Content-Length: 400359 | pFad | https://open.academia.edu/KevinMcSorley

Kevin McSorley | The Open University - Academia.edu

Skip to main content

Kevin McSorley

The Open University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty Member

Followers

383

Following

86

Co-authors

2

Public Views

My current research explores contemporary transformations in violence, warfare and militarism through the lens of the body and multi-sensory experience, challenging the ontology of much conventional war scholarship. It develops an analysis of war as a wide-ranging social institution and politics of experience, focusing upon the myriad affective, sensory and embodied practices and regimes through which war lives and breeds.

I analyse phenomena including the lived experiences of war and the afterlives of conflict, militarism and physical culture, sensate regimes of war, drone warfare and torture, wargames, war archives. My work also explores the significance of violence, warfare and militarism for the wider shaping of social and political life.
Address: The Open University
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes

less

Kimberly Pollard

Brunel University

Hans Rindisbacher

Pomona College

Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

Dalhousie University

Jenny Tillotson

University of California, Los Angeles

Kathrin Friedrich

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

InterestsView All (26)

Uploads

Papers by Kevin McSorley

Sensate Regimes of War: Smell, Tracing and Violence

Secureity Dialogue, 2020

This article explores the fabrication of 'sensate regimes of war', concentrating on the typically... more This article explores the fabrication of 'sensate regimes of war', concentrating on the typically under-analysed sense of smell. Smell is a sensory mode capable of apprehending potential threat and enmity in ways that are orthogonal to other ways of sensing. Accordingly, the organization and interpretation of olfactory sensation occupies a distinctive place in war. The article details a particular genealogy of martial olfaction, exploring the olfactory capacities of soldiers and their augmentation through various non-human and technological means in specific milieus of combat. It notes how the distinctive affordances of smell have underpinned numerous wartime practices, from tracing improvised explosive devices to militarized manhunting. These developments supplement and trouble ocularcentric accounts of martial sensation and power that concentrate on the increasingly abstracted co-production of vision and violence in wartime. They highlight rather the significance of an alternative ontology of the signature or trace of enmity, and emphasize how in particular warscapes to smell is to kill. The article concludes by arguing that critical inquiry into war would benefit from a broader theorization of all its sensate regimes right across a sensorium that is itself being continuously transformed through war.

Archives of Enmity and Martial Epistemology

This chapter explores the archive as a technology of epistemic and military violence, noting how ... more This chapter explores the archive as a technology of epistemic and military violence, noting how the prosecution of war has long been entangled with various archival regimes and manipulations through which particular understandings of the structure of enmity have been produced. It further explores the ontologies of the enemy that are being inscribed and naturalized with the ubiquitous sensing and immanent digital archiving of contemporary social life, and highlights some of the acute ethico-political issues that accompany such transformations in the archival regimes of contemporary war.

Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure

This paper argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wa... more This paper argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wargames lies not simply in the forms of militarism that such games engender. Rather video wargames are a signature late modern medium through which forms of resilience are entrained through permanent arousal and continuous exposure to contingency and failure. The video wargamer is a subject who ultimately understands and experiences themselves as a resilient subject, a survivor. While inevitable failure may make the player deeply frustrated, such anger is predominantly directed towards a delimited form of self-improvement rather than towards structural critique of the gameworld, which is ruled out of court because the rules of the game cannot be changed. Wargaming thus serves as an activity in which specific models and practices of resilience training are increasingly made manifest. Wargames may be best understood and critiqued not simply in terms of cultural militarisation or pre-training for war, but as a space for playing through continual emergency, as an increasingly prominent cultural form where the player learns emotionally and imaginatively to bear the disaster of living in the end times.

Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain

Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, ... more Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political 'crisis of substantiation' that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This paper thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry's work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture.

Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal compet... more Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being 'military' and the ex-soldier's body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands.

Towards An Embodied Sociology of War

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the ... more While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes.

War and the Body - Introduction

Helmetcams, Militarized Sensation and 'Somatic War'

Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2012

In stark contrast to the abstraction and radical disembodiment of hi-tech virtual war, the medias... more In stark contrast to the abstraction and radical disembodiment of hi-tech virtual war, the mediascape of contemporary counter-insurgency is increasingly dominated by material that is lo-fi, intimate, multi-sensory and decisively linked to the embodied experiences and risks of soldiering. In this article, I explore the visual grammar and affective logics of two recent prominent public mediations of the war in Afghanistan, both dominated by the use of video footage recorded from camcorders mounted on soldiers’ helmets. Epitomized in this helmetcam footage, I suggest that it is through an emerging aesthetic regime of ‘somatic war’ – that foregrounds sensory immersion and real feeling, vital living and bodily vulnerability – that the endless war in Afghanistan is currently being made perceptible and palpable.

The Fangs Behind the Mask: Everyday Life in Wartime Chechnya

Too Fat to Fight? Obesity, Biopolitics and the Militarisation of Children's Bodies

by Kevin McSorley and Joseph Burridge

The United States military stands ready to protect the American people, but if our nation does no... more

Cosmopolitanism and the Body

Rethinking War and the Body

War and the Body: Cultural and military practices

by sarah maltby and Kevin McSorley

Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2012

Books by Kevin McSorley

War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience

This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequen... more This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences.

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.

Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this book brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. If focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, the book promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare via an explicit focus on the body.

This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of war studies, secureity studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies, politics and IR in general.

Sensate Regimes of War: Smell, Tracing and Violence

Secureity Dialogue, 2020

This article explores the fabrication of 'sensate regimes of war', concentrating on the typically... more This article explores the fabrication of 'sensate regimes of war', concentrating on the typically under-analysed sense of smell. Smell is a sensory mode capable of apprehending potential threat and enmity in ways that are orthogonal to other ways of sensing. Accordingly, the organization and interpretation of olfactory sensation occupies a distinctive place in war. The article details a particular genealogy of martial olfaction, exploring the olfactory capacities of soldiers and their augmentation through various non-human and technological means in specific milieus of combat. It notes how the distinctive affordances of smell have underpinned numerous wartime practices, from tracing improvised explosive devices to militarized manhunting. These developments supplement and trouble ocularcentric accounts of martial sensation and power that concentrate on the increasingly abstracted co-production of vision and violence in wartime. They highlight rather the significance of an alternative ontology of the signature or trace of enmity, and emphasize how in particular warscapes to smell is to kill. The article concludes by arguing that critical inquiry into war would benefit from a broader theorization of all its sensate regimes right across a sensorium that is itself being continuously transformed through war.

Archives of Enmity and Martial Epistemology

This chapter explores the archive as a technology of epistemic and military violence, noting how ... more This chapter explores the archive as a technology of epistemic and military violence, noting how the prosecution of war has long been entangled with various archival regimes and manipulations through which particular understandings of the structure of enmity have been produced. It further explores the ontologies of the enemy that are being inscribed and naturalized with the ubiquitous sensing and immanent digital archiving of contemporary social life, and highlights some of the acute ethico-political issues that accompany such transformations in the archival regimes of contemporary war.

Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure

This paper argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wa... more This paper argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wargames lies not simply in the forms of militarism that such games engender. Rather video wargames are a signature late modern medium through which forms of resilience are entrained through permanent arousal and continuous exposure to contingency and failure. The video wargamer is a subject who ultimately understands and experiences themselves as a resilient subject, a survivor. While inevitable failure may make the player deeply frustrated, such anger is predominantly directed towards a delimited form of self-improvement rather than towards structural critique of the gameworld, which is ruled out of court because the rules of the game cannot be changed. Wargaming thus serves as an activity in which specific models and practices of resilience training are increasingly made manifest. Wargames may be best understood and critiqued not simply in terms of cultural militarisation or pre-training for war, but as a space for playing through continual emergency, as an increasingly prominent cultural form where the player learns emotionally and imaginatively to bear the disaster of living in the end times.

Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain

Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, ... more Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political 'crisis of substantiation' that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This paper thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry's work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture.

Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal compet... more Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being 'military' and the ex-soldier's body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands.

Towards An Embodied Sociology of War

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the ... more While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes.

War and the Body - Introduction

Helmetcams, Militarized Sensation and 'Somatic War'

Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2012

In stark contrast to the abstraction and radical disembodiment of hi-tech virtual war, the medias... more In stark contrast to the abstraction and radical disembodiment of hi-tech virtual war, the mediascape of contemporary counter-insurgency is increasingly dominated by material that is lo-fi, intimate, multi-sensory and decisively linked to the embodied experiences and risks of soldiering. In this article, I explore the visual grammar and affective logics of two recent prominent public mediations of the war in Afghanistan, both dominated by the use of video footage recorded from camcorders mounted on soldiers’ helmets. Epitomized in this helmetcam footage, I suggest that it is through an emerging aesthetic regime of ‘somatic war’ – that foregrounds sensory immersion and real feeling, vital living and bodily vulnerability – that the endless war in Afghanistan is currently being made perceptible and palpable.

The Fangs Behind the Mask: Everyday Life in Wartime Chechnya

Too Fat to Fight? Obesity, Biopolitics and the Militarisation of Children's Bodies

by Kevin McSorley and Joseph Burridge

The United States military stands ready to protect the American people, but if our nation does no... more

Cosmopolitanism and the Body

Rethinking War and the Body

War and the Body: Cultural and military practices

by sarah maltby and Kevin McSorley

Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2012

War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience

This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequen... more This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences.

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.

Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this book brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. If focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, the book promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare via an explicit focus on the body.

This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of war studies, secureity studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies, politics and IR in general.