post-modern spaces in ridley scott’s black hawk down

8/6/2019 Post-modern spaces in Ridley Scotts Black Hawk Down

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Michael [email protected]

Representations of post-modern spaces in Ridley Scotts Black HawkDown

Tuun me loose, fo I kick the natal stuffin outen you, sezBrer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she aint sayin nuthin.She des hilt on . . ..

Space is of course as fundamental to war as war is to space, though we

dont always think of it that way. We think of war as the extension of

politics, or, more recently, politics as the extension of war. But

however we choose to think of the meaning of war, of its content, it

remains in every case determined by, even as it determines,

fundamental qualities of space. Space, in that sense, is not a container

for war. It determines the nature of war. Clausewitz, the great analyst

of modern war, understood war in the context of a world in which

nations competed for territory. The goal of war was the occupation,

integration, homogenization and disciplining of space. In order for

those tasks to make sense, space needed to be of a distinct nature. It

had boundaries, surface, and depth. It was penetrable. It was capable

of holding or containing fluid formations that became stable formations

once the space was occupied. It was commensurable using Euclidean

measure. But this space of nations, which is the space of modernity, is

only one possible space.


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having done that to then recreate itself in viral and geometric fashion.

It just does it faster and more efficiently, and always against someone

who has no hope in that space of standing up to its overwhelming

force.

Ridley Scotts 2001 film, Black Hawk Down, explores what

happens when the modern military institution finds itself engaged in

conflict in a different kind of space. Filmed in 2000, the movies

general release was held up until January 2002 because of worries

about the how the movie would be received after the events of

September 11, 2001. Even so the film opened to extremely mixed

reviews. It was largely seen as an action movie and criticized from all

political directions for lacking a political viewpoint. This is because

Scott never makes any explicit moral claims in film. Rather than an

epic tribute to the sacrifice of soldiers such as Saving Private Ryan

was, or a moral condemnation of violence such as Apocalypse Now

was, Scotts film explores in minute detail how the States military is

undone when it attempts to use its mobile technological might to

penetrate Mogadishu. It is undone because it is unprepared to deal

with the spaces of Mogadishu which are neither the space of

modernity, the space of nations, nor the tribal spaces the colonialists

encountered in their first occupation of Africa. Scott recontextualizes

the notion of post-modern war imagined in terms of the U.S.s

advanced technology and information control. Of course all thats there


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in spades. Arguably much of the trouble the U.S. forces get enmeshed

in is due to the arrogance overwhelming technological might breeds.

But Black Hawk Down seems to propose that whatever makes this war

other than modern, its more than just changes in equipment, logistics,

and communications within the modern States military. Scott

represents the very ground the war is fought on, both literally and

figuratively, as of another world and another order, an order that

cripples the States might.

The spaces of Mogadishu in the film are the antithesis of the

isotropic, homogenous spaces of modernity. Those spaces are

represented in the American camp with its broad open spaces largely

determined by the needs of its technology, and to a lesser degree in

the invocation of suburban America itself during a scene where a

soldier attempts to phone his wife before the mission begins. The

spaces of Mogadishu are cramped, close, indeterminate, shifting, and

hostile to communication. They are fold upon fold refolded. The

channels are fluid and constantly moving. What was a street one

moment becomes a dead end the next. What was a cul-de-sac

unexpectedly becomes a passage. Its a place in which the progress of

the fighting is utterly fickle and unpredictable, moving in fits and starts

and swirling bursts. In one of the films darkly comic moments, two

American soldiers who have dug into a classic defensive position find

themselves suddenly abandoned by the war which has swept around


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them in a chaotic tumult. They have to reluctantly abandon their fixed

position and chase after the fighting. There is no stability in these

spaces and the line of sight is limited to the other side of the street or

across the square. No one can see whats going on. Increasingly, and

significantly, this includes even General Garrison, the U.S. commander,

back the base watching the events unfold through his not-so-panoptic

eye in the sky.

These unsettled spaces of flows, of blockages and interferences

and unpredictable discharges are unrelated to economic

developmentas in not enough, as if there were only one possible

mode of becoming developed and ordered with all human worlds

stretched out along its singular line. These spaces have been formed

not out of want (not that there isnt want) but from the multiplicitous

energies growing out of Europes great sweep across the planet. They

do not precede the space of modernity. They follow from it, multiplying

in its wake. Postmodernity in the Mogadishu represented in Black Hawk

Down has its own measure, one whose trajectory is heavily inflected

both by its tribal heritage and its influences from Europe, but which is

other than both.

This Mogadishu is anything but primitive, undeveloped, or

unordered as the Americans tend to think. The Somalis access to

technology, markets, and media all tend to level out many of the

disparities that once characterized their relationship with the European


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powers. The 1964 film,Zulu, depicts a crucial moment in the European

colonization of Africa where the Africans, though vastly outnumbering

the English, are unable to overcome them, mostly because of an

enormous gap in technologyrifles against spears and a different

attitude to warfare. Black Hawk Down depicts a similar moment some

150 years later, the main difference being that the African warriors are

now armed to the teeth with many of the same weapons that the

Americans have including, most significantly, rocket-propelled

grenades, arguably the Colt .44 of postmodern warfare. As well, the

international markets in which the Africans purchase the arms, the

changes in their organization because of new communications

technology including conspicuously, cell phones, the knowledge and

manipulation of the panoptic attentions of the international media, all

contribute to an overwhelming sense of the sophistication of the

Somalisa sophistication all the more sharply etched for its contrast

with the Biblical conditions of their circumstance.

Bruce Sterling, in an early dystopian critique of globalization

(Islands in the Net), ended on a despairing vision of the Globalized

Corporate State absorbing and commodifying the very technology that

the resistance developed to fight it. Scotts film proposes that the

opposite actually has become the case in postmodern warfare. The

enormous technological advantage of the State turns into its crucial

weakness in a double sense. The State, even as it relies on technology


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to provide an advantage of force, cannot control the dispersal of that

technology among those it intends to overcome. This is not even an

issue of the so-called weapons of mass destruction that has become an

obsession with the current Anglo-American axis. Its a matter of cell

phones and rocket propelled grenades. Because technology itself is out

of control, the resistance to the homogenizing push of the State gains

access to critical means of communication and force that tend to

equalize its relation to the State. The other problem for the State is

that the more complex and powerful the technological force it

mobilizes (and at the same time becomes enslaved to as Heidegger

pointed out some time ago), the more vulnerable it is to the

uncontrollable distribution and circulation of that technology. All it

takes is one child with a cell phone to alert the warriors in Mogadishu

to the impending U.S. attack, neutralizing the elements of speed and

surprise the U.S. forces counted on. All it takes is one guy in a cheap

nylon shirt with an RPG to bring down the first Black Hawk, bringing the

entire American operation to a screeching halt.

In one of the early scenes in the movie the Americans capture a

Somali arms merchant, Osman Atto. He is a fellow clan member with

Aidid and a businessman who is supplying Aidids militia with weapons

purchased in international arms markets. He is interrogated by General

Garrison, the American commander (played by Sam Shepard). Most of

the scene is shot as a close up of Attos perspiring face as he smokes a


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when it re-encountered its deep internal division as a kind of self-

devouring psychosis. But his Kurtz is something more as well. If

Conrads Kurtz embodies the madness that flows from the revelation of

the utter artificiality of good and evil, civilized and primitive, the whole

structure of thinking that justified Europes great adventure, Coppollas

anticipates, though only by a year, Gilles Deluezes and Felix Guattaris

vision of the War Machine, a nomadic remnant of a pre-State warrior

culture that not only exists outside the bipolar axes of the State

(Dumzils jurist-priest and magician-king), but in so doing acts to

challenge the States self-determined authority, including its military

institution.1

The most telling revelation of this force in Coppolas film comes

in Kurtzs camp. Sailing up the last leg of the river, Willard finds himself

thrown into in an archaic hell. The boat encounters a final boundary of

white ghost-like figures in dozens of primitive canoes that close behind

the U.S. soldiers as they pass through. They finally penetrate into the

heart in which bloody bodies dangle from palm trees, and anonymous

dead drape the terraces of an ancient temple. It is the realm of the

dead and the technology is primitive and directbows and arrows,

spears, machetes, some small arms. Warriors in loin cloths squat with

spears held loosely between their legs next to severed heads that dot

the temple steps. Next to them are U.S. soldiers (Willards

predecessor) and regular Viet Namese army holding M16s.


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The War Machine, as Deleuze and Guattari propose it, is an

undisciplinable force. It is nomadic and exists on the borders of the

States order. Originally warriors and herders whose mode of being was

an itinerant territoriality, they became part of a tradition realized in the

unsystematized, skilled knowledges of itinerant labourers. Kurtz

embodies the recognition that this War Machine, deterritorialized and

unrestricted by the various disciplines of the Military constitutes a kind

of pure violence untainted by the bureaucratic and political

contaminations that can cripple (or pollute) the Military, making it the

stereotype of absolute might and development.

Imagined as a heart, Kurtz both establishes the space of war as

classically Euclidean in its penetrability, and at the same time sets in

motion and maintains the physical and mythic action and their

revelatory relation to one another. He doesnt move beyond Conrads

radical bipolarity. He embodies its revelation in revelations very

possibility, the possibility of the visible and hidden, the surface and the

depth, the revelation of the heart as War Machine. He sets up a kind of

metaphysics of war that determines the fundamental nature of the

agon.

Mohammed Farah Aidid, the object of American desire in Black

Hawk Down, is, in contrast, nowhere. Throughout the film he seems

almost to float in a featureless room, never encountering anyone,

never speaking. He sits and smokes. He is the counterpart, the weight


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of another world, the other player to Garrison in his panoptic war room.

But whereas Garrison is increasingly frantic as he helplessly watches

his forces become entangled and savaged in the complex,

incommensurable spaces of Mogadishu, Aidid rocks and smokes alone

in a room, preternaturally aware of the events unfolding outside.

In this mode the War Machine takes on a different sense than it

does in Coppolas film. It is not a heart, not a revelation of some

foundation, but a kind of remnant, a minus-1, as Deleuze and

Guattari might put it, a wild, diverse, antithetical force that actively

resists the States homogenizing might.2 In Coppolas film, the War

Machine is represented as a purity, an horrific purity, but a purity that

both reveals the source of the states might and the limit of its control.

Willards State sanctioned murder of Kurtz is required to return the

State to the illusion of unfounded unity. The foundation must be

obscured, though it remains the foundation. In Black Hawk Down the

War Machines antithetical trajectory is of another order. It exists

utterly outside the States parameters. It is another world, another

space and a present time.

Aidid resembles a heart, but the resemblance is misleading. He is

the trigger to the Americans unilateral action and the focus of their

animus. The operation represented in Black Hawk Down is one piece of

a larger plan to capture or kill Aidid. But he is not locatable because

the Americans think they are in one kind of space, but in fact are in


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another. And even if he was locatable, as Atto points out, it would

make no differencebecause there is no heart. The initiating

penetration of Mogadishu falters when it becomes entangled in the

complications of that space without a heart. The American force seems

to penetrate the space, but then its thrust is blunted. The helicopters

land on the roof and the warriors, moving like a machine, set up a

perimeter, searching the building and securing the captured clan

heads for transport back to the U.S camp. They do all the right things.

But then comes the guy in the nylon shirt with the RPG. Suddenly the

nature of the space is revealed as other than what the Americans

thought it was. The surfaces, eddies, bursts and folds proliferate and

circulate becoming a Tar Baby, an endless pellicular entanglement, the

confounding of communication.

At that point, for all its pan-optic power (embodied in the image

of Garrison back at the U.S. camp watching every move unfold on a

T.V. screen with a live feed from a helicopter hovering over the action)

all illusions of the invulnerability of the State vanish in an explosion of

chaotic, random, uncontrolled force. And even though the Americans

eventually extricate themselves (at the cost of 18 dead Americans and

hundreds of dead Somalis), they have lost not just the battle but the

war because the very measure of whats winning and whats losing

has shifted into a new modality.


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The old modality was determined by the penetration of space

and its eventual occupation, manipulation, homogenization, and

stratification, all geared toward the reproduction of the State on its

pacified body. The essence of this modality is might, overwhelming

power. This is the mode of the American assault, as we lately

witnessed in Iraq. In the multiplicitous warrens of Mogadishu the US

troops discover that that modality no longer functions in this strange

space where all attempts to penetrate, whether successful or

unsuccessful come to naught. They come to naught because the

depth becomes an endlessly unfolding surface that generates an

unpredictable circulation of force that in turn endlessly occupies the

Occupiers. In Black Hawk Down, even though the mission is

successfully completed (the tribal leaders who were the object of the

attack are captured and removed), and the Americans kill hundreds of

Somalis for every one of their own casualties, the battle is lost, and

beyond that, so is the war, because the States ability to continue its

action is determined by a kind of late capitalist, neo-liberal, bottom-line

contract with its population; e.g. it can do whatever it wants as long as

the cost (lives, money) remains within a manageable budget, and

the loss of eighteen lives (and more importantly, the public humiliation

that flows from the entanglement) constitute an immediate and

decisive deficit.


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More recently a similar situation has occurred in Iraq, though the

lessons of Mogadishu have allowed the Americans to more successfully

disguise their defeat. The initial plans of the Bush administration called

for recreating the State in Iraq specifically in the image of the U.S.

State, the suspected fantasy of all American international policy

towards everyone since at least Woodrow Wilson, if not Thomas

Jefferson. Iraq was to be transformed into a secular, pluralistic, market

driven-nation.3 This proposed transformation was not simply the

gratuitous desire of ideologically driven theorists. It was the crucial

foundation of a strategy to deprive Islamicists of a possible base and

recruiting ground by transforming a large Arab country into a clone of

the United States by imposing on it a State whose form was derived

from the principles of the European Enlightenment. But the jubilation

and triumphalism that followed the initial penetration of Iraq has

given way to the recognition that the U.S. is now entangled in another

kind of space and that in order to extricate themselves (especially

before the Presidential election in November 2004) they must abandon

their plans. In the last several months they have had to give up plans

for free markets, a constitution, the abolition of militias (a.k.a the War

Machine that operates within the dynamics of the anti-State forces of

tribe and familyand that is both the foundation of the resistance to the

Occupation and a significant enabling condition of the future civil war),

the overhaul of Saddams national food rationing program, and the


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privatization of State owned businessesin other words, the Works,

the whole caboodle of born-again neo-liberal recipes for Utopia that

were to have transformed Iraq into America-lite.

Scotts analysis of this situation extends from the external

spaces of Mogadishu to the internal spaces of subjectivity, to the

nature of the warriors engaged in this decisive battle. Kurtz as heart

holds space to an economy of repression and revelation in which

subjects, like the space they are in, are informed by a dark heart.

They are both implicated and explicated in that space. They have

depth, character and act autonomously, though each of these

terms signifies only within a specific kind of space. This is the case as

well with the Americans in Black Hawk Down. There is an identity

confusion among them at the beginning of the film caused by all the

identical haircuts, but it quickly resolves into the recognizable

personalities of a classic war film. The soldiers are proposed as being

persons, important to the State, as is asserted in the often-repeated

slogan, No one gets left behind. This is in sharp contrast to the

Somalis of whom only three are ever identified as persons. Aidids

space leaves no room for the illusion of the depth of subjects. Instead

they are represented as what might be seen as a mass.

But not all masses are massive, nor do we necessarily

understand what is involved in being individuals. Farimbi draws

attention to the complications of these concepts in his interview with


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the captured pilot, Michael Durant. After asking Durant if he is one of

the Rangers who has been killing his soldiers, Firimbi appeals to

something very like individualism (whose absence among the Somalis

some critics of the film deplore), suggesting that he and Durant can

negotiate soldier to soldier. Of course Durant cant, and his obvious

inability to do so reveals the illusion of individualityor perhaps more

accurately reveals the price the Military extracts from its soldiers. The

Americans are of course all individualsthey have names, faces,

play chess, call their wives, make fun of each other, debate the

purpose of the warbut there is cost for this individuality and one

measure of it paradoxically is that they must become part of the

machine, a cog in a hierarchical Institution with carefully and precisely

defined roles.

Its as if the individuals arent really individuals, or as if being an

individual is not quite what we think it is. In the same sense, then,

perhaps the mass of Somalis is not a mass, at least not as we have

been trained to think of it in relation to individuals, but something else.

The very idea of mass is determined in the sense of a loss of

something and so tied to an implicit defense of the presence of that

thing. The OED has mass as a multitude of persons mentally viewed

as forming an aggregate in which their individuality is lost. That

loss, at its most obvious, has been represented in war films largely

through caricature that renders it grotesque, simultaneously laughable


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and despicable. Thats the stuff of open propaganda. Think of the

representation of the NVA in Green Berets, a movie whose determining

gesture, following the propaganda films of WWII, was to caricature the

enemy as mindless and soulless and the U.S. soldiers as having

inherently special, almost supernatural, human characteristics. More

recently and more subtly, the Randall Wallace/Mel Gibson film, We

Were Soldiers, rises slightly above caricature, but still manages to

imply a kind of implicit evil to the faceless enemy.

These images are very different from those Scott creates, with

their extraordinary energy and seemingly undirected intelligence.

When the Somalis pour out of various buildings to seize the second

downed helicopter they flow like water from the structures surrounding

the Black Hawk, a pliant force that erupts into uncontainable and

unpredictable flows of bodies riding untranslatable energies. Rather

than singular Might directed by pan-optic vision, Scott gives us an

image of an a-centered force in which all individuals are

interchangeable. They are a multitude, not a mass. Their

numerousness is not to be confused with facelessness or unity, and

especially not with the loss of something. They are another kind of

force. We could say tribal if thats understood as a fundamentally

different form of social organization, a different kind of machine, say,

than the Military Institution of the State. Its not a question of

mechanical as opposed to organic, but rather of different modes of


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connection (industrial, tribal), different machines, unfolding into

different modes of force. One is orderly, disciplined, and requires

individuals trained and drilled to work as a unit, while the other is

random, spontaneous, and chaotic and requires members who respond

with absolute precision and knowledge to unpredictable flows.

The entire body of the peoplemen, women, and children

comes alive in this space to maul and expel the Occupiers, something

the Americans never understand. In a remarkable scene at the

beginning of the U.S. operation, a number of children call in to report

the approaching Black Hawk squadron. One holds up a cell phone to

transmit the sound of the helicopters back to the city, and an American

soldier, misinterpreting the gestures as a sign of welcome, waves at

him in a moment that reveals the incommensurability of the two

worlds. These children are everywhere. As the fighting intensifies,

every member of the community seems to join in, picking up the guns

of the fallen to continue the attack.

Farimbi says that in this world, to kill is to negotiate, and that

there will always be killing, you see, in our world. Whats at stake

here, then, is the question of killing that has not been appropriated and

legitimated by the State but remains the provenance (and

responsibility) of the multitude. The Somalis have what might be

characterized as an active, social relation to death, or perhaps even an

intimate relation, and within that relation resides the ability, even the


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responsibility, to negotiate. For the Americans that relation has been

co-opted by the State in exchange for the promise not to be left

behind. But even that promise, Farimbi points out, is part of a world in

which the Americans lead long, dull boring lives which to each of

them is divinely unique, preordained, dramaticand fatal in any

deviation from the prescribed norm.

Atto suggests that the U.S. attempt to capture Aidid, while

ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, is actually governed by the

mythologies of individualism associated with the American west. What

do you think this is, he asks Harrison, the K.O. Corral? He implies

that the American strategy of getting Aidid is governed by a deep

mythic compulsion toward individual shoot-outs, that the Americans

see themselves in the position of the Earps in a showdown with the

Clantons, and that such a mythos will not signify within the space of

Aidid. Harrisons response, a condescending snigger and a smug

correctionYou mean O.K. Corraldismisses Attos critique by

asserting his own superior knowledge of American pop culture, while at

the same time ignoring the meaning of it.

Apart from raising the issue of the ways in which differing

illusions of forms of subjectivity affect the strategies of the opposing

forces, Attos comments also raise the question of the role of governing

narratives in the film. Perhaps hes right, and at some deep level, the

OK Corral lurks as governing narrative for the Americans. But its not


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one that circulates openly as rationale for the military adventure. It

doesnt serve as master narrative in the sense that Jean-Franois

Lyotard has proposed.4 The fundamental arguments for the American

presence are covered in an informal exchange between two soldiers

just before the mission is launched. One (Eversmann), characterized by

his comrades as an idealist, articulates the idea that the U.S. must act

to relieve the suffering of the Somali people. The other, represented as

a hardened warrior (Hoot), counters that all that matters once the

fighting begins is to take care of yourself and your comrades: They

wont understand its about the man next to you, thats all it is. These

attempts to provide narrative coherence are supplemented by others

during the course of the combat: watch out for the man next to you,

nobody asks to be a hero, they just are, it aint up to you, its just

war, no one gets left behind, and so on. Each of these narratives in

turn has been put forward by various critics and marketers as the

master narrative for the movie. Yet their sheer plenitude makes it

impossible to single out one to play that role. No one of them

dominates the discourse and provides coherence. Instead they all

circulate freely, contesting and competing for legitimacy.

Strangely missing is the master narrative that informed the last

50 years of American military and political mission: the defense of

liberty and freedom in the struggle with fascism and communism.

That defense focused on a real or perceived threat to the security of


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the State, and established a space of unity within which the State

could reproduce and introject its singular self under the rubric of

defending freedom. The resulting massification of fractured American

experience continues to serve, as Fredrick Jameson has argued, as

the great Utopian moment of national unification.5 In Scotts film, the

absence of such a master narrative is glaring, though the nostalgia for

it is everywhere. There is simply no way to mobilize that narrative in

this space. The local stories that circulate among the soldiers do not

replace that master narrative. Instead, they circulate within the space

left void by it and draw our attention to the black hole of its absence.

In that sense Black Hawk Down, unlike Coppollas film, is not

interested in making moral judgments about war and violence. If

theres a sense of horror, its local rather than global. Rather than the

horror of violence, its about disaster, the disaster the States military

institution faces when it engages the War Machine in the territory of

post-modernity. The War Machinetribal and nomadicexists outside

the parameters and structures determined by Modernity and so evades

its symbolic metaphysics of emanation and penetration. Scotts sense

of the War Machine is not as a deeper or more penetrating moment of

violence, a revelation of primal integrity. It is of another order, one that

is impenetrable to the State because it is all surface. Its organization is

anarchic and spontaneous, unpredictable and contingent rather than

technological and disciplined.6


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Absent any rationalizing uber-narrative, whats left is the drive

by the State to recreate itself. The pursuit of Aidid is part of a larger

plan to remove power from the competing (and brutal) multiple centres

of the War Machine and resettle Somalia in the form of a unitary

State under the rubric of a transition to democracy. Although its not

part of the material of the film, such a move presumably is a step

toward integrating Somalia into the States globalized Empire of

capital. It is as simple and blunt as that. Everything about the

American undertaking is geared toward and defined by the massive

unity of the State, the States desire to eliminate difference and to

reproduce itself: E pluribus Unum. But in the end as the American

troops run through the gauntlet of the Mogadishu Mile, Attos

observation about the future hovers over them.

If his reference to Arkansas white boy ideas refers specifically

to William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. president at the time of the

Mogadishu events, it also resonates beyond that to challenge the

assumption of those representing the State that the political

institutions of Euro-American Modernity are universally applicable and

desirable. This Utopian vision of a single world united by one market

and one State form has, as John Gray has eloquently argued,

unleashed as much violence on the world as any of its competitive

utopian visions, including Marxism and Islamism.7 Like any utopian

movement, its greatest weakness is its belief in its Truth. In Black


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Hawk Down, that belief staggers and stumbles in the final scenes of

the film. Its an astonishing moment. Finally rescued by the Pakistani

U.N. forces that they initially dismissed in their unilateral assault (in

another of Scotts prophetic moments), the American Rangers and D-

boys are forced to run out of Mogadishu on foot pursued by the

Africans. Its a running battle in which men, women, and children pick

up the guns of the fallen to join the pursuit. In one telling scene, an

African-American soldier shoots down an African warrior, and then

watches as a woman in a chador runs to pick up the fallen mans

weapon. Dont do it, he mutters, dont do it. But she does reach

down and pick up the gun, as she must. And he does shoot her, as he

must. The film makes no judgment. It doesnt question the integrity of

the soldiers plea. But the disaster of the moment is absolute and

unspeakable.

The Americans are stunned. Jogging in full gear out of the city,

dogged by African warriors in techs, they find the road lined on both

sides with men, women, and children hooting at them, mocking them

with what we finally realize must be traditional tribal gestures meant to

humiliate a defeated enemy, gestures whose origins for the Americans

lie in some alien and inaccessible world of ritualized war: a hand raised

just so, the brushing of the hair with the hands, a certain movement of

the feet. These are the same people shot down by Aidids men in the

opening sequence, the people one of the minor narratives claims the


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Americans are there to feed. Its a moment in which the two worlds

confront each other s utter incommunicability in a space that is all

difference.8


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1 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:--The War Machine. InA Thousand Plateaus. Tr.

Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987 [1980]. Coppola earlier

develops the same thread in The Godfather where the Mafia families take on the

same weight and significance.2 The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but

rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions

one already has available, always n 1(the only way the one belongs to the

multiple: always subtracted).A Thousand Plateaus, p. 6.

3 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Threats Force Retreat from Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq.

Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003: A01.

4 Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmpdern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tr.

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, Volume

10. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

5 Jameson, Fredrick.A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.

London: Verso, 2002: 212. More recently, the current representatives of the

American State have attempted to renew this narrative in an attenuated form by

raising the spectre of terrorism and claiming that exporting freedom and

democracy can undo its breeding grounds. While superficially similar to the

much disparaged root cause argument, this argument differs in proposing the

root cause as being the absence of the State rather than some injustice or

exploitation caused or supported by the State.

6 Its not a binary division. The State has access to the War Machine it contains,

and vice versa. This occurs in the film when the panotptic power of the State

breaks down in the chaos of Mogadishu and the Delta Force platoon attempting to


26/26

reach the surrounded Rangers abandons the States technology (and plan) and

enters the city on its own terms.

7 The era of globalisation is over,The New Statesman, 24 September 2001.8

I should note that although Black Hawk Down is based on Mark Bowdens

remarkable account of the actual events first published in the Philadelphia

Inquirer and later expanded into the book, Black Hawk Down, this scene, as well

as the other crucial scenes I have described, especially those in which Atto and

Farimbi converse with Garrison and Durant, are not part of Bowdens narrative.

They are the work of Scott and script writers Ken Nolan and Steve Zaillian.

post-modern spaces in ridley scott’s black hawk down

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