Taussig 2008

Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War on TerrorAuthor(s): Michael TaussigSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. S2 (Winter 2008), pp. S98-S116Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529091 .

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s98

Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War onTerror

Michael Taussig



Critical Inquiry s99

KeywordsFascinationApotropaicDazzleRazzle-DazzleDisruptive patterningCountershading

Subheadings:1. Exposure Does Not Weaken Deceit2. Color and the beyond of Language3. Fascination of the Abomination: Apotropaic Charms4. Color and the Argot of Secret Societies5. Camouflage: (and Why We Love It)6. Colonial War and the Return of Camouflage7. Black and White in Color: The Grayness of the Gray Fox8. The Art of War

All warfare is based on deception. When able to attack, we must seemunable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we arenear, we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when faraway we must make him believe we are near. Hold out the bait; enticethe enemy. Feign disorder and crush him.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 500 bce

1. Exposure Does Not Weaken DeceitI take Sun Tzu’s wise words regarding war on pretty much the same level

as a fortune cookie, but when it comes to the war on terror, then Sun Tzuhere catches my breath. For it seems that the art of deception in this par-ticular war is organic and built in to what is by necessity a war of error, adeliberate and compulsive lying, tied up with the fact that in the name of

Critical Inquiry 34, suppl. (Winter Supplement 2008)

� 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/08/34s1-0010$10.00. All rights reserved.

Michael Taussig first met Tom Mitchell a decade ago when Tom wore aleather jacket and smoked cigarettes in New York City. They talked a good dealabout fetishism, of course, and Taussig, who had pretty much given up onprofessors, said to himself, “Why aren’t there more academics like this? He makesit fun all over again.” Taussig has contributed a number of essays to CriticalInquiry, such as “The Language of Flowers” (Autumn 2003), and has published afew books, including The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980); Shamanism,Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis andAlterity (1993); Law in a Lawless Land (2003); and My Cocaine Museum (2004).



s100 Michael Taussig / Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism

1. Bertolt Brecht, “The Anxieties of the Regime,” Bertolt Brecht: Poems, 1913–1956, trans. JohnWillet et al., ed. Willet and Ralph Manheim (London, 1987), ll. 26–31, 40–44, pp. 297, 298.

defending the people, which is to say democracy, the war is now against thepeople. We the public have become the enemy, and that is how I read SunTzu on the art of war today.

Yet would it were that simple because the power of the art of deceit doesnot—I repeat not—necessarily weaken with exposure. Sometimes the veryopposite occurs; sometimes deceit seems to thrive on exposure, as in theconjuring tricks of shamanism and in the conjuring now exercised on aglobal scale by the world’s only superpower. This global conjuring rests ona sea change in the way truth and language work in what Carl Schmitt called“the exception,” meaning the state of emergency. The curious thing is thatdespite the tremendous concentration of power such a state of emergencyimplies, which should allow the leaders to tell the truth without fear of theconsequences, the opposite is more likely to occur.

In the late 1930s Brecht asked this question.

They break into homes and search the lavatoriesAnd it is anxietyThat makes them burn whole libraries. ThusFear rules not only those who are ruled, butThe rulers too

Why do they so fear the open word?

This is salutary political science. We forget that absolute power breedsabsolute anxiety on the part of those who have the power. How curious,however, that Brecht, who spent so much energy combating superstition,would end this poem invoking a fairy tale magic.

But their Third Reich recallsThe house of Tar, the Assyrian, that mighty fortressWhich, according to legend, could not be taken by any army, butWhen one single, distinct word was spoken inside itFell to dust1

You really have to wonder what that one distinct word might have beenbecause in our time, since 9/11, the anxieties of the regime seem quite ableto accommodate revelation of deceit. To date the war on terror traces acurvefrom the phoney allegation of weapons of mass destruction to thesurprisingadmission in late 2006 of “extraordinary rendition” and hence of tortureby the president of the United States. This pattern of lying and admission,or of lying followed by a breezy dismissal of one’s “mistake,” plus a raft of




2. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time ofTerror,” English Literary History 72 (Summer 2005): 291–308 and “Echoes of a Christian Symbol,”Chicago Tribune, 27 June 2004, sec. 2, pp. 1, 3.

neologisms sufficient to keep William Safire busy for another lifetime, is tomy mind a marked feature of this new war. I am especially moved to remarkon how easily admissions of deceit are made by the White House, as whenthe president did a comic routine for the Radio and Television AssociationDinner in 2004 in Washington, during which slides of him looking underOval Office furniture for weapons of mass destruction were shown.

Now admittedly this was one of those occasions that anthropologists liketo call rites of reversal, like carnival, in which for a brief period of time theking is the butt of scandalous humor. Nevertheless, something has changed.It is difficult to imagine Nixon joking about Watergate or Clinton aboutMonica Lewinsky. Meanwhile the Republican-dominated Congress de-criminalized violations of the U.S. War Crimes Act as well as the Genevaconventions and retroactively absolved U.S. officials, including the presi-dent, of culpability under their provisions. We are living, in other words, ina new regime of truth in which a peekaboo pattern—now you see it, nowyou don’t—is intimately associated with torture itself. And isn’t torture it-self a ritual of reversal?

2. Color and the beyond of LanguageDefended as a means to elicit information, torture depends on the be-

yond of language. To get people to talk, the unsayable is brought to bear,an unsayable that currently exhibits a curious connection to color. Whatthis connection with color means, what this implies for our understandingof torture and our ability to confront its unspeakability, I do not know. Butwhat I do know is that to talk with feeling and depth about torture is toenter into a rat hole where the violence in each and every one of us is tappedand channeled, as undoubtedly occurred with the guards at the Abu Ghraibprison in Baghdad whose photographs have long been the subject of TomMitchell’s attention.2

Following in the tracks of his analysis, I believe that the complex of at-traction and repulsion in the violence displayed is so well defended againstthe frontal attack of reason and sympathy that, perchance, a “poetic” orimagefull response is in order—the glancing blow, with the left hand, thehand of improvisation, as Walter Benjamin would say. We could just as wellinquire, What do these images want?

This is the tack taken by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, and itcomesacross strongly when his spokesman, Marlow, a pretty chatty and down-to-earth fellow, tries to describe the way a person can get sucked into the nas-




3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 32.4. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, 2

vols. (New York, 1991), 2:81. See also Bina Gogineni, “Beyond Orientalism: Humanist Exoticism inthe European Modernist Imaginary,” paper presented at the workshop “The African Presence inEurope,” Antwerp, Nov. 2005.

tiness of colonial power, but chokes on his words. All that he gets out—andthis diction is utterly unlike Marlow—is what he calls “the fascination of theabomination,” forcing the author to do something he rarely does in thisbook and that is actually interpose himself into the narrative,evokingflamesdancing across water as the sun sets on the river Thames. For Marlow seemsin love with what he detests. He detests what he is drawn to, like a moth toa flame. The conflict tears at his soul or at least his ability to speak. Why!The man hardly exists any longer! He is no longer a subject, we might say,more like a screen on which nervous impulsions collide and course. “Hebroke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red flames, whiteflames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each other—thenseparatingslowly or hastily.”3

Marlow stops mid sentence. “He broke off.” Words fail him. And whatfills the space, what ends the sentence . . . is color. Not just color fillingalready prepared forms. Not painting by numbers. Not color as a “secon-dary quality.” But raging, ripping, tearing color, diaphanous and ephemeralin an impossible mix of fire and water. They play like spirits, these flames,around the opaque colors that fill in Africa, meaning the then-existingmapsof Africa.

Point for point, fascination of the abomination recurred in Paris in 1938with what Georges Bataille called “sacred sociology,” central to which wasthe whirling mix of attraction and repulsion in the constitution of “the sa-cred,” as with “the aversion we feel toward those unstable, fetid and luke-warm substances where life ferments ignobly.”4

Such indeed are the photographs and apparently the unreleased videosthat surfaced from the U.S.-administered Abu Ghraib prison in early May2004. There is here a sense of art and display, a construction of the spec-tacular, as if building human monuments to the devil was what was up-permost in the minds of the guards. With this we are reminded how muchtorture by modern states is energized by the return of the repressed, mean-ing fantasies of so-called primitives, not merely their keen attention to ritualbut also the idea that in imitating the enemy you get control over him. Todefeat terrorism you have to go one better. Conrad understood this well, itbeing the centerpiece of Heart of Darkness. Frances Ford Coppola followedsuit in Apocalypse Now and did it twice over. First, with that brooding hulk




5. Daniella Gandolfo alerted me to this; see Daniella Gandolfo, “The City at Its Limits: Taboo,Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, Peru” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006). Shedraws on E. S. Hartland, “Phallism,” in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. JamesHastings, 13 vols. (New York, 1908–26), 9:825–26.

lost in shadows, Marlon Brando, as Special Forces Colonel Kurtz practicingsavage rites along with the hill tribes, committing unspeakable crueltiesagainst the Vietcong. Second, with Martin Sheen as the Marlow figure, thistime around as U.S. Army Captain Willard on a secret mission to assassinateColonel Kurtz, which he does by means of multiple machete blows toKurtz’s oversized body, a killing pictured in heavy-handed juxtapositionwith the bloody killing of a sacrificial ox or cow by the hill tribesmen. Thepoint is that Willard has to become a terrorist, just like Colonel Kurtz, theman he kills, and that both take their cue from the primitive other, as isthe case with Special Ops. “One look at you,” says the African American cap-tain of the patrol boat taking Willard upriver, “and I know we’re in trouble.”

3. Fascination of the Abomination: Apotropaic CharmsConrad helps us understand why the Abu Ghraib prison guards were so

foolish as to photograph their actions. They were compelled to. Fascinationof the abomination means you can’t stop looking precisely because it is soabhorrent, as if what you are looking at is looking back at you and has youlocked in its gaze like a deer in the headlights. An old word, fascination islike looking in a magic mirror. It means casting a spell by looking, yet it alsomeans the very opposite, being under the spell of an overpowering look, andthis must be why we feel shy before a camera, no less than why we just loveto take pictures.

Fascination is built around the way taboo attracts and repels simulta-neously. The word itself comes from the phallic god Fascinus displayed byRoman generals in triumphal processions. Thus, fascinum, meaning “en-chantment” and “witchcraft,” became associated with the phallus in ancientRome. Credited with powers to enchant as well as to stave off enchantment,especially that caused by the evil eye, the phallus has long served as an ap-otropaic charm, meaning the use of magic to thwart magic.5

To my mind the images from Abu Ghraib are just such apotropaiccharms, giving expression to the magic of the state in its war against terror.An extraordinary cultural feat. But then these are extraordinary times.These images are like objects, objects of force, same as magical charms, sameas the “love beads” of chains of ears to which Michael Herr in Dispatchesrefers us, worn by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. “Love beads,” hippy style. MakeLove Not War.




One way of getting at the “logic” of this is to straighten out its poeticoppositions so as to form a sequence of cause and effect. This is not how itworks, however, but is rather my attempt to slow down the machinery ofmagical connections in the hope they become more understandable. In re-ality, the compacted ironies in the poetry of “love beads” around the neckof a soldier function simultaneously so as to defy decompaction.

What is involved, first, is the transgression that gets you into the hallowedhalls of the taboo; for example, you mutilate the corpse of the enemy, work-ing on the hands, ears, or genitals, although with Abu Ghraib it seems as ifthis is done mostly on the “living corpse.” This endows you with the auraof the man with blood on his hands, the beast who will stop at nothing, anartistic fellow who works at the aesthetic level of war where child’s play andhorror form a unit. Yet at the same time this activity is sanctioned by adeliberately foggy don’t ask, don’t tell attitude of the state whereby in warall the stops are pulled out, the trick being to appear to follow the “rules”of war while in practice transgressing them. The art involved herein is con-siderable, owing much to tradition and mythology.

The fiend in the machine is what needs impressing on the enemy andthat is supplied by the fog of war, as described above, and by transformingwhat is described as meaningless violence into art, as with torture, an artthat calls attention to itself as art. Clausewitz got it only half right. War isart carried on by other means, torture being its most exquisite expression.

In measure as the enemy is dehumanized, thus subject to powerful fan-tasies as a magical or quasi-magical entity, it is tempting if not an absolutenecessity to bring your own magic, your apotropaic magic, to bear againsthis magic. Of course it is not expressed directly in this manner, but the actsspeak for themselves. The next step therefore is to have a piece of art—apiece of this mutilating and transgressive art—for display. The act has to bepreserved, either as an object or as an image, that can be made public andbe seen clearly by the spirits whose aid is required, as all such art requiresan audience—first and foremost that of the spirits. One of the fundamentalmistakes the Enlightenment has encouraged through the ages is to anthro-pologize and psychologize magic (meaning to reduce it to man) when itshould be understood in many instances throughout history as art acts per-formed for an audience of invisible spirits. As a primary medium of spiritcommunication, photography is most useful in this regard, especiallydigitalphotography, because it allows for vast and rapid dissemination of the im-age.

These charms feed off and contribute to the magic of the state as a theo-logical entity in modern guise. Edmund Burke called that mix of force andbeauty the sublime. State torture, we might say, is the other side of the sub-




6. See Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to AbuGhraib,” The New Yorker, 24 May 2004, pp. 38–44.

7. See Hersh, “The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret,” The New Yorker,24–31 Jan. 2005, p. 44.

lime. This mix would seem especially relevant today in the Terror of the waragainst terror, at which time rites of governance are not confined tospeechesin the Rose Garden. The state (and here I lapse close to anthropomorphizingthis strange entity) has a hunger for other, more spectacular rites that arelike the mirror image of the rose—beautiful, in their own way, yet destinedto die and shrivel into succeeding stages of warped crepuscularity. That isthe connection, the connection between the Rose Garden and what hap-pened in Abu Ghraib. And why do I use the past tense? Is that the sign ofmy own need for mastery?

4. Color and the Argot of Secret SocietiesAlso decidedly strange is that just as Conrad’s flames leap over water

when Marlow tries vainly to evoke why he is attracted and repelled by thehorror of the Congo, these Abu Ghraib images have a curious affinity tocolor. Only here the color does not flit like flames over the surface of theThames or even the Potomac in the setting sun of empire but has, instead,been appropriated into a child’s game of codes and the argot of secret so-cieties.

Take the invention of Copper Green, which Seymour Hersh claims wasone of the names given by the Pentagon to its secret operation encouragingphysical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort togain better intelligence in a losing war.6 As against the claims of the U.S.president and secretary of defense that the prison atrocities were the workof a few military police acting on their own, Hersh claims that CopperGreenwas instituted by the Pentagon with the knowledge of the president.

Before that there was Gray Fox, described as an undercover unit formallyassigned to the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command in Florida in July2002. And before that there was Yellow Fruit, set up after the failed rescueattempt of U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, kept secret even from some of thesenior generals, and later deployed in the Reagan government’s war againstthe Sandinistas in Nicaragua.7

And why Yellow Fruit? Could this particular flight of fancy have beeninspired by an image of the famous banana bullies, known as the UnitedFruit Company (now Chiquita), in Central America backed up by the Dullesbrothers at the helm of the CIA coup against the democratically elected left-wing government of Guatemala (chiquita, the diminutive of little, meaningsomething like cute little thing, otherwise known as el pulpo, the octopus)?




Speaking of names, maybe we should take a leaf from the Pentagon’sbook and rename the United States the United Fruits of America with abanana on its flag? After all, leaving aside the resemblance to Fascinus, couldanything be more harmless and nurturing than a ripe banana, baby foodfor a growing imperium? There is artistic perfection to this idea, given thatthe banana was not only the cause of U.S.-instigated counterrevolution inGuatemala, the banana being the slippery slope to communism in CentralAmerica, but was the first major tropical food imported to the U.S., lendinga helping hand to poor Third World countries’ exports since bananas arenot commonly eaten in the tropics anyway. In Colombia they are for pigs.In the movies and cartoons, for apes.

Who dreams up these names like Yellow Fruit? The office boy in the Pen-tagon? Some slick Madison Avenue ad agency? Why don’t they stick withthe nomenclature current in corporate America, with names such as Exxonand Enron, carefully cleansed of any connection to anything other thanthemselves? As designations of covert operations, names like Copper Green,Gray Fox, and Yellow Fruit belong to the world of (what used to be?) boys’adventure books, which is to say the adult’s imagination of the child’s imag-ination. Many of our institutions owe a good deal to this mutual mirroringof child and adult, nowhere more obvious than in nationalism, patriotism,and the culture of authority invoked by leaders and states throughout his-tory as brought out with icy clarity by George Orwell in Animal Farm.

And yet how secret is our old Animal Farm friend here, Gray Fox, lopingalong the shadowed edge of the ridge? If he and his friends were really andtruly secret, do you think that Hersh, experienced as he is, moving like anold fox himself in and out of the Beltway, would be told about them? No!The whole point about these names is that with a wink and a nod they emitthe signal that something scary and special is being worked on in the dun-geon along with the clanking of chains and the cooking of Freedom Fries.You don’t know what the actual secret is, but you know there is one, and itis that knowing which inflames your imagination and scares you. Later onyou get to know the contents of the secret, as Hersh did, but it is in the logicof these things that you never really believe you’ve gotten to the bottom ofthe mystery. There is always another secret behind the one revealed.

5. Camouflage (and Why We Love It)Both types of naming, Enron no less than Yellow Fruit and its congeners,

are camouflage, from the French word camofler, meaning . . . well, whatdoes it mean? Is its etymology any guide? Roy Behrens claims it is derivedfrom sixteenth-century French, being the name of a practical joke that in-




8. See Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage (Dysart, Iowa, 2002),p. 171.

volved setting fire to a paper cone and holding the other, smoking, endagainst the nose of someone asleep in a chair. Three centuries later camoufletreferred to a lethal explosive set into tunnels so as to suffocate an enemyforce, presumably making its way secretly underground. By some bizarreset of connections this word then comes to signify make-up as with cos-metics and costumes for a theatrical role or a disguise for criminals, theword finally making it into English during World War One, referring todisguise in warfare but also, at the same time, to a wide range of blendingsand deceptions, ranging from camouflaged eggs, meaning scrambled, to theact of bluffing.8 This is a word with a good deal of signifying power. Like asponge it sucks up most everything. What does that tell us about the shapesand figures of our world?

In surveying this etymology, you realize that camouflage is a word tryingdesperately to live up to its name, scattering fairy dust in your eyes, blindingyou in two different ways. One is camouflage through blending to the pointof concealment, as with mimicry; the other is to dazzle, by which I mean todistort and to misdirect attention as with cubist-stylepainting.Misdirectionis what conjurors and pickpockets purportedly do, and this is why cam-ouflage is sometimes said to belong to the same universe as magic and pull-ing off the perfect crime, a point not lost on the British War Office, which,in 1940, established its Camouflage Centre with a team including a magi-cian, a surrealist painter, and a famous zoologist (Hugh Cott, whose won-derful 1940 book on color in animals I use below).

Although these two principles, blending and dazzling, seem opposed,they very often combine in nature, which includes warfare and politics.Thisapparent contradiction is worth thinking about as it goes, I believe, to theheart of life.

But then this had been at the heart of theater, too, as when that serialkiller of all that stands between him and the throne was stalking the parapetsof a Scottish castle and couldn’t stop thinking about that crazy prophecythe witches had told him on the heath. “I will not be afraid of death andbane,” he says, “till Birnan forest comes to Dunsinane.” What does it mean,a forest that can move? Is it a riddle, a secret, a prophecy, or all three? Andwhy is it that prophecies so often come as riddles? Is that in itself not a formof dazzling, a prophecy that disguises itself? “Life’s but a walking shadow,”cries Macbeth as his sleepwalking queen dies,9 but worse is yet to come as

9. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans(Boston, 1974), 5.3.59–60, 5.4.24, p. 1337.




10. See Behrens, False Colors, pp. 36–57.

the wood actually begins to move, and he now understands the riddle ofthe witches’ prophecy as with drum and colors his enemies enter the stagecarrying branches of the forest in a deft display of magic’s magic (skilledrevelation of skilled concealment).

The way animals usually achieve blending is by having the top dark andthe underneath light. The animal seems to lose bulk, becoming a silhouetteand hence hard to see—so it is said, as if we humans see like them. In zoologythis is called countershading, and among its many curious implicationsmust be the assumption that animals are shadow sensitive and that is whythey play with their shadow so as to throw prey off track. One of the firstto point this out was A. H. Thayer, an artist from New Hampshire whostudied painting in the Brooklyn School of Art in the late nineteenth cen-tury. By his own account, bird crazy, Thayer had in his youth paintedwatercolors of birds and animals and came up with the concept of coun-tershading in 1892. Another avid student of the environment, TheodoreRoosevelt, in his capacity as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, invitedThayer to discuss the application of this principle to U.S. battleships duringthe Spanish American War of 1898.10

In nature, countershading, a form of mimicry, is often combined withdazzling. Fish swimming in coral reefs, for example, usually exhibit not onlydazzling dazzle patterns but also countershading. The stripes of the zebraand cheetah, no less than the spots on the leopard, qualify as dazzle patterns,but they are also countershaded, being larger and darker on the top of theanimal than lower down. The breathtakingly beautiful green-black colorsof the head and neck of the male mallard duck, glistening in the sunlight,shade into blackness as if by magic when it paddles through shadow, and itseems as if the duck knows when to swim in sun and when to swim inshadow, depending on whether it wants to conceal or attract or just showoff its beautiful being and play with you. Girl ducks just stick with coun-tershading.

In World War One camouflage came to be synonymous not only withmimicry but with dazzling, the more technical term being disruptive col-oration or disruptive patterning. In this regard it is instructive to read theetymology supplied in 1940 by the British zoologist Hugh B. Cott, who ex-plains that the word dazzle is based on the American slang razzle-dazzle,expressive of “active confusion—quite different from the correct Englishuse for partial blinding by brilliant lights.”11 I myself prefer the American,“active confusion” being better suited to what is going on.

11. Hugh B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (London, 1940), p. 47 n. 1.




f i g u r e 2. From Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage.

12. Nancy Goldring drew my attention to camouflage, to which her own artwork bears witness.She sent me Behrens, “Art, Culture, and Camouflage,” Tate Etc, www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/camouflage.htm

13. See Behrens, False Colors, pp. 83, 91.

According to Gertrude Stein, Picasso said “We did that first!” when in1914 he saw in Paris cubist-style camouflage painted on French canons. Inconversation with Jean Cocteau, Picasso later suggested harlequin suits ascamouflage for soldiers’ uniforms. In 1918 British battleships were beingpainted with cubistlike dazzle patterns so as to confuse German U-boat sail-ors peering through their periscopes.12 From March to December 1917, Ger-man submarines sank an average of 23 British ships a week, while in oneweek, mid-April, 55 British ships were destroyed. Something had to be done,and by June 1918 2,300 British ships had been dazzle-painted.13 They aresurely among the most brilliant artifacts of mankind, these ships, all stripes,no stars, set at conflicting angles to one another hundreds and hundreds offeet long. You can stare at them for a long time. Meant to destabilize visionin real life, they mesmerize when looked at in pages of a book (fig. 2).

Why mesmerizing? I do not know. Perhaps it is because we see here hu-mans out of desperation enjoy interfering with nature, painting it “out” ingrandiloquent swathes. Perhaps it is because we, who come after, have suchfun in seeing through the deception and marvel at the disingenuousness of




man’s ingenuity? We see twice over. We see the camouflaged thing, and thenwe see the thing “behind” the camouflage and admire both our clevernessand that of the designer, not to mention God who contrives nature in sucha way, our eyes included, that it includes its camouflaged deceptions ofselves that are not-selves as well.

Having never looked through a German U-boat’s periscope at a dazzle-patterned ship, I cannot judge the effectiveness of the alleged optical con-fusion in misdirecting the course plotted for the torpedo. But I am expertin feeling my own delight in seeing pictures of these dazzled vessels and insensing yours as well. This takes us back to Picasso and a certain mix ofanxiety and excitement we may feel at the merging of the artist with the artof war, for the harlequin is a figure of beauty as well as a nice example ofmilitary camouflage. And when I see the stripes on the giraffe or the zebra,the spots on the leopard, or the blaze of red that is the cardinal, I feel thesame delight as when I see those ships. Perhaps all these creatures will per-form optical magic when moving through their habitats and disappear. Ido not know. But surely that is not the end of the story? It is as if they wishto attract you as much as conceal something, namely, themselves.

I therefore have to ask whether dazzle patterns in animals or harlequinsare meant only to confuse and hence throw prey off course. Could it not bethe case that dazzling also occurs for fun, that it is beautiful and mischie-vous, and that this is a good deal more than some elaborate battlefieldvisionof survival of the fittest? If I put myself in the shoes of the World War I soldieron the Western Front who camouflaged a horse, painting it with stripes soit ever so crudely resembled and dissembled a bedazzling zebra, I cannotbut think of the insane amount of aesthetic pleasure this act must havearoused in him and in all the soldiers who saw this “horse” preciselybecauseit so effortlessly combines—or is supposed to combine—the aesthetic withthe downright practical and utilitarian.

For is it not the case that confusion and misdirection is an aesthetic, suchthat dazzling exists because it has deliberately and aggressively no purpose,which is to say it has a “higher” purpose, something beautiful, playful, ex-citing, sexual, and sacred, owing much, I dare say, to the breakup of wholesand the disruption of the boundary between figure and ground? The beautyof women’s bathing suits patterned like the ships of war in wedges of blackand white discordance at the time of World War I is breathtaking (fig. 3).

That deer, stuck in the glare of the headlights? When it breaks the spelland bounds away, its dun coat ensures it blends with the woodland—exceptfor that bobbing white triangle just below the erect tail, an open invitationto the hunter dressed, no doubt, in camouflage. And this must be why somany folktales from Africa and Australia, indeed the world over, take up




f i g u r e 3. From Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage.

questions like, How did the leopard get its spots? Stories that seem mostpopular today among First World parents looking for books for their chil-dren. Stories like these relish such spots for pleasure, for beauty, for mis-understandings between animals and between people (often the sameentities), and of course for the lavish display of cunning and deceit exercisedby the weak against the strong, as in the Native American story of how thechipmunk got its stripes in its struggle with the bear.

If we consider dazzling as camouflage, we have to concede it can be ex-cessive, to say the least, and merges with other forms of conspicuous col-oration in animals as related, so the Darwinian-inclined zoologists tell us,to sex within a species or as warning between species, such as the monarchbutterfly, whose coloration serves as a warning signal to potential predatorsthat it is poisonous. Does the same poisonous message apply to the U.S.troops who used “camouflaged condoms” on the ends of rifles to protect




14. Quoted in Susanna Trnka, “Living a Life of Sex and Danger: Women, Warfare, and Sex inMilitary Folk Rhymes,” Western Folklore 54 (July 1995): 238.

them from sand in the first Gulf War?14 Surely not, and perhaps one day,thanks to these camouflaged condoms, our zoologists may break out fromtheir zealous adhesion to functionalist, utilitarian, and adaptational modesof explanation that explain everything and nothing. Salutary here is themix—the mix of a magician, a surrealist, and a zoologist—gesturing to aquite different sensibility.

I thus wonder whether Gray Fox and his friends in that five-sided struc-ture known as the Pentagon do not actually combine all these aspects ofcoloration in animals—the sexual, the threatening, and what I call thesacred-aesthetic-playful— breaking wholes into parts and breaking upboundaries between figure and ground? As for this play, is it not also thatof attraction and repulsion, of being conspicuous and concealed in subtlealternation, as in some sort of courtship ritual, in which hiding is followedby wondrous starbursts of exposure, themselves giving way to miraculousdisappearances? For this reason Gray Fox strikes me as totemic of the publicsecret, itself composed of a strange form of knowing, namely, knowingwhatnot to know, a beyond of language as thrilling as it is threatening.

Right here, alongside the seduction and the threat, with its combinationof mimicry and dazzle patterning, we have Gray Fox, to whom it is surelylegitimate to add the coloring undergone by organic matter such as yellowfruit and green patinas spreading over copper. Why stop with animals? Yel-low Fruit and Copper Green form the natural background to which notonly living creatures adapt and blend but also vegetable matter, flowers,roots, leaves, fruit, and the chemistry of ageing copper. All are like animalsin this regard, mindful of their environment that they both sink into andstand out from. Think of the apple the witch offers Snow White, one sidegreen, the other red.

It is because they both hide and stand out and it is because they bothattract and repulse that Gray Fox and his friends are deployed. More thanthis, they attract because they repulse just as they stand out because theyare secret. In this sense they represent an advance on the fascination of theabomination.

6. Colonial War and the Return of CamouflageWhat happened to those marvelous-looking World War One dazzle ships

in succeeding waves of wars? They seem to have reverted back to their dullbattleship gray monochrome but years later the patterns found renewed lifein military uniforms from the Vietnam War onwards. This is not surprising




15. Lily Burana, “Army’s Fashion Fatigue,” New York Times, 5 Oct. 2006, p. A29.

since after World War Two, wars have reverted to being colonial wars againstguerrilla movements, now largely urban, and the war of position has givenway to the war of sleight of hand. In nineteenth-century colonial wars, Brit-ish and French troops may have worn resplendent uniforms, but, startingwith Vietnam, counterinsurgency meant mobile fighting with flexibleground troops and, of course, the helicopter. Camouflaged uniforms werepart of this new mindset of speed and sneaky. Later, in Afghanistan in 2002,U.S. Special Forces operated on the ground with long hair, full beards, somelocal clothing, and only partial uniforms until ordered to look more likesoldiers and less like locals, but the soldiers called this a mistake. How muchof their garb was to disguise themselves, and how much of it was their desireto identify with fierce Afghan warriors who previously had been Reagan’s“freedom fighters,” otherwise known as the Taliban?

Now the challenge is to develop camouflaged clothing for urban warfare,it being recognized by the U.S. Army that future conflicts are likely to bemainly urban because the large, sprawling Third World metropolis limitsU.S. technological superiority. Switching from the jungles of Vietnam to thecities of the Third World, the army has come up with a uniform in threeshades of grey in geometric patterns.

As regards the libidinal possibilities of camouflage, hearken to Lily Bur-ana in a recent op-ed page of the New York Times who, with refreshing can-dor, tells us that “every girl who’s had her head turned by a uniform has herfavorite, and for me there is nothing quite like the command of camouflage.A fitted, heavily starched long jacket and bloused trousers in a dark green,black and brown woodland pattern over polished black boots, the BattleDress Uniform, to me, is the American soldier.”15

7. Black and White in Color: The Grayness of the Gray FoxThe heart of the heart of darkness is the fascination of the abomination

that resists language and beckons instead to color. This color moves andchanges. It consists of different-colored flames moving across water, and itscontemporary manifestations since the Vietnam War are the swirling colorsof camouflage. It is to this combination of black and white, on the one hand,and living color, on the other, that the Pentagon’s secret torture programsare drawn.

Thus it is that Copper Green is but one of the so-called black programsin the Pentagon that are hidden by a firewall of secrecy from the white orovert world. The number of people in the know was less than two hundred.“We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of dark-




16. Quoted in Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” p. 41.

ness,” a former U.S. intelligence officer said. “The rules are ‘Grab whomyou must. Do what you want.’” You can feel the heat, the crackle of color.“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” thesame former intelligence officer told Seymour Hersh.

No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says,I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normalchain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and theelectricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting apicture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into thewhite world. We’re getting good stuff.16

Everyone wants a picture, it would seem, not just the guards in AbuGhraib, a hot picture that flows from black to white. A Pentagon consultanttells Hersh: “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have veryclear red lines.” Hence the title of Hersh’s article, “The Gray Zone.”

But of course that is impossible. If you have clear lines, then the secrecyis exposed and black becomes white (or is it the other way around?). If youhave clear lines, then you might just be able for a while to keep the contentsof the secret hidden, but you all the more firmly reveal the fact there is asecret. And, where there is knowledge of this red line that is the outer skinof a secret, you can be sure that someone is going to be unable to resistpeeling it open. The red lines are equivalent to the splash of color on themale bird seeking sex, the white flash on the deer’s butt, the revelation ofthe concealment. Thus the red lines were repeatedly infiltrated by U.S. sol-diers taking photographs, as they had to, given not only the fascination ofthe abomination demanding viewing over and over again but the delight—as the soldiers’ smiling faces display—in the revelation of the secret of theirown making, like children, like torturers, like the sovereign with his flash-light searching for weapons of mass destruction where there are none, justlike there are no coffins coming in from Iraq.

8. The Art of WarAnd so we return to camouflage. I have emphasized the role of secrecy,

deception, and confusion, but now in conclusion it is necessary to returnto other associations conveyed by the notion of art, as they were by thatancient sage, Sun Tzu, with whom I began this essay.

For from the outset—as with the story of Picasso taking credit for themilitary use of camouflage—there is something creepy about the use of artto kill people and sustain the state. It is bad enough that art is a tax shelter




17. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” AThousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. RobertHurley et al. (Minneapolis, 1987), pp. 351–423.

and capital investment. But war? Could it be that the autonomous realm ofthe aesthetic is about as autonomous as a castle moat or a Humvee? Butwhat makes it creepy is not so much this lack of autonomy as a sneaky re-spect for art as in the art of war.

The day seems long past when a sorcerer could use art to confuse anddestroy the enemy. Even when Brecht evokes the “house of Tar” to take onthe Third Reich, we take it as mere metaphor. Poet at work, we say.

But what if this distinction between art and war is fatuous, that all alongthe science of war has been a misnomer, just like the distinction betweenmetaphor and reality? How else to explain the frisson we feel when we comeacross an ancient Chinese manual of war such as that of Sun Tzu, reekingof the magic of antiquity and Orientalism, and nod our heads in respect?For one of the strangest things about war whether ancient or postmodernis that as a pumped-out, puffed-up “science,” it reeks of craft and witchcraft,accident and chance, as much as planning. Indeed the more “scientific” or“technological” it appears, the more arcane and mysterious, also. Guerrillawarfare makes this doubly so. Clausewitz is known on account of his equa-tion of politics with war, but is not politics merely the tip of a submergedcontinent of power whose outlines we dimly discern and whose uncannyforce we feel?

To combine a magician, a surrealist painter, and a zoologist, as in theBritish War Office, is pretty much the mind-set that any of us interested inbrushing history against the grain might espouse. So how might one out-camouflage their camouflage? That was John Heartfield’s strategy withpho-tomontage in Berlin around the time Brecht wrote his poem about theanxieties of the regime. Heartfield was a pioneer in the art of photomontage,cutting up images, rearranging the parts, and adding some new ones and acaption so as to reverse the message or expose its hidden meanings. Thiswould be to counteract the macabre artistry of “love beads,” themselves asardonic transgression of transgression. It is also what Deleuze and Guattariwere getting at with their labored notion of the war machine, a machinethey saw as the anarchic special ops built into any army, yet antithetical toit.17

Camouflage provides us with special, indeed amazing, possibilities. Nolonger do our knights in armor outfit themselves in the steel of the MiddleAges, the scarlets and blues of the eighteenth century, or the stolid all-of-a-piece khaki of the two world wars. Camouflaged soldiers bring into beinga most curious amalgam of the allegedly utilitarian and the unacknowl-edged exotic. Blending with the animal world and the love of imitation




18. See Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005).

therein, together with the aesthetic pleasure of theatrical disguise, the col-oration we call camouflage illustrates how narrow is the view of the prac-tical, workaday world if it does not admit that the most practical is also themost aesthetic when transplanted from the field to the battlefield.

To date the field of aesthetics has paid scant attention to its affinity withthe animal and with war, just as it has fought shy of magic and conjuring.So-called primitive societies knew better. To open this doorway, as with thewar machine, or with Tom Mitchell’s pointed question, “What do pictureswant?” is to recast the division between the aesthetic and the practical, afirst step to understanding how truth now functions in the Terror of thewar against terror.18



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Taussig 2008