ELAINE SCARRY has a beautiful and unique way of articulating the idea I've been developing through the LSS Newsletter for the past eight years: that warfare or battle is undertaken as a vehicle toward verifying or proving the truth of a sacred ideology.

Being wounded in battle, Scarry says, represents the ultimate source of substantiation, the "extraction of the physical basis of reality from its hiding place in the body into the light of day." In other words, the interior content of the human body--lungs, arteries and brains" oozing out--constitutes a mode of verification; proving that our sacred ideologies is real and true.

Richard Koenigsberg
___________________________________________________________________________________

Being wounded in battle, Scarry says, represents the “mining of the ultimate substance, the ultimate source of substantiation:” the “extraction of the physical basis of reality from the dark hiding place in the body out into the light of day.” That which oozes out—the “interior content of human bodies, lungs, arteries and brains”—functions as a form of verification: to prove that ideologies are real or true.

Dead and maimed bodies on the field of battle function as a testament or testimonial: warfare’s method for establishing the truth of a sacred ideology. The function of warfare and a battlefield are to provide the occasion and place where soldiers can provide--make manifest—the “precious ore of confirmation.” Witnessing the dead and maimed bodies, we are persuaded that the ideas for which these men die must have some validity. It is almost inconceivable that all of the sound and fury could have occurred in the name of no-thing.

Scarry identifies “injuring” as the essence of warfare. We regularly claim that soldiers (or civilians) are maimed and killed as societies attempt to achieve some objective. However, what if maiming and killing is the central objective of warfare? Scarry suggests that the institution of warfare revolves around producing maimed and dead bodies. What does this mean?

Scarry hypothesizes that wars begin when, within a society, there is a “crisis of belief:” a defining central idea or ideology or cultural construct is challenged. The dispute that leads to war, Scarry says, involves a process whereby each side “calls into question the legitimacy and thereby erodes the reality of the other country’s issues, beliefs, ideas and self-conception.”

Warfare, in short, revolves around the issue of truth, combined with a unique means of verification.

In warfare, the human body is brought to bear upon the process of verification: the “sheer material factualness of the human body” will be borrowed to lend the cultural construct an aura of “realness” or “certainty.” Scarry focuses on the idea of “substantiation.” In warfare, we substantiate or establish the truth of an idea by producing—lining up—dead and maimed bodies—to “lend the aura of material reality” to a construct or ideology.

In war, the “incontestable reality of the body”—the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of—is “conferred on an ideology or issue of instance of political authority” that has been deserted by benign sources of substantiation. Warfare is undertaken in the name of truth: we imagine that what we kill for—that for which we die—must be real.

War represents the “mining of the ultimate substance, the ultimate source of substantiation”: the “extraction of the physical basis of reality from the dark hiding place in the body out into the light of day.” That which oozes out—the “interior content of human bodies, lungs, arteries and brains”—functions as a form of verification: to prove that ideologies are real or true.

Dead and maimed bodies on the field of battle function as a testament or testimonial: warfare’s method for establishing the truth of a sacred ideology. The function of warfare and a battlefield are to provide the occasion and place where soldiers can provide--make manifest—the “precious ore of confirmation.” Witnessing the dead and maimed bodies, we are persuaded that the ideas for which these men die must have some validity. It is almost inconceivable that all of the sound and fury could have occurred in the name of no-thing.