continual attainment of what at any historical moment seems
to be impossible.
6
T. Fry
Obviously, as indicated, Unstaging War is not posed as fully packaged

universal solution. Rather it is presented as an idea and proto-practice to
be developed and tested as a situationally adaptive process. Its develop-
ment being firmly based on a critique of the idea and strategic insuffi-
ciency of peace and its pursuit, and in recognition of the changing nature
and form of war in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances. Thereafter,
‘the how’ of the making of the discourse, together with approaches to
practices are to be explored. A number of positions of enunciation now
need to be given. These to communicate a clear sense of the aspiration of
Unstaging War, as the breaking of new ground in the way war can be per-
ceived in the face of the emergent relational, geopolitical, enviro-climatic
and technological complexity within which it would be immersed.
The overarching position of speech adopted is relational and post-dis-
ciplinary. Which means that issues, problems, possibilities and knowl-
edge are all viewed as always interconnected and not constrained within
the epistemological bounds of a particular discipline, pre-given dis-
course or system. Understanding is thus to be synthetic and rigorously
established by a convergence of multiple perspective. To illustrate: here
are some of the implications of bringing this approach to an under-
standing of how to engage war.
War currently arrives via a series of discourses: history, military
history, war and conflict studies, peace studies, philosophy of war,
strategic studies, politics, psychology, international relations, mili-
tary anthropology, military science and technology, military doctrine
and so on. Added to these discourses are genres of war’s presentation
in popular culture. Clearly the more the focus is on any specific dis-
course the less is known of the whole. So while specific knowledge
is needed it equally requires being informed (and if necessary trans-
formed) by a developed general understanding. To grasp this is also to
realise that positions of speech need the able to traverse a variety of
discourses with perceptual flexibility. One problem of doing this is the
gulf between the ontology of the globally deployable military habitus2
2This is a different ontology from of the large number of military forces in the world whose func-
tion is, in the service of the government, is to keep the population in order.
7
(as strategic, tactical and ordered in every possible respect) and how
military conduct is understood and viewed by government (expe-
dient and politically strategic and opportunistic). The ontologi-
cally over-determined habitas of the military institution essentially
obstructs the ability of military personnel to develop and provide cre-
ative solutions to problems outside a prescribed matrix intrinsic to
the service context (predominantly training, combat, aid to the civil
power, peacekeeping). In all cases service is reactive to instruction
over the entire structure of command. Any innovation that occurs
does so in spaces of limited opportunity within the condition of limi-
tation. This issue will be seen to be of particular interest as it surfaced
in the context of counterinsurgency—an issue to be discussed in a
later chapter.
Thinking war as discrete no longer reflects its actuality. War no
longer can be reduced to just a particular geography, mode of conflict,
or transparent chronology. Increasingly war is being conducted in dif-
ferent visual and invisible modes across varied material and immate-
rial domains. But equally this does not mean the environments will
be any less impacted, rather they become more plural. All wars are
wars upon environments, cultures, bodies and minds. They all deplete
human, natural and urban resources, and sustain industries that are
fundamentally unsustainable. Once wars’ impacts were discerna-
ble and their duration retrospectively fixed. Now they are becoming
indistinct in form and time as well as becoming more multi-dimen-
sional and fluid.
Unstaging not only names the sum of this activity but also aims to
bring it into being by staging the unseen. This thinking and activity
arrives as recoil against, and challenge to, much of the accepted familiar
language of war, wherein meaning is taken as self-evident, and where
peace is taken to be an unquestioned logical opposite. Consequently the
position adopted aligns itself with those who now the reject the war/
peace binary relation.
8
T. Fry
On the Stage
In Chapter 3 of Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide of 1759 the ‘glories of
war, martial music, well-drilled troops and the spectacle of battle’ are
all collectively described as “the theatre of war.”3 This characterisation is
thought to be the first use of what was to become a well-used military
term (including by von Clausewitz). But it is now taking on a new life.
From 2009 Theatre of War Productions, founded by Bryan Doerries and
Phyllis Kaufman, has presented readings of Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes
to tens of thousands of members of military and civilian audiences in the
United States and Europe.4 The intent of the project is to show that the
response to the visible impacts of physical and psychological wounds of
war on soldiers, their families and communities has remained almost the
same over millennia. By doing this Doerries and Kaufmann believed that
a greater understanding would be created, that especially psychological
injury would be de-stigmatized, the trauma of veterans and their families
reduced, and that an increased awareness on mental health issues estab-
lished. Additionally, available resources and ways to build the resilience of
individuals, families and communities would be increased. That the project
gained enormous support and appreciation from military and civilian audi-
ences alike testifies to its efficacy. Three observations now follow.
First there is nothing glorious about the often less than visible con-
temporary lived forms of actual theatres of war. Second, the ‘Theatre of
War project’ while important, effective and inspirational—and an affir-
mation of the need to act, even though wars will continue—is insuf-
ficient. While empathising with the physical and mental casualties of
war, it offers no critical engagement directed at war’s causes or conduct
not least as they destroy vast numbers of civilian lives. And third, rec-
ognising there is no available means to actually stop warring, and while
acknowledging the discourse of peace has no efficacy in the face of war,
the unmet challenge of acting more effectively in opposition to the pro-
liferation and potential escalation of war demands to be confronted, not
3Lowell Bair (ed.) (1959) [1759], Voltaire: Candide (trans. Lowell Bair), New York: Bantam Dell.
4http://theaterofwar.com/about/mission (accessed August 9, 2017).
9
by protest but by redirective action. The inspiration, attainments and

limitations of the ‘Theatre of War’ project have been crucial in the origi-
nation of the founding idea of ‘Unstaging War’.
Knowing something of war and contemplating it as idea, it became
immediately clear that Voltaire’s image has expanded and merged into a
Shakespearian dramatic panorama of enormous proportions: the ‘world
has now become the stage for the theatre of war.’ To know this is to
comprehend that action based on creating a new counter-discourse to
war, underscoring a redirective order of change, is an imperative—this
because while ‘the danger grows’ opposition based on appeals to peace
lack a viable means of realisation and so are ineffectual. Likewise, the
voices of peace find few interlocutors. Calls for peace mostly sound
hollow and fall on deaf ears, with instruments of peace (such as United
Nations peacekeepers) being variously viewed as conflicted, biased and
ineffectual. But above all the vagaries of the meaning of the concept
of peace, and its lack of means to pre-empt conflict, currently leaves
humanity bereft of means to resist and diminish coming dangers. As
said, war is no longer discrete, which means it has to be understood and
engaged as relationally connected to other forces of negation.
If our species is to have a future with a future there are two absolutely
basic connected actions essential to be taken. The first is to overcome
our species proclivity to become ever more unsustainable. The second,
which is linked to the first (for nothing is more unsustainable than war),
is to work to against a seemingly destined historical trajectory towards
an eventual war of total oblivion, be it in the near or distant future.
Conflict and the Human Condition

From the time of the ancients to Neo-Darwinism, conflict has been
claimed as an underpinning precondition in maintaining life as a cir-
cling of birth, death and its recreation.5 Infamously conflict was posited
5In Western thought this view of conflict was first expressed by Heraclitus—see fragment 80,
T.M. Robinson (trans.) (1987), Heraclitus Fragments, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. The
term Neo-Darwinism was first coined by George John Romanes 1896, it was used to designate
10
T. Fry
as integral to natural selection, recast as ‘survival of the fittest,’ by Social

Darwinism.6 Stimulated by the rise of genetics, debates over conflict
and the origin of war have raged within social biology, archaeology, pal-
aeontology and anthropology.7 Two positions have become dominant:
the first is that biologically our species, in its animality, is intrinsically
violent and so has a propensity to make war; and the second is that war
is a product of specific forms of cultural ontological construction.
Notwithstanding historical debates on the place of conflict in the
maintenance of life, bringing such thinking to war now has no con-
temporary salience. One cannot reconcile the spirit of ancient tribal
warfare with the destructive power that the ability to make war is now
capable of. Equally problematic is the notion that there is a common
thread named ‘war’ connecting the earliest forms of combat with con-
temporary war, which if fully unleashed has the capacity to extinguish
our species and a vast number of other living organisms. But more than
this, for all the millions of images, books and movies on war, it does not
stand before us as an object of clarity and coherence. The picture cre-
ated can only ever be partial. There is no all-embracing objective point
of view of difference; there is always an absence and a covering over—
hence the power of the extending the metaphor of the “fog of war.”8
So no matter the erudition of the argument it cannot but be partial.
Moreover, in almost all contemporary conflicts, violence and destruc-
tion become disproportionate via the crude effects of the destructive
natural selection as the primary agent in evolution, while Ernst Mayr especially advanced the
modern development of the theory in 1963 in his Animal Species and Evolution, Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press.
6Herbert Spencer postulated this most violent expression of ‘natural selection’ in his book, First
Principles published in 1862. It was in this text in which his thesis of the ‘survival of the fittest’
was first presented.
7These debates are reviewed at length in a recent collection of essays edited by Douglas P. Fry
(2013), War, Peace, and Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8Von Clausewitz writes of war “wrapped in fog” in chapter 3 of book 1 of On War but the first
reference to the term comes from Lonsdale Augustus Hale (1896), The Fog of War, London:
Edward Stanford. The term gained contemporary profile via Errol Morris and his film ‘The Fog
of War’ based on an interview with Robert McNamara, the former US Secretary of Defense for
War during the Vietnam War.
11
capability of sophisticated weapons. Thus as Emmanuel Levinas clearly

enunciated, war is pure immorality.9 There is also the recent fiction that
begs to be outed, which is the idea that war can be waged on terror, for
war is terror, as Peter Sloterdijk unambiguously showed this in his book
Terror from the Air.10
Positioned by the remarks above, there is a trio of absolutely critical
factors that will overarch everything that now will be said in this volume.
Number one reiterates that our species has arrived at a moment wherein
there is an unprecedented confluence of dangers that in various configu-
rations could trigger a major global war of unprecedented proportions.
The second factor is that war itself is changing in its character, forms
of engagement, and technologies. It is now being conducted materially,
immaterially, and via the monitoring or direction of a global networked
system, irrespective of any apparent location of conflict. Linked to this is
the proliferation of distributed and asymmetrical conflict that render the
‘laws of war’ irrelevant, other than the unlawful being employed tactically,
this for many ‘irregular forces’ engaged in conflicts. Thus war’s legal sta-
tus, and ability for them to be contained in a particular time and place,
becomes more than problematic. In this respect, there are strong arguments
supporting the view that war has become a permanent and omnipresent
global condition of variable intensities from the subliminal to the intense.
The third factor points to the disjuncture between the changing nature
of war and the growing dangers of very serious war(s) over coming dec-
ades. There is an evident inadequacy of international political institutions
to theoretically and practically comprehend the relational complexity of
the current and unfolding global situations of risk, and thereafter appropri-
ately respond to it. Effectively, many analytical methods brought to making
sense of ‘the world’ have become disconnected from many transformative
forces of worldly change. Added to this is, as indicated, the diminishing
power of the already weak to non-existent agency of the discourse of peace.
9Emmanuel Levinas (1969), Totality and Infinity (trans. Alphonso Lingis), Pittsburg: Duquesne
University Press, pp. 220–232.
10Peter Sloterdijk (2009), Terror from the Air (trans. Steve Corcoran), New York: Semiotext(e).
12
T. Fry
Faced with this situation and recognising that there are no imme-
diate answers to hand, the activities of Unstaging War as a coun-
ter discourse names an affirmative process of discovery, creation and
construction that needs to commence. So when confronted with the
prospect and reality of war, formed as a praxis it could be mobilised
to provide a clearer form of expression and effective mode of action again
recognising the distinction between war and peace has now become
impossible.
This ruptured relation enfolds agon and agony.11 Unavoidably this
implies an experience of embracing and overcoming contestation, pain
and loss. Unstaging War places its ambitions as incrementally working
over time toward making the danger of war more visible, violent con-
flict more avoidable, delegitimising the recourse to war, and when in
progress of diminished scale and impact. In the pursuit of these aims
what is expected to be able to be attained is a variable, but significant,
transformation of our individual and collective proximity to war. What
proximity means so positioned is complex and important, as will be
seen when it is addressed at length in Chapter 9.
Framed by agon,12 the opening into Unstaging War depends upon
the creation, and situated arrival of, the causal conditions of dynamis
(its potential power) brought to ‘events’ to expose war ‘as event’ in its
familiar, emergent, mutant and representational forms as becoming
existentially embedded in what will be shown to be a growing human
condition of unsettlement. This links to the changing nature of war
itself, and associated increasing ontological geopolitical, anthro-tech-
nological and environmental-climatic conditions that can precipi-
tates future conflict. While also recognising that our species relation
and response to war needs to dramatically change to prompt action to
negate heightened risks and the possibility of conflict. Now while the
desire implicit in such a statement is affirmed, it makes no claim that
11Agon—meaning struggle, contest, battle in any domain of human activity, including sports, war
and the arts—Liddell and Scott (1994), Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Agon is also the root element in ‘agony’ (as it expresses the pain or loss associated with agon ).
12In this context it is understood as strength, might, ability, power vested in a subject or object.
13
its exposition and argument will contribute to producing such an effect.

It is never otherwise: for no matter what change we strive for, albeit by
intent or default, we do so without any certainly that change will arrive
in the form desired.
Being-in-the-world now is to be experientially situated in a particu-
lar ‘grounded here and mediated there’ of the semiosphere—no event
can avoid this. Place is no longer singular. What arrives with war in its
actual material and representational modes does so in the company of
all that constitutes the environment of its signs, causes and crises. New
causes of war compound with the old. The instability of such complex-
ity is palpable; it is felt and as such does not depend on a conscious
engagement with detail. It is of the world of our being now, and it
unsettles.
Living with Unsettlement: An Afterlife

and Anticipation of War
Besides actual displacement, unsettlement names a differential and
heightened human experience producing a psychology of the end of cer-
tainties and without a sense of new beginnings. Along with this comes
a feeling of foreboding. This existential and mostly sensed condition is
a product of encountering numerous and contradictory signs of change,
with uncertainty about how to interpret them or their consequences.
Thus unsettlement denotes a fusion between nihilism and a rate of
change that goes beyond any current human ability to grasp and then
appropriately adapt.
In the condition of loss, which is unsettlement, “where everything
presses toward nothing, nihilism reigns.”13 The loss is never just of
place, the materiality of familiar everyday life, one’s livelihood, social
milieu and what one cares for, but the devaluing of one’s values them-
selves. The loss of all values is equally a loss of the future. While it
13Martin Heidegger (1998) [1955], ‘On the Question of Being,’ in Pathmarks (trans. William
McNeill, ed. William McNeill), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 291.
14
T. Fry
started out as a condition of European nihilism, as Nietzsche recognised

over a century ago, it is now becoming planetary as a state of inaction as
the leaders of the world, and the vast majority of their populations, turn
away from facing the combined forces of defuturing unsustainability
that are eroding the fundamental values of life itself in order to sustain
the unsustainable (of ‘business as usual’). So positioned, warring rather
than being what so often it is claimed to be—the protection of values—
is it’s very opposite. For in war, as again Nietzsche made clear, the high-
est values become devalued.14 His view has ever increased in salience, in
the context of the increased ‘instrumentalisation’ of our species. Which
in the contexts of war, the unsustainable, and unsettlement, translates
into the biopolitical management of our beings as ‘bare life.’
Technology: First Pass

Technology is obviously deeply implicated in war, and as will be seen,
the speed of its transformation. Contrary to a widespread faith in it
salvfic powers it also directly connects to the acceleration of the plan-
etary condition of unsustainability and the globalisation of nihilism
by modernity, as Heidegger’s writing on ‘The Question Concerning
Technology’, and his exchange with Ernst Jünger on in his essay ‘On the
Question of Being’ makes very apparent.15
Unsustainability spans and exceeds the instrumental effects of the
unceasing speed of production. This process that goes back to the very
moment of our species arriving as makers of their world within ‘the
world.’ From this moment the pace of the hominoid production of
worldly change has never slowed, but has continuously increased in speed
14Friedrich Nietzsche (1967) [1887], The Will to Power (trans. Walter Kaufmann), Vantage: New
York, Aphorism No. 2, from 1887, cited Ibid., p. 9.

15Martin Heidegger (1962), ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays (trans. William Lovitt), New York: Harper & Row; Martin Heidegger
(1998), ‘On the Question of Being,’ in Pathmarks (trans. McNeill), pp. 291–322.
15
and in the rate of the transformations of the human condition.16 At the

beginning, with small global population and very basic tools, the impacts
were low and easily accommodated by natural systems. But now with the
volume of resources depleted, the scale of production and consumption,
increases in levels of environmental damage is extreme, the extent of the
loss of biodiversity huge, and now the growing consequences of anthropo-
genic enhanced climate change, all aided by advanced technologies, means
unsustainability is spinning out of control (in part named as increased
innovation, productivity, and rising standards of living—especially of the
already privileged). Reason has served every element in the advance of this
directional ‘development’ as it includes a vast war machine.
An interpretative confrontation with this situation takes us beyond
an extrapolation of the discernable effects and to imagined futural con-
ditions of de-humanised and post-humanised life. In so doing unset-
tlement shifts from merely being an experienced and felt disposition
toward the ‘state of the world’ to a condition of mind (a psychology)
ever contemplating uncertain possibilities of a felt certain progression
of possible traumatic phenomenal events, all triggered by the effects of
speeding forces of negation. Here one can cite ‘unrestricted war,’ (as
we shall see as a named unbounded mode of war already underway)
in emergent modified multi-nodal forms as they become woven into
worldviews, everyday life, aggressive cybernetics, techno-industrial sys-
tems, that all combine as features that stream into conditions of contin-
uous and plurally conducted conflicts.17
16Paul Virilio’s has worked on speed over at least forty years and shown how it has transformed
the human condition and now it needs to be understood—see, for example, his (1986), Speed
and Politics (trans. Mark Polizzotti), New York: Semiotext(e). See also ‘speed’ as an constantly
accelerating rate of worldly transformation that effectively rewrites a good deal of Hannah
Arendt’s (1958), seminal thesis in The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
17Unrestrictive warfare is addressed in detail on Chapter 6.
16
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Putting Crisis in Place

Unstaging War is placed before the crisis of the present as a statement
affirming the history of our species being a continual attainment of the
impossible. The fact is that the impossible is not so much an empirical real-
ity but an epistemologically framed perspective and political imperative.
The impossible is designated by what is known at the time, so attainments
of the present always have looked impossible from a few centuries prior.
Crisis is clearly intrinsic to life’s cycle of birth, death and renewal. But
the crisis of the Anthropocene and the unsustainable is crisis of a different
order; ones that pose the prospect of breaking the cycle. Its character is
not unknown, is already present, unevenly experienced, ignored, misrep-
resented and arriving at a differential speed in different forms and places.
In a supposed age of understanding and unbounded information there is
a profound crisis of this crisis. While it actually being lived, and deeply
felt by vast numbers of people it is also consciously avoided—a condition
named as akrasia. So while there is a sensed or conscious knowledge of
crisis that unsettles this does not change actions. This is a situation link-
ing back to nihilism, as it’s undergirded by an ontologically embedded
sense of helplessness that discounts a belief in one’s actions having any
agency. Such a state of being is not merely individual but collective, and
manifest when war is taken to be inevitable. In the current global con-
juncture of crisis there is also the added factor of the overwhelming rela-
tional complexity of the problems to be confronted in time, which is in
turn negated by chronophobia—the fear of time and an illusion of per-
manence.18 Indivisible from this situation is ‘a crisis of representation’19
18Bernd Magnus (1978), Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
pp. 190–195.
19Dealing with the crisis of representation as it folds into states of unsettlement actually begs three
responses. Each recognises the enormity of the relational complexity of what unsettles (us) as it is
present but as such largely invisible. Hence it being felt but not seen.
Response one is to acknowledge that one cannot presume the received problem is the problem
(or even a problem) and the solution is a solution (or not simply another problem). Living in
doubt has to override illusions of normality.
17
(effectively a crisis of truth) that has now taken a political turn and is
producing a crisis in the authority of critical thought, science and the
media20).
The Narrative Form and the Structure

of the Book
While the narrative has been written sequential argument the chapters
can be read independently. The book is divided into three parts. Part
I: Facing Condition of War, provides five perspectives on war, the first
presents a theoretical reading of the complexity of violence, next is an
introduction of war understood as an ‘event’ from a series of philosoph-
ical points of view. It also includes illustrative a case study; the weap-
onisation of design. Perspective three brings questions of reason and
the irrational to the thinking of war. Four addresses the breakdown of
the efficacy of the rules of war. The final chapter and last perspective
brings together the relation of war to climate change and changes in the
nature of war in which is, or will be, implicated. The focus of Part II:
Being Without Peace, starts with the history of the idea of peace. This
is followed by an account of the philosophical problems of the con-
cept and the breakdown of the war/peace binary. Part III: The Power of
Response two is to recognise there are no solutions to many things designated as problems
(in this situation it is matter of learning to adapt in order to live with the problem—this implies
the development of a difference view if human agency and the acquisition of a new sensibility).
Effectively adaption is not merely and instrumental action but an act of redisposing our mode of
worldly placement.
Response three is acting on the basis of understanding that we are in the complexity (not exter-
nal observers of it) and, thereafter, to deal with its threats and potentials it has to pictured—this
via a process of exposure and re-imaging (not just visually) predicated upon the formation of a
new imaginary. If ‘we’ can see the world another way it will be another place (cf. Plato’s, ‘Allegory
of the Cave,’ in his Doctrine of Truth, in William McNeiil [ed.], Pathmarks, pp. 155–182).
20For example On April 23, 2017 there were more than 600 marches held around the world, with
organizers saying science ‘under attack’ from a White House that dismisses the threat of climate
change, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/22/march-for-science-earth-day-
climate-change-trump.
18
T. Fry
the Imperative, puts Unstaging War forward as a means of redirective

engagement with the contemporary multi-dimensional character of war
and the inability of peace to deal with it. It does this first by outlining
the idea of Unstaging War. It then places it in the context of transfor-
mation of ‘the human condition.’ The last chapter presents details of
the concept as a new counter-discourse, process, practice and praxis to
bring into being. The book ends with a number of concluding remarks
that open into futuring possibilities.
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Because, Robbie—to return to your question—your Scotsman
believes only in success. How can a man, who regards success as
the goal of life, be a true artist? God saved the genius of Robert
Burns to poetry by driving him through drink to failure. Think what an
appalling figure in literature a successful Burns would have been! He
was already trying to write poems in polite English, which was about
as ludicrous as for a polite Englishman to try to write poetry in the
dialect of Burns. Riotous living and dying saved him from that last
degradation of smug prosperity which threatened him.
l.h. But do you mean no artists are successful?
o.w. Incidentally; never intentionally. If they are, they remain
incomplete. The artist’s mission is to live the complete life: success,
as an episode (which is all it can be); failure, as the real, the final
end. Death, analysed to its resultant atoms—what is it but the
vindication of failure: the getting rid for ever of powers, desires,
appetites, which have been a lifelong embarrassment? The poet’s
noblest verse, the dramatist’s greatest scene deal always with death;
because the highest function of the artist is to make perceived the
beauty of failure.
r.r. But have Scotsmen of genius been any more successful, in a
wordly sense, than others? I seem to remember a few who failed
rather handsomely.
o.w. Possibly. Providence is sometimes kinder to us than we are
ourselves. But never was there a Scotsman of genius who survived
his youth, who was not fatally compromised by his nationality. To fail
and to die young is the only hope for a Scotsman who wishes to
remain an artist. When, at the end of the eighteenth century,
Scotland produced her second great writer of genius, she inspired
him to a terrible betrayal (for which the tradespeople of literature still
praise him)—to break his art on the wheel of commercial rectitude, to
write books which became worse and worse, in order to satisfy his
creditors! In Dante’s Purgatorio there is nothing to equal the horror of
it. But he succeeded; and Scotland, in consequence, is proud of him.
I see by your faces that you all know the man I mean: one does not
have to name him. Think of unhappy Sir Walter, writing his
transcendent pot-boilers for no other reason than to wipe out
bankruptcy! Bankruptcy, that beneficent fairy, who presents to all
who trust her with their insolvency five, ten, fifteen, sometimes even
nineteen shillings in the pound of what they owe to their creditors—to
those usurious ones whose extortionate demands, recognized in
other branches of the law, here get turned down. How much did she
give me, Robbie?
r.r. An extension of time, Oscar. She hasn’t done with you yet.
o.w. No; she does not dismiss the lover from her embraces while
she has any hope of securing the restoration of his balance, or of
discovering some deeper stain in his character. What touching
devotion! She is the romantic figure of the money-market. But I
believe—or at least I tell myself—that fewer Scotsmen go bankrupt
than any other nationality. It is not, however, merely monetary
success which seduces them; success, in all its aspects, has for
them a baleful attraction. They succumb to it intellectually, morally,
spiritually. On that Carlyle wrecked his chances of producing a
permanent work of art greater than his French Revolution.
all. Carlyle?
o.w. I surprise you? Is that because we all know that Carlyle
remained poor? So do misers. Carlyle was the greatest intellectual
miser of the nineteenth century. In his prime he wrote his greatest
work—the history of a failure—the French Revolution. The time
came when, with all his powers matured, he stood equipped for the
writing of his supreme masterpiece. There was no need to look far
afield for a subject: it stood obvious awaiting him. After his French
Revolution he should have written the life of Napoleon—the greatest
success, the greatest failure that the world has ever known. He
would have done it magnificently. What a spectacle for the world: the
Man of Destiny receiving from the son of humble Scottish peasants
his right measure of immortality! But because Carlyle was a
Scotsman, he would not take for his hero the man whose life ended
in failure: he could not bring himself to face the débâcle of Waterloo,
the enduring ignominy and defeat of St. Helena. Had he been true to
his art, he would have realized that St. Helena was the greatest
theme of all—for an artist, the most completely significant in the
whole of modern history. But because he had the soul of a
Scotsman, because he worshipped success, he looked for his hero,
and found him, in that most mean and despicable character,
Frederick the Great: a man to whom heaven had given the powers of
a supreme genius, and hell the soul of a commercial traveller with
that unavailing itch for cultural gentility which Voltaire has exposed
for us. On that mean theme he wrote his most voluminous work, and
became, in the process, that skeleton in Mrs. Carlyle’s cupboard
which the world now knows.
You smile at me, Robbie, but believe me, in my own ruin I have
found out this truth. The artist must live the complete life, must
accept it as it comes and stands like an angel before him, with its
drawn and two-edged sword. Great success, great failure—only so
shall the artist see himself as he is, and through himself see others;
only so shall he learn (as the artist must learn) the true meaning
behind the appearance of things material, of life in general, and—
more terrible still—the meaning of his own soul.
l.h. Why is a man’s soul more terrible than life in general? Does
not the greater include the less?
o.w. Because an epitome is always more terrible than a
generalization. We do not see life in general steadily diminishing in
force and vitality, or we do not realize it; the whole bulk is too great.
But when a man really sees into himself, the process of diminution
that is going on becomes apparent: he meets there a problem he
cannot escape—a problem to which religion, and philosophy, and
history can give no certain answer, however much they may pretend.
As I sit here—with a few friends left to me; friends who, however
faithful, their number must needs diminish—for I shall never make a
new friend in my life, though perhaps a few after I die—as I sit here
and look back, I realize that I have lived the complete life necessary
to the artist: I have had great success, I have had great failure. I
have learned the value of each; and I know now that failure means
more—always must mean more than success. Why, then, should I
complain? I do not mean that a certain infirmity of the flesh, or
weakness of the will would not make me prefer that this should have
happened to one of my friends—to one of you—rather than to
myself; but admitting that, I still recognize that I have only at last
come to the complete life which every artist must experience in order
to join beauty to truth. I have come to see that St. Helena is, for a
world which follows Cæsar and not Christ, the greatest place on
earth next to Calvary. It is more neglected: men do not fight for it,
they do not go out to conquer it in weary generations of disastrous
crusades, like those which did so much to destroy for Catholic
Europe the true significance of Christianity. But it is there; and only
when men begin to fight for it, as a thing desirable and precious to
possess, only then will its spiritual significance change, and its value
diminish.
If I could write what I have been saying to you, if I could hope to
interest others, as I seem to have interested you, I would; but the
world will not listen to me—now. It is strange—I never thought it
possible before—to regret that one has too much leisure: leisure
which I used so to lack, when I myself was a creator of beautiful
things.
l.h. But you told me, in your last letter, that you were writing
something?
o.w. I told you that I was going to write something: I tell everybody
that. It is a thing one can repeat each day, meaning to do it the next.
But in my heart—that chamber of leaden echoes—I know that I
never shall. It is enough that the stories have been invented, that
they actually exist; that I have been able, in my own mind, to give
them the form which they demand.
r.r. If you won’t write them, Oscar, you might at least tell them.
o.w. You have heard them all, Robbie.
r.r. The others have not.
o.w. My dear Robbie, you are not nearly artful enough; but you are
very kind. I will tell you one of my stories presently. Let us go on
talking till the appropriate moment makes it more possible.... Is it I, or
is it the ortolans that are still keeping us here? I do not mind; I would
only like to know.
r.r. To tell you the truth, Oscar, the ortolans were merely a
delicate excuse. We are now waiting for the most perfectly forgetful,
and the most regularly unpunctual person that any of us know. Do
you mind if I cling for five minutes more to my belief that he really
intends to meet us?
o.w. Not at all; a charming experiment. Forgetfulness is a great
gift. While he exercises it, we have more time for being happy where
we are than we should otherwise have allowed ourselves. Who is
our benefactor?
r.r. I thought you might like to meet Harvey Jerrold again. I was
keeping it behind the ortolans as a surprise for you.
(The name has evoked a look of eager, almost of startled,
pleasure; and response comes with animation.)
o.w. My dear Robbie; but how inventive of you! What a finishing
touch to a circle which already seemed complete! I did not know that
he was here.
r.r. He only arrived last night. I ’phoned to his hotel and left a
message for him asking him to join us. This morning he sent word
that he would come.
o.w. (with just a shade of doubt in his tone). Did you tell him who
we all were?
r.r. I only said “friends.” He knows all of us.
o.w. If he has not, in the exercise of his gift, forgotten some of us.
That—as I remember him—is possible.
r.r. He can’t have forgotten you, at any rate, considering it was
you who published his first plays for him. Or did you only write them?
o.w. Ah! but he has done so much better since. Suppose he were
now ashamed of them. He was one of those—true artists—who
make a reputation before they do anything. That is the right way to
begin; but few have the courage to persevere. It is so difficult. Yet he,
of course, is the most complete artist who is able to remain perfect—
doing nothing.
r.r. I have heard you say that before. But for the sake of the
others won’t you explain it? Your explanations are so much more
illuminating than your statements, you know.
o.w. I may have said the same thing before, Robbie. (It requires a
friend to tell one so!) But my explanation, I am sure, will always be
different. And yet the one which comes at this moment seems only
too obvious. The greatest work of the imagination, for an artist, is to
create first himself, then his public. The writing of my plays and my
poems was never difficult: because they belonged to me, they came
at call. But to make my own public was a labour of Hercules. That is
what I did first. The effort lay in the fact that while one appeared to
be doing nothing, one was actually prostrated by the exertion. I have
known what it is to come back from a week-end—one of those
ordeals by tattle which the stately homes of England provide for the
passing guest—almost literally at death’s door, from which nothing
but hermetic seclusion, until the week-end following, enabled me to
escape. One of my doctors called it “heart-strain,” the other “brain-
fag.” It was really both. I remember once, on a Monday morning,
missing an unreasonably early train, and having to return for four
hours to the bosom of a ducal family, when its exhibition hours were
over. It was a charnel house: the bones of its skeleton rattled: the
ghosts gibbered and moaned. Time remained motionless. I was
haunted. I could never go there again. I had seen what man is never
meant to see—the sweeping up of the dust on which the footfall of
departing pleasure has left its print. There for two days I had been
creating my public: the two days given by God to the Jewish and the
Christian world for rest; and from that breaking of the sabbath,
creator and created were equally exhausted. The breath of life I had
so laboriously breathed into their nostrils they were getting rid of
again, returning to native clay. And yet how few understand what a
life of heroism is that of an artist when he is producing—not his art,
but the receptacle which is to contain it. That, dear friends, is why
the world is to the artist so tragic. It is always a struggle. The artist
may possibly for a while mould the world; but if the world moulds
him, he has failed to become an artist, though he may have
succeeded in acquiring the Scotch accent.
l.h. You spoke just now of the artist creating a public for the
appreciation of his work; can he not also create other artists? Would
not that be the ideal aim?
o.w. Ideal, but impossible. You cannot create an artist; you can
only invent one—and it always remains a fiction. Artists—God’s last
creation, secret recipients of the Word of Life—continue to create
themselves. But invention is often tried as a substitute. I remember,
years ago, Hermann Vezin inventing an actress who was to be a
second Rachel. For years and years he continued to invent her,
telling us what to expect. Then one day he produced her....
r.r. (after allowing the rhetorical pause its due weight). What
happened? I don’t remember.
o.w. On the day he produced her, she ceased to exist.
r.r. You mean she didn’t arrive?
o.w. Her arrival was a departure: the stage was her terminus.
Engines whistled; the uproar became frightful. She ran to Brighton
without stopping; and, I believe, still dies there.
l.h. Was she so bad, then, after all?
o.w. She may have been almost a genius; who can tell? The fatal
mistake was when Hermann Vezin began inventing her. What would
happen to an actress, however great, who came upon the stage
bejewelled with the names of Sarah, Rachel, Ristori, Siddons?
Probability becomes violated; the sense of the theatre is destroyed.
When that happens all is over. Hermann Vezin should have held his
tongue till the gods themselves applauded. But he lacked faith. The
worst thing you can do for a person of genius is to help him: that way
lies destruction. I have had many devoted helpers—and you see the
result. Only once did I help a man who was also a genius. I have
never forgiven myself.
r.r. Oscar, you are perfectly absurd!
o.w. (with a glance of genuine affection). But I have forgiven you,
Robbie.
l.h. What happened?
o.w. To the man I helped? He never told me; and I would not ask.
When we met afterwards, he had so greatly changed that, though I
recognized him, he failed to recognize me. He became a Roman
Catholic, and died at the age of twenty-three, a great artist—with half
the critics and all the moralists still hating him. A charming person!
l.h. How often one hears that said, as though it were the final
summing up of a man’s life and character—covering everything.
o.w. But surely it is so. What is more fundamental, more
inalienable from a man’s personality, than charm? He may lose his
looks; he may lose his character; but in almost every case that I
have known—in spite of adverse circumstances—the charm
remains, like the gift of a fairy godmother: something which cannot
be got rid of. A person who has charm has the secret of life; but does
not know what the secret is—he himself being the secret. For in this
wonderful turning world we can know other people by their
differences—as I know all of you; but we can never know ourselves.
Matthew Arnold, a fine but a very mistaken poet, was always trying
to do the most impossible thing of all—to know himself. And that is
why sometimes, in the middle of his most beautiful poems, he left off
being the poet and became the school inspector.
l.h. I thought you said that the artist must know himself in order to
know others?
o.w. Never! You misunderstood me. “See himself” is what I said;
and, seeing himself naked but not ashamed, learn the terrible
meaning of his own soul—how it exists to torment and divide him
against himself, but always as a stranger within his gates, remote,
inscrutable, unnatural. For this thing, which he can never
understand, goes deeper than the consciousness of self—it is
something primitive, atavistic, fierce, and savage with a fanatical
faith in gods whom this world tries no longer to believe in, but still
fears, lest they should become true. When news of Matthew Arnold’s
death came to Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, he said (for he
was a Scotsman with a fine sense of humour): “How dreadful! He
won’t like God.” You smile; and yet there was a very real truth in it.
The theology of Matthew Arnold was a terrible mistake; it arose out
of that insistence on trying to know himself: he wanted also to know
God. And just as trying to know yourself savours of social snobbery
—being an attempt to know the person you think the most important
in the world, so in the other attempt there is a certain spiritual
snobbery. It is surely quite sufficient that He should know us, without
any pretended recognition on our part, which, in any case, would be
futile. For if a man cannot know his own soul with real
understanding, still less can he know with real understanding that
which directs its ministry of pain—that constant intolerable reminder
that we can never, unless we would choose only to be dust, belong
separately and entirely to ourselves. Man’s destiny is to be haunted;
however deserted of his fellows, he is never for a moment alone.
Matthew Arnold, in one of his poems, made that beautiful but
ridiculous statement which appeals to us, perhaps, as true because
we would so much like it to be true:
Yes, in this sea of life enisled,

We mortal millions live alone!
We don’t: we live with a familiar who is a stranger, always eating out

of our hand, always defrauding us of the joys of life while denying us
the reason. And we never know from day to day whether that
stranger is going to murder us in cold blood, or make us become
saints.
r.r. Why not both? To me they sound almost synonymous.
o.w. Robbie, you must not interrupt me, saying clever, sensible
things like that: you put me out. People who want to say merely what
is sensible should say it to themselves before they come down to
breakfast in the morning, never after.
l.h. That was when Lewis Carroll’s “White Queen” used to practise
telling herself all the things she knew to be impossible.
r.r. I always thought that meant saying her prayers.
o.w. But saying prayers, Robbie, is always possible. It is only the
answer to prayer that is impossible. Prayer must never be answered:
if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence. If we
ask for our daily bread and it is given us as manna was given to the
Israelites in the wilderness, it is merely an invitation to dinner
reversed. How much more devotional the exercise becomes when
we know that our food comes to us from quite mundane sources,
irrespective of prayer.
h.d. But your prayer then becomes merely a superstition.
o.w. Not at all: a compliment—a spiritual courtesy which one may
surely hope is appreciated in the proper place. I do not say it
derisively. There is a proper place for the appreciation of everything.
And perhaps it is only in heaven—and in hell—that art, now so
generally despised, will receive the appreciation that is due to it.
h.a. In heaven, yes; but why in hell?
o.w. Why in hell? I must tell you one of my stories.
(A grave smile passes from face to face, as the friends
lean forward attentively to listen; for they know that
this born story-teller only tells them when, for the
moment, life contents him.)
In hell, among all the brave company that is ever to be found there of
lovers, and fair ladies, and men of learning, and poets, and
astrologers, amid all the ceaseless movement of doomed bodies,
tossing and turning to be rid of the torment of their souls, one woman
sat alone and smiled. She had the air of a listener, ever with lifted
head and eyes raised, as though some voice from above were
attracting her.
“Who is that woman?” enquired a new-comer, struck by the
strange loveliness of her face, with its look the meaning of which he
could not read, “the one with the smooth, ivory limbs, and the long
hair falling down over her arms to the hands resting upon her lap.
She is the only soul whose eyes are ever looking aloft. What
skeleton does she keep in the cupboard of God up yonder?”
He had not finished speaking before one made haste to answer, a
man who carried in his hand a wreath of withered leaves. “They say,”
he said, “that once on earth she was a great singer, with a voice like
stars falling from a clear sky. So when doom came for her, God took
her voice and cast it forth to the eternal echoes of the spheres,
finding it too beautiful a thing to let die. Now she hears it with
recognition, and remembering how once it was her own, shares still
the pleasure which God takes in it. Do not speak to her, for she
believes that she is in heaven.”
And when the man, bearing the wreath of withered leaves, had
finished, “No,” said another, “that is not her story.”
“What then?”
“It is this,” he said, as the man with the withered wreath turned
away: “On earth a poet made his song of her, so that her name
became eternally wedded to his verse, which still rings on the lips of
men. Now she lifts her head and can hear his praise of her sounded
wherever language is spoken. That is her true story.”
“And the poet?” asked the new-comer. “Did she love him well?”
“So little,” replied the other, “that here and now she passes him
daily and does not recognize his face.”
“And he?”
The other laughed, and answered: “It is he who just now told you
that tale concerning her voice, continuing here the lies which he
used to make about her when they two were together on earth.”
But the new-comer said, “If he is able to give happiness in hell,
how can what he says be a lie?”
(There is an appreciative pause: no one speaks: from
those listening faces no word of praise is necessary.
Once more the speaker has secured the homage of
his fellow men; and so, forgetting for a while the pit
that life has digged for him, continues to narrate to his
friends the stories which he will never write.)
Since that has appealed to you, I will tell you another.... Once
there was a young man, so beautiful of mind that all who heard him
wished to be of his company; so beautiful of form——
(In the middle of a sentence he pauses, as he sees
advancing—though the others, intent only on him, do
not—a young man, graceful in person, indolent in
motion, who, with a light nonchalant air, meets and
lets go the glances of strangers as they pass. From
these, as he draws near, his eye turns toward the
group seated at the out-door table under the sun-
bright awning, and becomes fixed and attentive.
Glance meets glance, holds for a moment, till that of
the younger man is withdrawn. Without any change of
countenance he slightly deflects his course and
passes on. In the face they are watching, the friends
see a quick change: the colour goes, the look of quiet
expectation ends abruptly, as though sight had
stopped dead. But it is with his accustomed
deliberation of tone that at last he resumes speaking.)
Ah, no; that is a story of which I have forgotten the end: or else it
has forgotten me. No matter; I will tell you another. This is one that
has only just occurred to me; and I am not quite sure yet what the
end of it will be. But it is there waiting. You and I will listen to this
story together, as I tell it for the first time.
This shall be called “The Story of the Man who sold his Soul.”
A certain traveller, passing through the streets of a great city,
came there upon a man whose countenance indicated a grief which
he could not fathom. The traveller, being a curious student of the
human heart, stopped him and said: “Sir, what is this grief which you
carry before the eyes of all men, so grievous that it cannot be
hidden, yet so deep that it cannot be read?”
The man answered: “It is not I who grieve so greatly; it is my soul,
of which I cannot get rid. And my soul is more sorrowful than death,
for it hates me, and I hate it.”
The traveller said: “If you will sell your soul to me, you can be well
rid of it.” The other answered: “Sir, how can I sell you my soul?”
“Surely,” replied the traveller, “you have but to agree to sell me your
soul at its full price; then, when I bid it, it comes to me. But every
soul has its true price; and only at that, neither at more nor at less,
can it be bought.”
Then said the other: “At what price shall I sell you this horrible
thing, my soul?”
The traveller answered: “When a man first sells his own soul he is
like that other betrayer; therefore its price should be thirty pieces of
silver. But after that, if it passes to other hands, its value becomes
small; for to others the souls of their fellow men are worth very little.”
So for thirty pieces of silver the man sold his soul; and the traveller
took it and departed.
Presently the man, having no soul, found that he could do no sin.
Though he stretched out his arms to sin, sin would not come to him.
“You have no soul,” said sin, and passed him by. “Wherefore should I
come to you? I have no profit in a man that has no soul?”
Then the man without a soul became very miserable, for though
his hands touched what was foul they remained clean, and though
his heart longed for wickedness, it remained pure; and when he
thirsted to dip his lips in fire, they remained cool.
Therefore a longing to recover his soul took hold of him, and he
went through the world searching for the traveller to whom he had
sold it, that he might buy it back and again taste sin in his own body.
After a long time the traveller met him; but hearing his request he
laughed and said: “After a while your soul wearied me and I sold it to
a Jew for a smaller sum than I paid for it.”
“Ah!” cried the man, “if you had come to me I would have paid
more.” The traveller answered: “You could not have done that; a soul
cannot be bought or sold but at its just price. Your soul came to be of
small value in my keeping; so to be rid of it I sold it to the first comer
for considerably less money than I paid in the beginning.”
So parting from him the man continued his quest, wandering over
the face of the earth and seeking to recover his lost soul. And one
day as he sat in the bazaar of a certain town a woman passed him,
and looking at him said: “Sir, why are you so sad? It seems to me
there can be no reason for such sadness.” The man answered: “I am
sad because I have no soul, and am seeking to find it.”
The other said: “Only the other night I bought a soul that had
passed through so many hands that it had become dirt-cheap; but it
is so poor a thing I would gladly be rid of it. Yet I bought it for a mere
song; and a soul can only be sold at its just price; how, then, shall I
be able to sell it again—for what is worth less than a song? And it
was but a light song that I sang over the wine-cup to the man who
sold it me.”
When the other heard that, he cried: “It is my own soul! Sell it to
me, and I will give you all that I possess!”
The woman said: “Alas, I did but pay for it with a song, and I can
but sell it again at its just price. How then can I be rid of it, though it
cries and laments to be set free?”
The man without a soul laid his head to the woman’s breast, and
heard within it the captive soul whimpering to be set free, to return to
the body it had lost. “Surely,” he said, “it is my own soul! If you will
sell it to me I will give you my body, which is worth less than a song
from your lips.”
So, for his body, the other sold to him the soul that whimpered to
be set free to return to its own place. But so soon as he received it
he rose up aghast: “What have you done?” he cried, “and what is
this foul thing that has possession of me? For this soul that you have
given me is not my soul!”
The woman laughed and said: “Before you sold your soul into
captivity it was a free soul in a free body; can you not recognize it
now it comes to you from the traffic of the slave-market? So, then,
your soul has the greater charity, since it recognizes and returns to
you, though you have sold your body miserably into bondage!”
And thus it was that the man had to buy back, at the cost of his
body, the soul which he let go for thirty pieces of silver.
(With occasional pauses imposed for effect, but without
any hesitation or change in the choice of word, the
ordered narrative has run its course. But in spite of
the decorative form, and the decorative modulations
of tone, there is an under-current of passion; and his
friends, undeceived by that quiet deliberateness of
speech, know that the speaker is greatly moved. And
so, at the end, there is a pause while nobody speaks.
At the kiosk opposite a newsboy arrives, and delivers
a bundle of papers to the woman in charge. Over her
is an announcement to the Englishman, in his native
tongue, that his own papers are there on sale. From
the restaurant comes a garçon charged with a
message, and wishing to have instructions. The two,
who have shared in the arrangement, exchange
glances interrogatively; R.R. looks at his watch and
nods. L.H. signs to the garçon who has served the
aperitifs.)
r.r. Let us go in to lunch. Jerrold is not coming; he has forgotten
us.
o.w. Not all of us, Robbie. He came, but he has gone again.
(They all look at him in astonishment; and, for a moment,
nobody speaks. Then:)
r.r. Came? Here, do you mean?
o.w. Looking as young and charming as ever. But, as soon as he
looked at me, I saw he had entirely forgotten me.
(There is nothing possible to be said. L.H. makes haste to
pay for the aperitifs; and with the anxiety of an
Englishman, unpractised in foreign ways, to do what
is right for the reputation of his country in a strange
land, he puts down an additional pour-boire, five
bronze pieces in all, to correspond to the number who
have been served. With grave apologetic politeness
his guest lays an arresting hand upon his arm; and
(while the garçon whisks away the douceur with
cheerful alacrity) instructs him for future occasions.)
o.w. My dear L.H., you should not do that! The Frenchman, for
these casual services, gives what you call a penny. The Englishman
gives what some of them call “tuppence”; not because he does not
know that the Frenchman’s penny is sufficient, but because he is an
Englishman. If you give more than that the waiter only thinks that you
do not know where you are.
l.h. (who has a weakness for putting himself in the right, even in
quite small matters.) Ah, yes, Mr. Wilde, that may be, but here, at St.
Helena, one tips the waiters differently.
(It is touching to see what pleasure that foolish but
fortunate little “mot” has given to the man for whom it
was designed. They have all now risen; and their next
move will be to the tabled interior, where pleasant
courses are awaiting them. But the forward movement
is delayed; and it is with a curious air of finality, as
though already taking his leave, that O.W. speaks.)
o.w. My friends, we have had a wonderful hour together. I have
been very happy. Excuse me: I am going across to get an English
paper. The woman at the kiosk, who sells them, is a charming
character: she compliments my accent by pretending to think that I
am French. Go in: I beg you not to wait for me.
(They see him cross the street, with his accustomed air of
leisurely deliberation—a little amused to notice how
the vehement traffic has to pause and make way for
him. At the kiosk he and the woman exchange words
and smiles. He lifts his hat and turns away.)
l.h. (startled). He’s not coming back?
r.r. Harvey Jerrold wants kicking. Poor Oscar!
h.a. Shall I go after him?
r.r. No, no! Let him go. We understand.
(And they all stand and watch, as he passes slowly down
the street, till he disappears in the crowd.)
Footnote
T WENTY years after a man’s death is usually a sufficient time to

compose, in their proper unimportance, the prejudices and
enmities which have surrounded his career. But in this particular
case, I suppose, it has hardly done so; and the man who was so
greatly over-rated by his own following, during those ten years of
literary and social triumph which made him the vogue, was, in the
ten years after, as carefully under-rated, not because the quality of
his work had proved itself poor and ephemeral, but because of
something that he had done.
The blight which fell on his literary reputation was about as
sensible in its application as it would have been for historians to
deny that Marlborough was a great general because he peculated
and took bribes, or that Mahomet was a great religious leader
because he had a number of wives, or that David was a great poet
because he preferred the love of Jonathan to the love of women. In
which last-named absurdity of critical inconsequence we have
something very much to the point; and it is upon that point, and
because the world has been so unintelligently slow in seizing it, that I
am moved to write this footnote to my dialogue, with which, in
subject, it has so little to do.
Always, so long as it stays remembered, the name of Oscar Wilde
is likely to carry with it a shadowy implication of that strange
pathological trouble which caused his downfall. And whatever else
may be said for or against the life of promiscuous indulgence he
appears to have led, his downfall did at least this great service to
humanity, that—by the sheer force of notoriety—it made the
“unmentionable” mentionable; and marks the dividing of the ways
between the cowardice and superstitious ignorance with which the
problem had been treated even by sociologists and men of science,
and the fearless analysis of origins and causes which has now
become their more reputable substitute.
Obscurantists may still insist on treating as an acquired depravity
what medical research has now proved to be an involuntary or
congenital deflection from a “normality” which exact science finds it
harder and harder to define. But in spite of these surviving
resistances to the formation of a new social conscience, intelligence
is at work, and to-day it is no longer eccentric or disreputable to
insist that the whole problem shall henceforth be studied and treated
from the medical, rather than from the criminal standpoint; so that in
future, whatever limitation of reticence or segregation society
decides to impose on men whose tendencies are ineradicably homo-
sexual, the treatment shall be health-giving in character and
purpose, carrying with it no social or moral damnation of those who,
in the vast majority of cases, have been made what they are by
forces outside their own volition, either at their birth or in early
infancy.
The comical ignorance and ineptitude of which quite brilliant minds
are capable in regard to a matter that they wish to relegate to mental
obscurity, was well exemplified in the remarks made to me on this
subject, only ten years ago, by one who ranked then as now among
the most eminent of British bacteriologists. He had been told, he
said, that homo-sexuality came from meat-eating; and his solution of
the problem was to have all homo-sexuals put to death. But the
subject, he went on to say, did not interest him; nor did he propose to
give the meat-eaters (of whom he himself was one) any warning of
their pathological danger, or of his proposed remedy for the
pathological condition to which their meat-eating habits might bring
them. Having escaped the infection himself, he was quite willing,
apparently, to leave the rest to chance. It was, he had been told, very
prevalent, but personally he had not come across it. And so he
continued to interest himself in bacteriology, through which fame,
wealth, and title had come to him.
As I left his consulting-room I felt as though I had just emerged
from the Middle Ages, and from listening to the discourse of some
learned theologian—a marvellous expert in the doctrine of the
Incarnation and the Procession of the Holy Spirit, but still believing
that the sun went round the earth, and that the earth was flat; and
though—God aiding him—he would put to death any who thought
otherwise, the subject did not interest him!
He remains to me a portentous example of how a really brilliant
mind can totter into second infancy when called upon to dig for the
roots of knowledge outside his own cabbage-patch in hitherto
uncultivated ground.
What led me to this strange scientific experience was very much to
the point. For it was just then, ten years ago, that I had been asked
to join a society having for its object the formation of a more
intelligent and less servile public opinion on this and various other
difficult sex problems which are a part of human nature. I agreed to
do so upon one condition—that membership should be open to men
and women on equal terms, and that women should be upon the
executive committee. Even in that comparatively enlightened group
the proposal seemed revolutionary; and I was asked whether I
realized that such things as homo-sexuality would have to be openly
discussed. My answer was: “That is why we must include women.” I
contended that where a problem concerns both sexes alike, only by
the full co-operation of both sexes can it be rightly solved.
My contention was admitted to be sound, and the society was
formed on the equal basis I had advocated; and perhaps one of its
best discoveries is that, in a body of social goodwill, there is no such
thing as “the unmentionable.” Since then, women have been called
to juries, and it has become a duty of good citizenship for them to
share with men the knowledge of things which the obscurantists, in
order to keep them as a male perquisite, chose to describe as
“unmentionable.”
“E pur se muove”: that wise old saying continues to have its
application in every age. Always, at some contentious point in the
affairs of men, belief in knowledge and belief in ignorance stand as
antagonists. The nineteenth century had its superstitions, quite as
much as the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, when loyalty
to the Mosaic law made the persecution of witchcraft a religious duty.
And a surviving superstition of our own time has been that false and
foolish moral insistence on regarding certain maladjustments of
nature as something too horrible to be mentioned, and of putting the
victims thereof in a class apart, rather lower than the ordinary
criminal. The old theological idea that the world was flat reproduced
itself in another form; and so, in spite of the advance of science, the
moral world had to remain flat and simple, unencumbered by nature-
problems, for fear of the terrible things it might have to contain and
account for if once admitted to be round.
Twentieth-century science is busy proving to us that the moral
world is dangerously round; and it is no use trying to fall off it by
walking about it with shut eyes. From a flat world that method of
escape might be conceivably possible, but not from a round. A round
world has us in its grip; and it is our duty as intelligent human beings
to face the danger and get used to it.
What a strange irony of life that the man who tried most to detach
himself from the unlovely complications of modern civilization should
have become the symbol, or the byword, of one of its least solved
problems; and that society’s blind resentment toward a phenomenon
it had not the patience or the charity to trace to its origin, should
have supplied him so savagely with that “complete life of the artist”
which success could never have given him.

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Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict

and Peace Tony Fry

Management and War: How Organisations Navigate Conflict

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork Roger Mac

Post Conflict Literature Human Rights Peace Justice

Liberal Peace and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in Africa

The Indo Pacific Axis Peace and Prosperity or Conflict

Information Technology for Peace and Security IT

Walking Through Anger A New Design for Confronting

ISBN 978-3-030-24719-5 ISBN 978-3-030-24720-1 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Dmitriy Divanov/Alamy Stock Photo

these environments, in contrast to the expectation that war arrives as a

the multiple and extremely complex contexts in which it is employed.

Launceston, Australia Tony Fry

1 Introduction: Setting the Stage 1

Part I Facing Conditions of War

2 History and the Genealogy of Violence 21

3 War as Event(s)ing and Case Study 51

4 War Philosophy, Reason, and the Irrational 103

5 Law: The Breaking and End of Rules 137

6 Climate, Change and War 155

Part II Being Without Peace

7 Peace, Learning and Unlearning 191

8 Peace and the Unobtainable Unity of Being 209

Part III The Power of the Imperative

9 Unstaging War: The Opening of an Idea 227

10 Unstaging War and the (Post)Human 251

11 Unstaging War: The New Discourse 267

A Closing with an Opening 297

© The Author(s) 2019 1

The Changing Nature of the World:

Obviously, as indicated, Unstaging War is not posed as fully packaged

by protest but by redirective action. The inspiration, attainments and

Conflict and the Human Condition

as integral to natural selection, recast as ‘survival of the fittest,’ by Social

capability of sophisticated weapons. Thus as Emmanuel Levinas clearly

its exposition and argument will contribute to producing such an effect.

Living with Unsettlement: An Afterlife

started out as a condition of European nihilism, as Nietzsche recognised

Technology: First Pass

York, Aphorism No. 2, from 1887, cited Ibid., p. 9.

and in the rate of the transformations of the human condition.16 At the

Putting Crisis in Place

The Narrative Form and the Structure

the Imperative, puts Unstaging War forward as a means of redirective

Yes, in this sea of life enisled,

We don’t: we live with a familiar who is a stranger, always eating out

T WENTY years after a man’s death is usually a sufficient time to

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