11. The Heart Is a Hand Grenade: Plastic Figurations of Bodies at War

What may popular cultural depictions of socio-political institutions tell us of the institutions they portray? More particularly, how are institutionalized bodies configured, discursively and materially, in filmic representations of bodily institutionalization? In order to offer possible answers to these questions, Norholm and Kirkegaard analyse war on screen and bodies at war. Through a case study they investigate how soldiers’ bodies are rendered intelligible to viewers in the Danish documentary Armadillo (2010), which follows a group of soldiers on their deployment to Afghanistan. They begin from a material-discursive ontology that emphasizes the co-constitutive character of each, and offer the notion of plasticity as an intermediary concept. Material-discursive configurations are plastic in three respects as the involved elements both give form to and take form from the relationships into which they enter, but as the elements may also become explosive and blow up form (Malabou, Plasticity at the dusk of writing. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010). Norholm and Kirkegaard operationalize these three forms of plasticity in an analysis of Armadillo that is inspired by Hall’s (Popular culture: production and consumption. Blackwell Publishers, Malden, 2001) concepts of encoding and decoding. Discursive regularities figure prominently at the film’s moment of production, as an interview with the instructor reveals how his work with the filmic material was shaped by genre conventions of war films and mythologies of the soldier. Further, the film shapes public perceptions of war at its moment of reception as reviewers and commentators alike were influenced by its depiction of war. Finally, the authors zoom in on the soldiers’ bodies as these are configured by the film-as-discourse. Here, they encounter explosive plasticity; as the soldiers are, literally and figuratively, blown to pieces, they become other to themselves and to society. In and through the analysis, they offer illustrations of their methodological and theoretical contributions. Methodologically, analysis of popular cultural artefacts may help expose public perceptions of institutional arrangements. Theoretically, plasticity may provide a conceptual key to theorizing the relationships between institutions, discourse and materiality.