The Practice of Everyday War

Abstract

This essay examines how art and visual culture participate in what it terms “the practice of everyday war”—the routinization of political violence across ordinary spaces and times, rather than its confinement to discrete battles or events. Taking Barton Gellman's 2022 Atlantic essay “January 6 Was Practice” as a point of departure, the author argues that the Capitol riot functioned less as an isolated event than as rehearsal for an ongoing authoritarian project, one whose consequences have deepened by 2026. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategy (spatial, top-down) and tactics (temporal, opportunistic) and Carl von Clausewitz's writings on “small war,” the essay traces how paramilitary violence—historically associated with irregulars and the “weak”—has been appropriated as a tool of state and reactionary power. The argument moves through three case studies. First, it analyzes photographs from January 6 taken inside the Capitol rotunda, where rioters clash beneath John Trumbull's monumental Revolutionary War paintings, arguing that the juxtaposition collapses supposedly discrete historical registers into a single continuum of “everyday war.” Second, it turns to Trumbull himself, reading his decades-long practice of picturing “1776”—and his fraught encounter with the French Revolution of 1789—as an early instance of art mobilizing history as ideological material. Third, the essay examines photographer An-My Lê's work, particularly Small Wars and 29 Palms, as counter-practices that expose the recursive, non-linear temporality binding past wars (Vietnam, the Civil War) to present and future militarism, without recourse to conventional antiwar rhetoric. Ultimately, the essay contends that art's engagement with war's imagery—whether complicit, critical, or ambiguous—reveals history itself as a kind of ideological arsenal, one weaponized anew amid the contemporary erosion of democratic norms.