Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Abstract

This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus.