Bureaucratic Weaponry and the Production of Ignorance in Military Operations on Guam

摘要

Militarism is a form of life accomplished in the contemporary world through large institutions organized bureaucratically around the preparation for, and production of, violence. Bureaucracies most famously produce a diffusion of responsibility among their members, but additionally they produce both knowledge and ignorance at both the institutional and the more compartmentalized scales. This article examines the political and cultural uses of ignorance claims and performances by military bureaucracy, taking the example of the US Navy's environmental impact statement documents produced in the process of building up its presence in the nonsovereign island of Guahan/Guam. While the documents produced in militarized bureaucratic contexts like this one appear to be claims to expertise, they are striking for how they navigate between knowledge and ignorance, that is, for how they seek some kinds of information and avoid others, how they use bureaucratic rules to set boundaries on what knowledge they will seek and quietly perform, not knowing what they at some level in fact know but do not wish to know. The goal is to understand the ignorance of militarism here not as an obstacle to knowing but as a related phenomenon with its own social shapes and effects.