Description
The ‘practice turn’ in International Relations has taught us that questions of politics and discourse are not solely limited to matters of aesthetics and representation. Discourse – in all its forms – has real implications; it can (re)organize our thoughts, our lived positionalities, and, further still, our actual or empirical relations with (and/or vis-a-vis) our various others. This is the new reality – the reality that the practice turn has prescribed. At this point in time, however, very little research has considered the implications of this for the contemporary military memoir. This paper is aimed at addressing this gap. Beginning from a discussion of the written ‘I,’ i.e. the narrative first person – the authoritative subject of the contemporary military memoir, this paper starts out by discussing how the ethical foundations of such a construct does in fact implicate the reader of these texts in the violences described, portrayed or enacted, thereby. Applied to memoirs of the war in Northern Ireland, particularly as represented by members of the UK’s Special Forces directorate and its constituent elements (e.g. 22 Special Air Service and 14 Intelligence), this discussion will show how the discursive components of these texts implicate us – their readers – in the violent, neocolonial relations of this conflict. Not to be confined to this one dimension, the second half of this paper examines how our own ‘haunting’ of these texts, their relations, and their violences does also demand our own ethical response: our accounting for ‘our’ violences. Positioned as a call for responsibility, this demand for ‘accounting’ will be seen as a soubriquet for self-reflexivity and deconstruction: ethical practices which, in no uncertain terms, call for our disassembling and denaturalizing of the politics/positionalities advanced by the soldier-memoirist. Here, we will see that, far from a one-dimensional expression of neocolonial politics and discourse, the contemporary military memoir can be read – via the practice turn – as a postmodern simulation of violence; one which simultaneously enacts and deconstructs the violence(s) which it espouses.
