Table Of ContentMAKING THINGS INTERNATIONAL 2
MAKING THINGS INTERNATIONAL
Mark B. Salter, Editor
1. Circuits and Motion
2. Catalysts and Reactions
Making Things
International 2
Catalysts and Reactions
Mark B. Salter, Editor
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of “Barbed Wire” was published in Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within:
International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance (New York: Routledge,
2015).
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Salter, Mark B., editor.
Title: Making things international, 2. Catalysts and reactions / edited by Mark B. Salter.
Other titles: Catalysts and reactions
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044918| ISBN 978-0-8166-9629-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9630-7 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: International relations—Philosophy. | Globalization—Political aspects. | World politics—
21st century. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human
Services. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization.
Classification: LCC JZ1319 .M372 2016 | DDC 327.101—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044918
Contents
Introduction: Making Assemblages International vii
Mark B. Salter
Part I. Territorialization
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter 3
Srdjan Vucetic
Military Manuals 20
Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi
Barbed Wire 32
Alexander D. Barder
Protest Camps 49
Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy
Tent 63
Andreas Folkers and Nadine Marquardt
Benches 79
Emily Lindsay Jackson
Secrets 92
David Grondin and Nisha Shah
Grey 106
Shine Choi
Orange Prison Jumpsuit 122
Elspeth Van Veeren
Flags 137
Rune Saugmann Andersen, Xavier Guillaume, and Juha A. Vuori
Container Scanning Unit 153
Julian Stenmanns
Diplomatic Cable 166
Tobias Wille
Part II. Deterritorialization
The Yellow Car 181
Debbie Lisle
Smartphone 195
Peter Chambers
Hotlines and International Crisis 216
Claudia Aradau
Cookies 228
Thomas N. Cooke
The Atom 241
Casper Sylvest and Rens van Munster
Asbestos 258
Nicky Gregson
Dirt 274
Mary Manjikian
Shit 285
Sagi Cohen
Burning Cars 299
Helen Arfvidsson
Tear Gas 313
Miguel de Larrinaga
Drones 326
Kyle Grayson
4 x 4s 338
Adam Sandor
Acknowledgments 357
Contributors 359
Introduction
Making Assemblages International
Mark B. Salter
The world is made up of things, stuff, objects. Political assemblages can be cat-
alyzed by a host of surprising sparks. Global systems are complex and inter-
dependent, but the well- worn tools of International Relations seem unsuited
to the task of understanding how particular objects, ideas, and people come
together to create, dispute, solve, or perhaps cause these political configura-
tions. Inspired from contemporary social and critical thought coming from so-
ciology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, this project offers
some provocative interventions in the debates about causality, connection,
and politics through the notion of assemblage.
In the companion volume, Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion,
we used things, stuff, and objects in motion to capture some of the material
dynamics of global politics, and in particular to demonstrate that importance
of the material. This volume builds on this conversation, and looks at unique
objects that catalyze political assemblages. In tracing the history and devel-
opment of specific objects, technologies, and tools, we can see not simply the
evidence of high- power interstate politics, but also the politics in all its fine
capillaries: on the docks, in the walls, as we text or surf the Web, debated in
technical subcommittees, discussed in boardrooms, and decided in engineering
labs. As Law argues, “nation states are made by telephone systems, paperwork
and geographical triangulations points” (Law 1999, 7). Material connections
and the circuits and controversies that they call into being catalyze political
stakes that are nonlinear, emergent, and unpredictable. The architecture of the
Internet and e- mail was a by- product of a military calculus: to enable the trans-
mission of a second strike command to nuclear missile silos after a successful
first Soviet strike, the architecture of a communication system that allowed
the messages to find a path through a broken or compromised system to their
recipient (Ryan 2010). The containerization of the global shipping trade, which
has led to a radical reduction in the cost of shipping and indeed provided the
efficient material foundation for our current mode of globalization, was the
vii
result of an entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, who sought profit through ratio-
nalization of trucking and shipping in the 1950s (Levinson 2006). Histories of
specific technologies, commodities, or objects are very popular: cod, salt, the
machine gun, barbed wire, telephone, cables, and so on, but too often con-
cerned only with how these things relate to humans. Bogost makes the claim
most provocatively: “We’ve been living in a tiny prison of our own devising,
one in which all that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and
the stuff with which we stuff ourselves. Culture, cuisine, experience, expres-
sion, politics, polemic: all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the
rich world of things discarded like chaff” (2012, 3). We seek to engage this rich
world of things. What we add to these discussions, as political scientists and
International Relations (IR) scholars, is a sensitivity toward power, authority,
control, and sovereignty.
This chapter will introduce the concept of assemblage, particularly in the
manner used by Actor- Network Theory (ANT) that leverages a flat ontology to
trace controversies through the connections between things, people, and ideas.
To further our discussion in Making Things International 1, we reengage with
the critique of sovereignty from this new materialist position. Because some
of the contributions in this volume follow discursive objects as well as material
objects, we differentiate new materialist analysis of discourse or cultural prac-
tices from other critical discourse analyses. Finally, we provide a survey of the
interventions in this volume.
Assemblage and Catalysts
More and more critical IR scholars are demonstrating interest in new mate-
rialism, that is Actor-N etwork Theory, Science and Technology Studies more
broadly, and vital materialism (see 2013 Millennium special issue on materi-
alism and world politics, 41[3], 2013 International Political Sociology forum in
7[3]; see also Acuto and Curtis 2014; Schouten 2014). Without a minute sur-
vey of these distinct fields, this introduction will serve as a brief overview to
this approach, and in particular to the role of assemblages within new ma-
terialism. This sensitivity toward new scales of analysis, emergent causality,
thick description of particular milieus, objects or processes, a flat ontology,
and the agential capacity of objects can be derived from two traditions. From
Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, there is a philosophical route to new materialism that
emphasizes Spinoza and other vitalist thinkers that account for a more dis-
persed account of causality. In this view, there is a new kind of realism that
takes the world as existing independent of human cognition or interpretation.
viii Mark B. Salter
“The vital materialist affirms a figure of matter as an active principle, and a
universe of this lively materiality that is always in various states of congeal-
ment and diffusion, materialities that are active and creative without need-
ing to be experienced or conceived as partaking in divinity or purposiveness,”
writes Bennett (2010, 93). This realism is not the stark six principles famil-
iar to IR scholars, but a philosophical stance that the world, even the social
world, is “mind-i ndependent” but not essentialist (Delanda 2006, 1). Thus, vital
materialists would accept that there is such a thing as a “market,” but only
particular markets, arising in historical and geographical locales with specific
practices, resources, and logics. The market is also a perfect object of study
for ANT, precisely because “the market is an institution which mixes humans
and non-h umans and controls their relations” (Callon 1999, 182). Delanda and
Sassen, for example, both trace the evolution of the “national” market, arising
from villages, to towns, to cities, to nations. Vital materialists such as Ben-
nett seek to describe political ecologies, in which things, environmental pro-
cesses, life at all scales, and humans all contribute to particular assemblages,
which by their nature have effects greater and less predictable than the sum of
their parts.
From the other route, work in Science and Technology Studies, and partic-
ularly Actor- Network Theory, with the work from Latour, Law, Callon, Mol,
Barad, and others, has focused on the role of human and nonhuman actants in
particular assemblages. Latour, for example, sets out a program for a Dingpoli-
tik or thing- politics:
Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant
parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and
dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure
without having to agree on much else. In other words, objects— taken
as so many issues— bind all of us in ways that map out public space
profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label
of “the political.” It is this space, this hidden geography that we wish to
explore. (2005a, 15)
In the magisterial Making Things Public, a host of contributors muse on the
question of connections between things and democracy. Walters demonstrates
the power of this Dingpolitik by looking at how the rubble and residue from
drone strikes made claims of responsibility possible (2014). Callon, in a famous
example, looks at how preservation debates around the scallops of St. Brieuc
Bay must allow for the agency of the scallops themselves, which must interact
Introduction ix
