Military Waste. Joshua O. Reno
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represents the ultimate disvalue—an absolute threat to human and nonhuman life—there are far more open-ended forms of military waste revalued and reimagined while they circulate as rubbish. The toxic remnants of industrial war, including leftover explosives and radiation, are more than objects of destruction. Surprisingly, the presence of lingering hazards in such places may be imaginatively integrated into everyday life.21 I use different theoretical terms to express how social actors productively engage with military waste, from reflexive practice (chapter 1) to affordance (chapter 2), world-making (chapter 3), attunement (chapter 4), transvaluation (chapter 5), and wastelanding (chapter 6). In each case, I highlight how people actively engage with waste-related objects, stories, and sites in creative ways. As with many forms of waste practice, making and unmaking are not clearly opposed, like before and after, but exist, to paraphrase Leah Zani (2019), in parallel.22
I characterize these as various costs of war preparation, costs that are incurred whether or not wars happen, if a society wishes to be ready for all-out war at all times. These costs I have glossed as “wastes” in order to highlight that they are often unintended or involve excesses, accidents, collateral damage. But they are, in each case, ambiguously related to economic and moral forms of valuation. In some cases, waste comes to mean something like “opportunity cost” in an economic sense; in other cases waste represents the limit of any form of economization, where the regeneration of life itself is placed at risk.23 Some of the people in these chapters imagined or sought out connections with discarded material remains for profit, artistic enjoyment, or political expression. Some of them avoid contact with military waste, which flashes across their vision like so much unwanted dust from the heavens, getting in the way of what they really want to witness. Some find themselves living out their own or other people’s violent militaristic fantasies, trying to fulfill or survive shootings made possible by an overabundance of guns. Some, finally, are trying to imagine relationships with wasted places that have been cast aside, deliberately hidden from reclamation by rightful inhabitants and scrubbed from official American history.
People all over the world are increasingly forced to consider what happens when a global military begins to wear and rot. This might mean recycling old and disused weapons as scrap, discarding them in the ocean, waiting for them to fall from the sky, or mothballing them temporarily until a use can be found for them. Their indeterminacy can be hazardous in many circumstances, but it can also provide opportunities for artists, entrepreneurs, activists, and curators who would make something new out of military discards. In doing so, they contend with both public expectations about how military materials should be treated and the material characteristics of crumbling and unpredictable artifacts. While the revaluation of such materials is therefore constrained, alternative uses of military objects are possible, uses that may challenge representations from popular entertainment, the defense establishment, or the national security state. By exploring relationships with the unintended and unacknowledged by-products of the military, I hope to offer new ways of thinking about the hidden costs of permanent war-readiness which affect the entire world, including forgotten postindustrial towns of the rust belt, distant atolls in the Pacific, and satellites orbiting the planet in space.
METHODOLOGY
With few exceptions, all of the people interviewed for this book are middle-aged or older and white, and all but three are men. This disparity in age, race, and gender reveals important insights into the nature of this research topic and how I chose to approach it.24 All participants in the 2001–2 and 2015–18 research were sought out through institutions. This included prisons, charity organizations, museums, junkyards, artificial reef-making operations, and a private space technology contractor. For the more recent ethnography, institutions were specifically chosen for their connection to some sense of military waste, and older white men were disproportionately represented in these institutions.
One thing that many of these institutions have in common is a connection to science and technology in some form, so that expertise in or passion for topics related to machine tinkering was common. The charities in the Southern Tier of New York were used as sites to recruit current and retired IBM and Lockheed Martin employees. They were all engineers, and they were attracted to charity organizations that involved tinkering with technology in some form. This was also true of the amateur astronomers (which included some of the same people) who spent a significant amount of their time tinkering with telescopes, computers, and cameras. This is the case with people who work with junk and artificial reefs, as well. Many of the latter came to the industry through diving, which has historically also been a more male-dominated activity, as one of the few women interviewed explains in chapter 3. Even the artists and art critic discussed in chapter 2 engage in a form of artistic practice that often requires some technical facility.25 The museums, finally, were typically concerned with technology, and in one case military technology. And the two museums that focused on less strictly technical subjects, a diving museum in Florida and an art museum in Wisconsin, account for two of the three women who were interviewed. Technical expertise and interest were therefore common among people recruited to the project, precisely because the institutions with which they were affiliated tended to favor technically mediated relationships with forms of military waste. As evidence has shown, exposure to science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (or STEM) fields has typically been gendered and racialized in the United States, both historically and in the present day.26
That being said, race and gender are not fixed categorical types—they are fluid and shaped by everyday and extraordinary actions. As Connell and Messerschmidt argue, “Masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals. Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action and, therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a particular setting” (2005, 836). Moreover, “hegemonic masculinities can be constructed that do not correspond closely to the lives of any actual men. Yet these models do, in various ways, express widespread ideals, fantasies, and desires” (2005, 838). The same goes for whiteness (Hartigan 1999). The activities of engaging with and being affected by the wastes of the permanent war economy also involve doing (and undoing) masculinity and whiteness in various ways. Sometimes this means embracing humility and care before things that cannot be controlled, as I argue amateur astronomers tend to do, or choosing to act nonviolently or celebrate antimilitarism in some form through art and technology, as some of my other informants do.
Using waste as a methodological guide, the reach of the military industrial complex expands in unexpected ways. Early on in this research, in an incident I recount at the start of chapter 1, I set out to interview an amateur astronomer and instead was surprised to learn that he had much more to teach me about the curious ways that waste is conceptualized by military manufacturers. This moment of ethnographic surprise led me to look more into the history of the greater Binghamton area and its reliance on defense contracts, from the city’s origins to the present day. When I started my affiliation with amateur astronomers, I had intended to learn only about distant and generally demilitarized space junk, but it led me somewhere else, somewhere a lot closer to the functioning of military industry than I ever thought I would get. Similarly, I started this research with the intention of tracking disused and decaying military objects, like ships and planes, to see what had become of the military built to fight World War III after this conflict never came to pass. Instead, I ended up following forms of waste as they traveled from tests of military product quality to art projects and coral reef regeneration, to orbital debris pageants, mass shooting incidents, and atolls covered with seabird guano.27
I follow waste in these various directions largely in order to collapse the distance between military and civilian worlds, complicating how these two seemingly distinct “realms” interrelate. War preparation can contribute to background conditions of social life that fade into invisibility even and especially to the degree that we depend on them. As Deborah Cowen (2014) documents, for instance, the logistics of global trade and travel that are now taken for granted were directly shaped by twentieth-century war and war preparation.