The Military Subject or How to Wear Camouflage

To provide an introduction to the ‘world’ as it is right now is an inherently solipsistic and ideologically infested means of ‘manufacturing consent’. Articles of this kind will often begin by providing an expansive panorama of events that constitute the world in which the emergence of this article becomes not only necessary but also inevitable. This is of course a journalistic trick: it provides, ostensibly with the interest of providing a ‘context’, the ideological assumptions of the article as an objective, radically disinterested documentation of pressing, relevant events of which the article is not only culmination but also resolution. The trick lies in the fact that once we have been introduced to the necessary assumptions of the text, and have (whether forcefully or not) accepted them to be true, we have already accepted too much and then the article cannot be challenged from outside its own parameters (‘restrict your argument to the article, please’). Although I cannot promise any drastic disavowal of the journalistic conventions of article writing, I can forgo the strictness of introductions by providing only the key ‘tags’ of my interest and allowing the reader to freely associate the relationships amongst them and the situate them in the ‘context’ of the current ‘world’: war, militarization, patriotism, hierarchy, popular culture, code, honour, structure, ideological constitution, state.