The First Few Things To Know
About Experimental Unit...
What’s in a Title?
The provisional title for this piece for weeks has been “What is Experimental Unit?” This formulation has sat uneasily, even more uneasily than the task of writing this piece in general. I am grateful that another title has come to me. It’s in conversation with the phrase, “do you know the first thing about so-and-so?” Well, after reading this, you will know the first few things to know about Experimental Unit (XU), and you will be ready to make it your own.
Further elaborations will come, from my own detailing of aspects of Experimental Unit lore, including the endless possibilities for wordplay which exist within the words “Experimental Unit.” For now, let’s begin with how these words wound up populating your screen.
The Term “Experimental Unit”
Although I can’t quite recall where I first read the words “Experimental Unit,” the term comes to us through the history of military innovation. Ted Gold, in his introduction to Williamson Murray’s essay on the history of experimental units, writes to us that
Experimentation has played a major role in the transformation of military forces throughout history. The process of experimentation with new military capabilities and force structures is not just a matter for simulations in laboratories or for the writings of theorists. Its success often depends on the establishment of experimental units that can test emerging theoretical and technological capabilities to the fullest…1
Experimental units, then, are new groupings of people and technology which exist to help meet new challenges and unfold new potentials. This term stuck with me, for carrying within it the beating heart of innovation and transformation within centralized bureaucracies.
XU is not a Warfighting Organization
To explain this, we will briefly examine the document “Operation of the Logistics Enterprise in Complex Emergencies” by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There it is written:
This guide is focused on assisting those organizations concerned with the collective provision of logistics to meet requirements in a wide array of international conflict, humanitarian, and domestic disaster relief scenarios. Together, these scenarios are known as complex emergencies. These complex emergency situations typically involve combinations of warfare, civil disturbance, and natural and man-made disasters coupled with vulnerabilities such as food insecurity, epidemics, social conflict, and displaced populations. Often, the scale and scope of these emergencies are beyond the capability of affected nation(s) and humanitarian actors…2
What is central to understand from the standpoint of XU is that war is a kind of emergency.
From war, and conflict between wills more generally, emerge perhaps the most pressing emergencies that are currently faced. Yet it is not only possible to deal with war as war, namely to take a side in a war and fight so that one’s own side is able to force its will onto the “enemy.” Rather, it is possible to go further than the Joint Chiefs do here and see that warfighting is a subcategory of complex emergency response. The most proper response to war is often precisely not taking a side and fighting for it, but rather addressing the situation as an emergency.
This formulation is highly convenient for XU and sets it apart from many other organizations which characterize their activity as being oriented toward an enemy. XU sees no enemies. It sees only recruits.
Worship and Merrymaking
A third constituent aspect of XU arrives to us from Thorstein Veblen, who wrote in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class about a category of activity called “exploit,” which was defined against a category called “drugery.” Writing there, he expounds:
Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of life.3
It must first be said that the distinction made by Veblen here is obsolete. In the nuclear, and now the cyber age, that activity which addresses warfare can no longer be intrinsically distinguished from that which addresses everyday tasks.
Secondly, we have already addressed warfare in the preceding section, preferring to speak of complex emergency response. Leaving politics aside for the moment, we take up the next two categories: public worship and public merrymaking.
In these categories XU finds more hints as to its nature. XU has been called as a concept to respond to complex emergency, and it has been called to innovate in the spheres of public worship and public merrymaking.
Is XU an Organization?
It is not so wrong to say that XU is an informal organization.4 There is nothing that says anyone or anything is or is not part of it. Participation in XU is open to anyone, regardless of their identificatory attributes.
It can also be said that participation in XU is a matter of acts, not of persons. When we innovate in complex emergency beyond war, in public worship and merrymaking, we participate in XU. This theme can be further elaborated by again referencing Veblen’s writing on “exploit.” He writes:
exploit, so far as it results in an outcome useful to the agent, is the conversion to [the agent’s] own ends of energies previously directed to some other end by an other agent (see footnote 3)
The positing of XU is such a gesture of exploit, in that it groups together activities which are already taking place, and which have taken place throughout time and space. In this sense, XU predates its founding here, its conception as such.
The First Few Things…
Those are the first few things to know about Experimental Unit (XU). It takes its name from experimental units employed by militaries to test new powers and concepts, but it is no warfighting body. Experimental Unit is an informal organization dedicated to innovation in the spheres of emergency response, public worship, and public merrymaking. It is offered, and will be expounded upon, as a basis for working together which is adequate to present situations.
Further entries will begin to unfold on conceptual subtleties opened up here, for the consideration of you, the potential XU practitioner, in your own experiments…