Hoffman’s Barracks and Beyond: Quick, Dead, Zombies

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dear Readers, the below is the third and final post of a three-part series on the moral economy of resource extraction, with its attendant violent commodification of people’s lives. Here, Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Founding Research Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s “Human Rights and Social Movements Program” at Harvard University, provides an insightful review of Danny Hoffman’s book (which CIHA Blog editorial assistant, Ben Cox, discussed with Hoffman in part one of this series) and, in particular, focuses on how Hoffman’s work contributes to the way we think about spatial dynamics and what Prasse-Freeman calls “necroeconomies”.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman

During this Spring’s #Kony2012 hysteria, I argued that the spectacle provided us with an opportunity to look beyond a single warlord to the spaces he traversed, bringing into focus the millions of deaths in a decade-old slaughter that has barely touched global consciousness.  Sketching the resource economies that have often spurred the killing, I focused on the double-sided death-making that constitutes these extractive zones, which I called “necroeconomies”: on one hand, those who kill best extract best; on the other, extraction itself takes the form of killing – draining the mines of their ore, the forests of their trees, the streams of their diamonds, yielding complete territorial (and often social) exhaustion.[i]

But my short article neglected the question of how those in the necroeconomies are mobilized (coerced, cajoled, incentivized, etc) to conduct the kind of labor required for making death / extracting resource, and then how their bodies are harvested (much like the materials they in turn harvest), and then spatially ordered for the kind of deployment necessary to conduct this work with maximal efficiency. Danny Hoffman’s The War Machines, to its immense credit, makes this question of how “violent” labor is psychically, socially, and spatially organized in Sierra Leone and Liberia its direct objects of analysis.

An important spatio-anthropological ethnography, Hoffman’s book takes critical theorists seriously, using in particular Deleuze and Guatarri’s concepts as tools that build new ways of seeing economy and conflict. In this vein, I am interested in Hoffman’s book not particularly for what it says (knowing little about West Africa, I cannot assess his empirical analysis), but rather what it does: what questions does it open up for conceptualizing the necroeconomy and the spatial dynamics in the post-colony? To do this, I will elaborate on a couple of Hoffman’s spatio-political concepts and try to draw out some questions and approaches of future inquiry.

The Barracks  

Hoffman’s conceptual innovation is ‘the barracks’, which he imagines as a zone – both physical and conceptual – that collects and then redeploys bodies for all sorts of labor (fighting in wars, waging election-related battles against other politicians’ gangs, extracting minerals from mines). The barracks allows “for the temporary colonization of space and then, when necessary, the rapid redeployment to another location” (172), something so central in animating the ephemeral West African political-economy that Hoffman claims the barracks represent the “nomos” of the region’s post-modernity.[ii]  The barracks are, in other words, the animating concept of the entire area. More importantly, Hoffman suggests they might just constitute the dawning reality of our entire world.

This is wonderfully perceptive stuff, and there’s much here to learn from – especially given that Hoffman’s careful ethnography shows how these spaces seem to pop up spontaneously and right in the middle of society. Once forming, they crystalize and stand apart even as they stand within.[iii] We see this clearly when Hoffman describes how gaining physical access to these spaces (the Bo town soccer stadium to access Disarmament Demobilization Rehabilitation resources; the Brookfields hotel to become part of the Civil Defense Force) is a complex process that often involves one not only deploying force to hold off others but then strategically referencing past patron-client relationships with those (General Joe, CDF leaders) who act as gatekeepers. The ability to enter into barracks zones depends on being coded as the correct kind of body, and Hoffman describes this divide as absolute: “Passing between the [Brookfields] hotel and the streets beyond meant passing between order and chaos, though which was which depended on where one stood” (223). These examples suggest that violence is inscribed upon the passage into the barracks: to attain access one has to perform and internalize violence that one will later commit in the necroeconomy.

But a question emerges here. Does the existence of such boundaries have any significance for Hoffman’s model of barracks as holistic – as a higher-order organizing principle that subsumes other models that would define space?[iv]

To answer this question we must dig into the ontological foundations of the barracks. Hoffman follows Hardt and Negri’s argument that labor has been globally subsumed to capital. Consequently, if capitalism has created a flat field of immanent potentiality/domination, then the barracks is an organizing technology that crystalizes anywhere at any time to re-deploy bodies for undifferentiated work. But does Hoffman’s ethnography support this reading?[v]  As opposed to a totalizing nomos, the barracks seems a formation that is highly liminal: like War Machines, barracks form on the edges or interstices of striated spaces. ^[vi] Rather than constituting a homogenous field, barracks appear to require dynamic interplay between other kinds of space to leverage and then capitalize on resources and opportunities (a positionality described in detail in Jane Guyer’s work on Atlantic Africa’s economies). This comes through, for instance, in Hoffman’s sensitive rendering of a long-term informant, Mohammed, who is stuck in Freetown and unwilling to return home:

By describing the shame of returning empty-handed from the battlefield and predicting that he would be greeted with scorn, Mohammed named a condition in which he as a subject represented no productive or positive potential. He was someone in whom no one in his natal community was prepared to invest. His value was purely a market value. With no liquidity after a decade of war he was a person of no worth (161).

Hoffman argues that Mohammed is turned into a pure object – a receptacle of accumulation – and that the reductive economic rationality on display therein constitutes an ontology that is shared by both those in the city-space and the rural-space. But is it possible to read this another way? First, investment per se doesn’t seem to emerge as a question – the community never seems to consider it, Mohammed never suggests he could leverage his position in the city as a way to accumulate capital provided by rural confederates to then transform it into higher yielding projects: with access to networks, spaces, and information that the rural dwellers don’t have, he could credibly utilize their capital for higher returns.

Mohammed seems instead an alien entity, a person who has fallen out of the bounds of symbolic recognition. In this way, and in general, the relationship between the village and its prodigal[vii] sons seems to demonstrate the cleavage between kinds of space: the son disappears, and later returns wealthy or not at all (he either dies, emigrates, refashions an entirely new life disconnected from the village, or repatriates resources as a way of developing a village-based dependency network). Mohammed’s plight suggests more of a separation between the two spaces than a smooth connection, and perhaps points to an additional way for understanding the spatialized political economy that can run alongside Hoffman’s argument about the total subsumption of labor to capital: in “the barracks” we might agree with Hoffman that there’s no distinction between soldier, manual laborer, prisoner, etc: there is only laboring body. But the relationship between the village and the barracks suggests relational differentiation: Mohammed had ‘passed through’ the zone in which he was initially grounded (as a rural dweller) to take on the precarious and potential-filled position of an urban hustler/war-maker. When Mohammed fails to accumulate resources in the precarious zone, villagers suspect that he is lying: one goes to the city and either comes back rich or he doesn’t come back. The penniless Mohammed doesn’t exist as a social category: he has become illegible and cannot pass back into the previous field of signification.

The point here is not of course that the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ stand in complete separation (as these are neither stable categories nor insular domains), but also that they are not affected by the penetrations of global flows (capital, violence, symbols) in the same ways. Instead they are connected by particular lines and conduits that fit patterns predicted by the assemblage of material opportunities, transportation and communication networks, political economies, etc. Seen this way the barracks seems to act as a highly unstable and continually morphing conduit linking village and global domains (or providing ways of cutting them off from each other). It is not Hoffman’s objective to analyze this entire system, but his groundwork has provided wonderful material with which to theorize and synthesize: how does this system work? How are peripheral political economies fragmented in their induction into global supply chains and symbolic economies: how are they torn apart and then re-inserted into chains of circulation? And what are the effects on the subjects who have to navigate them?

Hinting at another model?

Hoffman’s study joins a growing anthropological literature on what I’ll call global capital’s extimate[viii] spaces: those which are both inside and outside – or, more specifically, first exteriorized by the system to then be reinscribed on different terms. Hoffman’s barracks recalls the bush (tracked by Janet Roitman), the edge city (examined by Erik Harms), the refugee camp (described by Michel Agier), the pirate town (AbouMaliq Simone), the global slum (Mike Davis), spectral legal/juridical spaces (the Comaroffs), the charismatic church (Charles Piot), etc., which all stand (in part) as different precarious but potential-filled zones.

These zones are different in their expression but share a substrate of intensity (both opportunity and peril braided together). And this is because they are connected as different effects of the same system: the great deterritorialization-machine (the global capitalism of uneven development) interacts with the respective territorial, economic, symbolic, cultural, and environmental constellations of given ecologies to create the different permutations described by these anthropologists and theorists.

This seems to operate as follows: as the deterritorializing force rearranges space, economies once directed ‘inward’ (to the national or regional level) are gutted, leading to Bayart’s strategies of extraversion diffusing out of elites’ captured domains and into all parts of the post-colony, diffracting as they move across space. These spaces – the bush, the edge, the camp – are then reinscribed into global supply chains in ways that the ‘core’ of the periphery never could be: the resources are often extracted in these liminal border zones, or flow through them, or provide the opportunities and space for subjects to improvise them. Indeed, against previous accounts of legible and stable state-capitalist reterritorialization strategies (e.g., property rights or contract laws are developed to minimize risk, reduce transaction costs, allow for predictable future exchange, etc.), these conduits are perpetually perilous, synchronically unstable.

And as a result of this spinning and reorganization, it seems that a separate variable – speed – becomes increasingly important. What defines these spaces, and something that certainly comes through in Hoffman’s barracks,[ix] is the way speed itself is inscribed upon these zones of intensity, and access to this speed becomes a key variable by which humanity is divided: whether a subject can use it or not determines opportunities and outcomes. Theorist Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics takes this to a stark conclusion: speed is the main vector of differentiation that organizes historical progress. From this Virilio predicts a dire end: “humanity will stop being diverse. It will tend to divide only into hopeful populations … and despairing populations, blocked by the inferiority of their technological vehicles, living and subsisting in a finite world” (70).

Before discovering Virilio I had been playing with my own conceptualization of a similar divide: that between what I call the Quick or the Dead populations versus the Zombie populations. Indeed, the aforementioned crucible coerces an unenviable ‘choice’ for many at the global economy’s peripheries: do you want to remain of the excluded zones (those immured in spaces, whether in underdeveloped countries or urban center/rural peripheries in Western ones, who have no little access to social mobility and thus not even full citizenship/subjectivity), or do you want to risk the intense (c)rush that comes with entering these speedy spaces, where death is an ever-present reality? The former is safer but can be hopeless; the latter is dangerous, almost overflowing with an affective flow that can carry one to prosperity or drown her in the deluge.

Returning to the ethnographies, in Piot’s Nostalgia of the Future on life in Togo, we see how various institutions (churches, NGOs, the visa lottery) stand as Quick or Dead spaces, speedy zones of intensity with lines of flight shooting out from them, connecting to symbolic economies and communities far outside of Togo: the church imagines a global Christianity; NGOs capture resources from the West; the visa lottery allows one to physically flee Togo (something Piot calls “a culture and imaginary of exile… indeed… an entire nation in exile” [3]).[x]  Some might suggest that this does not mark a drastic difference from the past – that things have always been this way, that certain conduits always existed, etc. But post-modernity’s compression of time/space; the suffusion of transglobal symbols, ideologies, and affects; the demise of the post-colonial national and economic liberation projects etc. create a more complex situation, where there is both more opportunity and more privation, where subjects are more aware of the opportunities that they often cannot grasp… but that their neighbors sometimes do. This is the move from the legible and blunt force of exclusion to the exquisite pain of the mostly-ungraspable horizon of opportunity, the mostly-unfulfilled promise of liberatory passage.

The juxtaposition between speedy and slow spaces (creating the ‘swiss cheese’ world that Deleuze and Guatarri told us about[xi]), provides opportunity for investigating what political philosopher Sayres Rudy and I have been calling the “politics of passage.” We think of this as the process in which narrow institutional and ideological portals within the world’s capitalist political-economy and liberal-cosmopolitan/realist symbolic order allow subjects to access fields of care, recognition, and resources. “Passage” works on two registers, combining the idea of alteration of subjectivity (passing from one way of being to another) with the idea of movement: that traversal of space with speed or slowness effects more abstract transformations of identity, attitude, and affect.

Indeed, there are major ramifications on subjectivities (of both individuals and their institutions) that are important to track – the consequences of becoming Quick, or remaining Zombie. To wit, Egyptian democrats were allowed to ‘pass’ through (the US finally withdrew support for its tyrant Mubarak) only when they rejected both Islamism and radical economic reforms; Burmese political activists are recognized as legitimate only when they take on Western Human Rights ideology and reject explicit political violence;[xii] American inner-city dwellers are forced to ride the brittle vehicles of meager social services and sparse social opportunities to acquire not only the skills to participate in the bourgeois economy, but also the attitudes and affects of the bourgeois order. Under these intensities, identities are worn or shed, entirely new subjectivities are fabricated.

But as we can observe in the Egypt example, the global order’s univocal disciplinary demands are not fully effected upon the politics of passage: Islamists have come to power after all, and through the vaunted institution of democracy that is meant to turn the world’s subjects into liberal cosmopolitans. The same holds for the American occupation of Iraq, which has ultimately allowed Shi’ite Iranian-sympathizers to dominate that country. Burmese democrats for their part are now in the process of proposing the ethnic cleansing of a much-derided ethnic group. The point is that the Quick can escape capture, producing a destabilized world to which the hegemonic West continues to war against. Here the “war on terror” becomes the war on speedy spaces that it cannot control. As Hardt and Negri put it, “Dominance, no matter how multidimensional, can never be complete and is always contradicted by resistance.”[xiii]

Have I simply replaced Hoffman’s model with another metaphorical model that can be rightfully assailed? Of course, but to return to Deleuze and the importance of using models as tools, this is not the point. The point is that Hoffman’s barracks is remarkably productive, the model gets us thinking about systems and structures, flows and relationships, that have before been illegible. I hope that the Quick and the Dead versus the Zombie gestures in such new directions.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman is Founding Research Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s “Human Rights and Social Movements Program” at Harvard University, and is currently an advisor of the “Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Initiative” there. He holds an undergraduate degree with honors from Harvard University and a master’s degree in Development Economics from Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is also a PhD candidate at Yale University in Anthropology.