Corpographies: Making Sense of Modern War

In his seminal account of the production of space Henri Lefebvre argued that the triumph of abstract space involved a relentless privi-leging of visualization, an aggressive inscription of “phallic brutal-ity,” and a repression, even a “crushing” of the human body. For Lefebvre, significantly, this “space of calculations” first emerged in the years surrounding the First World War, and although he did not address it in any detail, modern war clearly exemplifies these trans-formations: an intensifying reliance on an optical-cartographic imagi-nary, an excessive capacity for spectacular, masculinized violence, and an exorbitant violation of the human body.2 But if we take Neil Smith’s injunctions about the (co-)production of nature seriously, the dialectic of modern war reveals a second narrative, in which what Lefebvre called “the practico-sensory realm,” comes to the fore. For in order to survive ground troops had to invest in modes of appre-hension that extended far beyond the visual; they remained not only vectors of military violence but also among its victims; and their bod-ies have to be comprehended as intensely physiological and affec-tive organisms.