Agamben K
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Modern surveillance reform is smoke and mirrors --- the state of exception will
continue to operate indefinitely
Douglas 9 (Jeremy – independent scholar, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and the state of
exception,” in Surveillance & Society, Volume 6, Number 1, 2009, p. 32-42,
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/3402/3365)
However, although many of the concepts and techniques we see at work in the camp are not fundamentally different today, not everything has remained the same.
The importance of a juridical- political system that acts according to the state of exception, or suspension of the law, is evident in the emergence of recent
totalitarian and ‘democratic’ permanent states of emergency; for example, the UK and the US have normalised the exception through the passing of ‘laws’
(Terrorism Act, Patriot Act, etc.) that essentially nullify the application of normal laws protecting human rights, while still holding them technically ‘in force’. We see
also that these ‘exceptional’ laws go hand in hand with increased surveillance, both of which are tactics that establish control of the population. Yet what remains to
be analysed is the relation(s) between surveillance, territory, and the state of exception - how does surveillance allow for the rise of the state of exception and the
camp? And, more broadly, how are all there concepts integrated in an art of government? Surveillance
must be regarded as the point at
which the camp and the bare of the state of exception intersect in the governmental control of the
population. Defining the Terms: Foucault and Agamben Although Michel Foucault wrote a book (Discipline and Punish) that dealt extensively with one
method of surveillance, the panoptic, his more useful contribution to the theory of surveillance comes from his study of ‘governmentality’, or the ‘art’ of governing.
In the course of his 1970s lectures at the College de France, Foucault underwent a significant shift in the emphasis of his theory, moving from the power- territory
relationship of sovereignty to the politico-economic governmentality of population; the concept of sovereignty concerned with maintaining power and territory is a
dated pre-modern concept, and what needs to be analysed now is the governing of a population though various circulatory (that is, relational) mechanisms: “it is
not expanse of land that contributes to the greatness of the state, but fertility and the number of men” (Fleury quoted in Foucault 2007, 323). In other words, what
is emerging in Foucault’s writings, beginning with The History of Sexuality Vol 1, is the concept of biopolitics: “the management of life rather than the menace of
death” (Foucault 1990, 143). Broadly, what is taking place in Foucault’s works and lectures in the mid to late 1970s is his description of the differences (not
transitions) between “sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management” (Foucault 2007, 107). The
essential goal of sovereignty is to
maintain power, which is achieved when laws are obeyed and the divine right of the throne is
reaffirmed. ‘Power’ is the essential defining component of sovereignty, while ‘government’ is more or
less just an administrative component within the sovereign state
- a component that is the function of the family; the family, oikos, in ancient Greece was the private
management (government) of economic matters where the father ensured the security, health, wealth, and goods of his wife and children, while the polis was the public realm where man realised his political significance in striving for “the good life”. The rise of government in the
sixteenth century is marked by this family government model being “applied to the state as a whole” (ibid, 93), as well as by the rise of “mercantilism” - the former not realizing its full scope and application until the eighteenth century and the latter being a stage of rasion d’etat between
sovereignty and governmentality. However, when the art of governing becomes the predominant ‘goal’ of the state in the eighteenth century, the family is relegated to the position of an “instrument” and population emerges as the “main target” (ibid, 108) of the government (territory is
the main target of sovereignty insofar as a sovereign defines itself according to its territory, while government defines itself in term of its population). With population as the central concern for government, other institutions and sites - such as territory, the family, security (military),
police, and discipline - all become “elements” or “instruments” in the management of the population - these biopolitical tactics are what primarily distinguish governmentality from sovereignty. Conduct and Subjectivization Foucault wants to situate bio-power in the multiplicity of
relations within the overarching structure of the state, and therefore not discard the notion of ‘power’ but instead couch it in terms of governmentality. Biopolitics is produced in the relations between biological life and political power (bio-power), which is possible when a population is
confronted with and in relation to the biopoliticizing (not to be confused with disciplining) techniques of institutions, territory, police, security, and surveillance; rather than positing a sovereign-people dialectic (which Agamben tends to do), Foucault wants to complicate the notion of
biopolitics by accounting for a state that “spreads it tentacles” (Virilio 1997, 12) through its various instruments and tactics. It seems as though, with the beginning of a governmentality discourse developing in the Security, Territory, Population course, Foucault feels he has said enough
about biopolitics as such and can now move towards the art and techniques of governmental and subjective “conduct”, in which biopolitics is implicit. Yet what emerges is, on the one hand, a theory of the top-down management of a population that is controlled through governmental
mechanisms such as statistics-guided surveillance and police practices, and, on the other hand, the bottom-up subjectivization of population through the regulation of actions confronted with state power relations; this may also be regarded as biopolitical population control and
individualizing discipline, respectively. These two streams of governmentality surface in Foucault’s later writings from time to time, but he never clearly reconciles the art of government and subjectivization. This subjective ‘conduct’ or ‘governing the self’ is a self-disciplining that is made
possible through the knowledge of oneself as ‘the other’, as the object of an unseen seer (as is discussed with the panoptic model in Discipline and Punish). This self-conduct, however, is framed in terms of the problematic of government that uses the power relation techniques of
governing others to govern themselves (Foucault 2000, 340-342); but again, where do these two points converge and differ? It seems as though we must look to surveillance to answer this question. We know that surveillance is certainly a governmental ‘technique’ for the management
and control of the population, but we also see that subjectivization is only possible via surveillance, as just mentioned with the panoptic model. However, panoptic surveillance is an ancient notion, developed at least as far back as EBII, sometime around 3000-2650BC (Yekutieli 2006, 78).
The relation between the seer and the subject is no longer that of a physical perspective from a point fixe, nor is it localised in a contained space, as with Bentham’s prison model. Rather, as Paul Virilio would argue, surveillance is making the traditionally confined space of the camp the
very centre of the city. However, before examining the juridical-political applications of this notion, we must understand Giorgio Agamben’s conception of biopolitics in terms of “bare life” and “the state of exception”. Redefining Biopolitics Following and ‘completing’ Foucault’s discussion
of biopolitics, Agamben seeks to further explore the relation between state power and life, not in terms of governmentality, but rather, in terms of sovereign power. That is, what affect(s) does the state have upon the lives of citizens in relations of power and control? In a sense,
Agamben’s position is formulated in accordance with what Arendt and Foucault failed to do: Agamben completes Arendt’s discussion of totalitarian power, “in which a biop olitical perspective is altogether lacking” (Agamben 1998, 4), and completes Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics,
which fails to address the most paradigmatic examples of modern biopolitics, such totalitarianism and the camp. This revision of Arendt and Foucault is achieved through the exemplification of the state of exception and bare life, which find their ultimate realizatio n in modern examples of
the camp. But first, it is necessary to understand how Agamben arrives at this conclusion. In Politics, Aristotle distinguishes between natural, simple life , Zoe, and political life, bios. Zoe is private life confined to the home, oikos, while bios is life that exists in the public (political) realm of
the city, the polis; the former is life regulated by the economy of the family, while the latter is “good life” regulated by the state. It appears, then, that Zoe and bios are mutually exclusive, and man moves from an animal life to a distinct political life, as Aristotle seems to argue. Foucault
picks up on this Aristotelian animal/political life when he writes of the “threshold of biological modernity” (Foucault 1990, 143), in The History of Sexuality, and modifies it to reflect the transition from a politics of the power-limit of death to the politicization of biological (or, more
accurately, zoological - i.e. Zoe-logical) life: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal [Zoe] with the additional capacity for a political existence [bios]; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (ibid). The
distinction between Zoe and bios is called into question; what were once two distinct forms of life are now indistinguishable - biology has become political and politics has become biological, giving rise to biopolitics. Agamben’s claim, however, is that Foucault, Arendt, and others have
misread Aristotle; in interpreting Aristotle, they believe that “the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family” (Arendt 1998, 24, author’s italics). On the
contrary, the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of life in politics - that is, the production of a biopolitcal life - is the “original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben 1998, 6). Although Aristotle appears to present zoe and bios as polar forms of life - animal versus political - he provides
indications that the supposed exclusion of natural life from the political realm is at the same time its inclusion, and therefore the originary biopolitical act: “we may say that while [the polis] grows for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life” (Aristotle quoted in Politics,
Metaphysics, and Death, 3). This implies, as Agamben notes, that natural life had to “transform” itself into political life; political life is not “in direct opposition” to natural life, then, but is born of it. The very notion of bios is itself only possible through its inclusion of zoe - “Nation-state
means a state that makes nativity or birth (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty” (Agamben 1998, 20); biopolitics is this indistinction between private life and public life, an “undecidability...between life and law” (Agam ben 2005, 86). Bare Life and the State of
Exception This conception of biopolitics as an ancient and founding notion of sovereignty needs to be distinguished from what Agamben terms “bare life” or “homo sacer” (life that may be killed but not sacrificed). Biopolitical life, as mentioned above, is still within the juridical-political
realm, but bare life is that which is banished from the polis. It is not pure political life as such, but a life that exists at the threshold between zoe and bios. Bare life is the indistinguishability between natural life and political life - a life that exists neither for the sake of politics nor for the
sake of life: “bare life.. .dwells in the no-man’s-land between the home and the city” (Agamben 1998, 90). It is a life that is banished from politics - outside of law - but included in its exclusion - still within the ‘force of law’: The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to
itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational [i.e. bare life]. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it - at once excluded and
included, removed and at the same time captured. (ibid, 110) How is this possible? How can bare life be excluded and included? What implications would this have? In order to understand how bare life is produced and how it can exists both within and outside of the polis, it is necessary
to introduce another concept: state of exception. This notion is derived, by in large, from Carl Schmitt’s book Political Theology, as well as from a fairly extensive debate between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt concerning the nature of the state of exception. The state of exception is a
“suspension of law”, which is usually instituted during a period of war or another state of emergency: “The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like” (Schmitt 1922,
6). Under the state of exception there becomes a ‘threshold’ between law that is in the norm but is suspended and law that is not the norm - i.e. not necessarily part of the juridical order - but is in force; so, in the state of exception there appears this “ambiguous and uncertain zone in
which de facto proceedings, which are themselves extra- or antijuridical, pass over into law, and juridical norms blur with the mere fact - that is, a threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable” (Agamben 2005, 29). What needs to be underlined here is the relation between
the state of exception and bare life. This point is absolutely crucial for Agamben and for understanding the role of governmental surveillance: the state of exception opens up the possibility of bare life and of the camp, where bare life is outside law but constantly exposed to violence and
“unsanctionable killing” (Agamben 1994, 82). Agamben’s position can be understood in the triadic relation ‘state of exception-camp-bare life’; the ultimate power of the sovereign, and the complete dissolution of democracy into totalitarianism - two political systems that, according to
Agamben, already have an “inner solidarity” (ibid, 10) - happens at the point when the state of exception becomes the rule and the camp emerges as the permanent realization of the indistinguishability between violence and law, to which we all, as homines sacri, are exposed. The
paradigmatic example is, of course, Nazi Germany; but what remains to be seen is how this triad can be applied to our current political milieu. The Potentiality of/for Violence Perhaps the closest Agamben comes to discussing the relations between the state of exception and surveillance
is his 11th January 2004 article in Le Monde, entitled, “No to Bio-Political Tattooing” (Agamben, 2004). This article comes as a result of Agamben’s cancellation of a course he was scheduled to teach at New York University that March. The reason he cancelled the course was because he
modern security and
surveillance techniques are emerging as the new paradigm (though not to the extent of the camp) of the state of
exception, in which the exception has become the rule: There has been an attempt the last few years to
convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that
had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional. Thus, no one is unaware that the control
exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached
was denied entry to the US as a result of his refusal to provide biometric data as part of post-9/11 US security measures. The resulting article is mostly a brief, simplistic version of his book Homo Sacer, but Agamben does imply that
previously unimaginable levels. (Agamben 2004) Electronic and biometric surveillance are the tactics through which the
government is creating a space in which the exception is routine practice. The biopolitical implication of
surveillance is the universalization of bare life: “History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied
later to the rest of the citizenry” (ibid). These new control measures have created a situation in which not only is there
no clear distinction between private and political life, but there is no fundamental claim, or right, to a
political life as such - not even for citizens from birth; thus, the originary biopolitical act that inscribes life
as political from birth is more and more a potential de-politicization and ban from the political realm. We
are all exposed to the stateless potentiality of a bare life excluded from the political realm, but not outside the
violence of the law (and therefore still included): “states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the
point that it's
humanity itself that has become the dangerous class” (ibid). Making people suspects is
equivalent to making people bare life - it is the governmental (a Foucauldian governmentality rather than an Agambenian
sovereignty I would argue) production of a life exposed to the pure potentiality of the state of exception: “the sovereign
ban, which applies to the exception in no longer applying, corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains itself in relation to actuality precisely
through its ability not to be” (Agamben 1994, 46). Surveillance
is the technique that opens up this potentiality, which
allows for the normalization of the exception. In this particular instance - i.e. biometric data collection and surveillance in the US - the
state of exception as a permanent form of governmentality and the universalization of homines sacri has been brought into existence though the USA Patriot Act
and the Patriot Act II . I have used
the term ‘potentiality’ a number of times precisely to point to the state in which the citizens (or, more broadly,
the population) of a number of countries find themselves. The potentiality I want to analyse can follow two directions: it is the potentiality to be stripped
of citizenship, to be banned, to be abandoned to the law, and to be subjected to political violence, or it is the
potentiality for the government to exercise violence and exceptional law upon the population. So, this potentiality can be both negative and
positive. Although violence becomes indistinguishable from law - or, more specifically, indistinguishable from
surveillance and control - in the state of exception, what needs to be emphasised is that it is not a power relation of
pure violence, but rather, of potential violence. It is important, as Benjamin notes in “Critique of Violence”, to understand that
violence is a function of the power mechanisms of the government (although Benjamin would probably say ‘sovereign’):
“the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of
preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law,
threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law” (Benjamin 1933, 136). The state of exception arises when the population
threatens to take violence away from the law - the
population (rather than individuals per se) are regulated by surveillance methods,
in order to ensure that the ‘norm’ of the law is not threatened; and for this norm to remain ‘in force’ an indefinite period of state
of exception is often exercised, as we see with the example of the USA Patriot Act. The American State of Exception Surveillance and the External 'Threat' This
politics of potentiality is created through the de facto ‘laws’ of state of exception legislation like the Patriot Act. Looking at actual parts of the Act, we can see that it
exemplifies the state of emergency referred to by Agamben et al.; the
‘normal’ law of the state is not abolished but its
“application is suspended” so that it still technically “remains in force” (Agamben 2003, 31). As such, the
suspension of the normal application of the law is done “on the basis of its right of self-preservation”
(Schmitt 1985, 12), so that the exception is that which must produce and guarantee the norm. Obviously then the state of exception is not intended to be anything
more than a temporary safeguarding of normal law. In fact, there can be no ‘normal’ law without the state of exception: “ the
state of exception
allows for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order” (Agamben 1999, 48). The use of the state of emergency to
protect the normality of the legal order dates back at least as far as the Roman Empire. Whenever the Senate believed the state to be in danger, they could
implement the iustitium, which allowed for the consuls “to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the state” (Agamben 2005, 41).
Looking back at the Judean Roman camp example, the detention of the Jews could be seen as enacted during an iustitium when Jewish rebelliousness was
endangering the newly acquired Roman providence of Judea. The iustitium, as with other examples of the state of exception, is a void in which the “suspension of
the law” creates a zone that evades all legal definition. Thus, the state of exception is neither within nor outside of jurisprudence - it is “situated in an absolute nonplace with respect to the law” (ibid, 50-51). This ‘non-place’, however, also has literal geographic implications - the ‘place’ of the camp is no longer necessary for
creating bare life. Rather, the mutually operative surveillance and state of exception allow for a city-camp, which maintains control and suspicion over a population
without necessitating borders. But, we must distinguish - and this is relevant for the Roman camp example - between the functionality and mechanization of camps
(see abstract). For example, the Roman camp, prison, border camp, work camp, etc. all have a different functionality - from the suppression of a rebellion to idle
detention - but the mechanizations they employ to carry out this functionality are the same - to monitor and maintain control over a given population by creating
bare life (the reason the population is in a camp in the first place is surprisingly irrelevant). Although the functionality of camps may differ, I want to emphasize that
the mechanizations of power will always employ a structure of surveillance; this is the link between ancient and modern camps. Moving away from ancient
examples of the state of exception and looking at the current American judicial-political situation, Agamben’s central argument in Homo Sacer and State of
Exception is that modern
politics are defined by the permanence of a state of exception in which the exception
becomes the rule, or the norm. An example of this exception-as-the-rule can be seen in an American 2006 CRS Report for Congress on national emergency
powers: “those authorities available to the executive in time of national crisis or exigency have, since the time of the Lincoln Administration, come to be increasingly
rooted in statutory law” (Relyea 2006, 2, author’s italics). It continues: Under
the powers delegated by such statutes [constitutional law,
statutory law, and congressional delegations], the President may seize property, organize and control the means of
production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all
transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a
variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens. (ibid, 4, author’s italics). This report alludes to biopolitical powers for one, but also the
ways in which the state of emergency is implemented through a variety of statutes, and not instituted as one bill or act that can be in or out of force en bloc. Rather,
it is becoming more difficult to identify juridical documents that provide state of exception powers that
are clearly distinguishable from ‘normal’ law. The Patriot Act, to be sure, is clearly identifiable from ‘normal’ US law, but The Domestic
Security Enhancement Act 2003 was not passed under that name (nor under the alias ‘Patriot Act II’), but was tacked on to other Senate Bills piecemeal. For
example, some enhanced surveillance measures were not passed under the Patriot Act, but were passed into US Code - under title 50, chapter 36, subchapter I, §
1802 of the US Code: “Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order
under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year”. So, ‘ snooping’
surveillance tactics will still be
part of ‘normal’ law even if the Patriot Act is not renewed; this is what Agamben means when he writes
of the “permanent state of emergency” (Agamben 2005, 2).
There are a few sections of the Patriot Act that are worth discussing in order to demonstrate the modern state of exception, as well as its link
to surveillance and the camp. Under Section 412 of the Act, entitled “Mandatory detention of suspected terrorists”, the Attorney General has the power “to certify that an alien meets the criteria of the terrorism grounds of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or is engaged in any other
activity that endangers the national security of the United States, upon a ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ standard, and take such aliens into custody”. The Attorney General must review the detention every six months and determine if the alien is to remain in detention because of a
continued risk to security. But what remains ambiguous, and allows for the indistinction between law and violence and between police and sovereignty, is this “reasonable grounds to believe standard”. Suffice it to say, without going into greater depth, this ‘standard’ is grounds for racial
profiling and the detention of political opponents. Also, the detention of aliens on a ‘belief’ is the production of bare life, since it is the stripping of rights without reference to a violation under ‘normal’ law; in other words, these “suspected terrorists” are detained without having done
anything wrong, but must be situated in the state of exception camp for those who may threaten the ‘normal’ force of the law - this is the aforementioned void, or ‘non¬place’, of the law. Since these aliens cannot be detained under the normal law, a camp of suspects must emerge in a
national security emergency. What is also telling about this Act is that the ten Titles may be seen as different governmental tactics, networked in one state of emergency act; Titles include, “Enhancing Domestic Security against Terrorism”, “Protecting the Border”, “Strengthening the
Criminal Laws against Terrorism”, and “Increased Information Sharing for Critical Infrastructure Protection”. Foucault would be quick to point out that this Act characterizes the population conducting tactics that define governmentality: policing, disciplining, and security. However, Title II,
“Enhanced Surveillance Procedures”, not only becomes implicit in many of the other areas of the act that discuss “intelligence” and “security”, but also allows the Act to go beyond the protection of the ‘norm’ in a sovereign nation-state through foreign surveillance provisions. Section 214
functions in collaboration with and amends several parts of the Foreign Intelligence Service Act 1978 (FISA) in order to allow for international surveillance activities in order identify suspected terrorists: during periods of emergency (i.e. state of exception), the US invests itself with the
power to collect “foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or information to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities” (Sec. 214(b) (1)). The detention and surveillance of aliens continues though other mechanisms of
jurisprudence, which, as mentioned, are becoming normalised through bills, acts, etc. that are not designed as state of emergency ‘law’ per se. On 13th November 2001, George W. Bush issued a military order for the “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War
Against Terrorism”; by ‘certain’ this order means anyone “believed” to be associated with al Qaida (PoTUS, 2001). Like with Section 412 of the Patriot Act, suspected terrorists are to be detained without a court order. Similarly, under the Terrorism Act 2000 in the UK, “A constable may
arrest without a warrant a person whom he reasonably suspects to be a terrorist” (Section 41(1)). As with the US, any person detained under this Act can remain in detainment following and pending a review (Schedule 8, Part II). The Disappearance of Citizenship What we have been
discussing thus far applies to the “indefinite” and “mandatory” detention of aliens, but the Patriot Act and the Terrorism Ac t contain various sections on increased surveillance measures that target aliens and native citizens alike. These surveillance activities include the collection of DNA
from anyone detained for any offence or suspected of terrorism, phone taps, wiretaps for electronic communications, the collection of individual library records (Section 215; this Section in particular has received heavy criticism and debate), the collection of banking and financial records,
and other indirect surveillance methods, such as the collection of biometric data at US borders (as Agamben experienced). However, these universal surveillance methods become much more significant when we consider the proposed increased governmental powers outlined in the
Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003 (alias, Patriot Act II). Under Section 501 of Patriot Act II the “mandatory dentition” of aliens suspected of terrorism extends to include Americans, who ca n also be stripped of their citizenship and made stateless detainees. As Gore Vidal remarks,
“under Patriot Act I only foreigners were denied due process of law as well as subject to arbitrary deportation...Patriot Act II now includes American citizens in the same category, thus eliminating in one great erasure the Bill of Rights” (Vidal 2003). Section 501, “Expatriation of Terrorists”,
of the Act states: This provision (i.e. Section 501) would amend 8 U.S.C. § 1481 to make clear that, just as an American can relinquish his citizenship by serving in a hostile foreign army, so can he relinquish his citizenship by serving in a hostile terrorist organization. Specifically, an
American could be expatriated if, with the intent to relinquish nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a "terrorist organization,” if that group is engaged in hostilities against the United States. With the power
proposed in this section of the Patriot Act II, the government would be able to produce bare life with both aliens and American citizens - “a process leading to the disappearance of citizenship by transforming the residents into ‘foreigners within’, a new sort of untouchable [homo sacer],
in the transpolitical and anational state where the living are nothing more than the ‘living dead’” (Virilio 2005, 165). We have seen how a permanent state of emergency creates a situation in which foreign residents or visitors can be detained without a court order for a n indefinite period
of time; even greater governmental powers are now aiming at expanding this exposure to the pure power of the juridical-political system to citizens as well. Citizenship and political significance are becoming less fundamental and inalienable ri ghts and more categorizations that are only
maintained though blind adherence to so-called democratic polices, which look more and more like a dictatorial structure (see: Arendt 1973). What should also be mentioned is the production of bare life in foreign states; or, conversely, the loss of political rights to another state power
within one’s own country. The power to detain and expose individuals to pure violence and even death is characteristic of the CIA’s and MI5’s borderless security, policing and surveillance mechanisms, which becomes more evident with the Patriot Act and FISA. This may be seen as
grounds for a debate between sovereignty and governmentality. Is sovereignty concerned, above all, with the territorial nation-state, as Foucault argues (Foucault 2007, 14)? Or, is sovereignty more accurately defined as that which decides on the exception, as Schmitt and Agamben
maintain? Neither of these questions can be properly answered until we understand the relations between sovereignty and foreign states. That is to say, is sovereignty only possible in a contained nation-state, or is it something broader that can be applied to foreign nations and even to
the point of being able to declare a state of exception in a foreign land? But if this latter situation is possible - the suspension of other sovereigns’ law - maybe it is something that should, as Foucault insists, be called ‘governmentality’. What should be understood as common to both
conceptions of sovereignty and governmentality, however, is the production of camp, in which the state of exception reaches its ultimate realization. It should be clear that the Patriot Act and other juridical-political provisions precondition and allow for the continued existence of the
The difficulty with theorizing surveillance is that it cannot be done positivistically - it needs to be
situated within a state system that has a biopolitical relationship with the population through a network
of various techniques and conducting mechanisms. Failing to do so will result in a superficial study of surveillance that neglects the crux
camp. Conclusion
of governmental tactics. On the other hand, accounting for the various relations that condition and require surveillance can make theoretical examinations appear
as though they are not ‘about’ surveillance. But this is certainly not the case. Before we can even ask why a state uses surveillance mechanisms, we need to define
what state structure we are talking about. Following Foucault, governmentality
best describes our current political situation, as
it is above all concerned with managing the internal structure of the state according to a
biopoliticization of the population, rather than maintaining the power over life and death, as is characteristic of sovereign politics.
Governmentality is literally an ‘art’ of governing, in which the population is ‘conducted’ through various relations and tactics employed by the state, such as
institutions, security, statistics, and surveillance. So, governmentality is the structure in which surveillance can operate as one of the arms of state power. When we
move towards the juridical-political situation of the state of exception, we see another area in which surveillance plays a crucial biopolitical role. The
use of
exceptional legal measures in order to protect the ‘normal’ force of law is what defines the state of
exception. The ‘normal’ law that is suspended is often that which guarantees the rights and the citizenship of foreign and national citizens; thus, under an
exceptional juridical situation, individuals with no political significance are produced: bare life. The USA Patriot Act (among other documents) embodies this loss of
rights, production of bare life, and increased surveillance based on a perceived national threat. The
state of exception, Agamben argues, is
becoming more and more the normal course of politics - this is nowhere more exemplary than in the
camp. The camp is the place where bare life is produced and the exception becomes the rule. Yet, the Roman camp in Judea shows us that the emersion of
surveillance in a camp-‘state of exception’- territory structure is nothing new. What is primarily ‘modern’ is not biopolitics (Foucault) or the camp (Agamben), but
the governmental control of the disappearance of citizenship. With
digital technology, the erasure of a definite ‘here’ or ‘there’
means that the localised camp is no longer a paradigmatic ‘place’ where the limit of the state of
exception is realised; rather, the non-place of a population in constant movement is what defines the new non-place of the city camp. Thus,
surveillance is deeply imbedded in and necessary for the governmental system that seeks to be instantly
aware of any potential threats to the state so that it can quash those threats by depoliticizing
‘dangerous’ portions of the population and exposing them to the pure potentiality of the ‘management’
of life.
Refuse to draw lines between what forms of surveilling the population are
appropriate --- instead, refuse the ethic of sovereign power which demands such
control
Edkins and Pin-Fat 5 (Jenny – Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and
Veronique – Senior Lecturer in politics at Manchester University, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power
and Relations of Violence,” in Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005, Volume 34, p. 14,
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/34/1/1.full.pdf)
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoeand bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms.
It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of
administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life.
In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination
of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of
political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following
Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between forms of life (and
indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a properly
political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign
power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power
relation by contesting sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the
sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move
outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but
also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign
power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this
is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even
explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such
strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating
such violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse
sovereign power’s line-drawing ‘ethos’, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare
life.
Security logic guarantees that the world lives in a state of constant crisis and becomes
the justification for a violent state of exception that reduces us to bare life
Agamben 14 (Giorgio – Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collège International de
Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of
Destituent Power,” transcript of lecture delivered by Agamben in Athens, 11-16-13, published on
Roarmag, 2-4-14, http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/)
A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where
it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not only non-democratic, but
that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that European society today is no longer a political society; it is something entirely new,
for which we lack a proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy. Let me begin with a
concept which seems, starting
from September 2001, to have replaced any other political notion: security. As you know, the formula “for
security reasons” functions today in any domain, from everyday life to international conflicts, as a
codeword in order to impose measures that the people have no reason to accept. I will try to show that the real
purpose of the security measures is not, as it is currently assumed, to prevent dangers, troubles or even
catastrophes. I will be consequently obliged to make a short genealogy of the concept of “security”. A Permanent State of Exception One possible way to
sketch such a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman
principle Salus publica suprema lex – public safety is the highest law — and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle that necessity does not
acknowledge any law, with the comités de salut publique during French revolution and finally with article 48 of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground
for the Nazi regime. Such a genealogy is certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the security apparatuses and measures
which are familiar to us. While
the state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure, which
was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security
reasons constitute today a permanent technology of government. When in 2003 I published a book in which I tried to show
precisely how the state of exception was becoming in Western democracies a normal system of government, I could not imagine that my diagnosis would prove so
accurate. The
only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler took power in February 1933, he
immediately proclaimed a decree suspending the articles of the Weimar constitution concerning
personal liberties. The decree was never revoked, so that the entire Third Reich can be considered as a
state of exception which lasted twelve years. What is happening today is still different. A formal state of
exception is not declared and we see instead that vague non-juridical notions — like the security
reasons — are used to install a stable state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly
identifiable danger. An example of such non-juridical notions which are used as emergency producing
factors is the concept of crisis. Besides the juridical meaning of judgment in a trial, two semantic traditions converge in the
history of this term which, as is evident for you, comes from the Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one. In the medical tradition, crisis means
the moment in which the doctor has to judge, to decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days in which this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the
decisive days. In theology, crisis is the Last Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can see, what
is essential in both
traditions is the connection with a certain moment in time. In the present usage of the term, it is
precisely this connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement, is split from its temporal index and
coincides now with the chronological course of time, so that — not only in economics and politics — but in every aspect
of social life, the crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of government. Consequently,
the capability to decide once for all disappears and the continuous decision-making process decides
nothing. To state it in paradoxical terms, we could say that, having to face a continuous state of exception, the government
tends to take the form of a perpetual coup d’état. By the way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what happens here in
Greece as well as in Italy, where to govern means to make a continuous series of small coups d’état. Governing the Effects This is why I think that, in order to
understand the peculiar governmentality under which we live, the
paradigm of the state of exception is not entirely adequate. I
will therefore follow Michel Foucault’s suggestion and investigate the origin of the concept of security in the beginning of modern economy, by François Quesnais
and the Physiocrates, whose influence on modern governmentality could not be overestimated. Starting with Westphalia treaty, the great absolutist European
states begin to introduce in their political discourse the idea that the sovereign has to take care of its subjects’ security. But Quesnay is the first to establish security
(sureté) as the central notion in the theory of government — and this in a very peculiar way. One of the main problems governments had to cope with at the time
was the problem of famines. Before
Quesnay, the usual methodology was trying to prevent famines through the
creation of public granaries and forbidding the exportation of cereals. Both these measures had negative effects on
production. Quesnay’s idea was to reverse the process: instead of trying to prevent famines, he decided to let
them happen and to be able to govern them once they occurred, liberalizing both internal and foreign exchanges. “To govern”
retains here its etymological cybernetic meaning: a good kybernes, a good pilot can’t avoid tempests, but if a tempest occures he must be able to govern his boat,
using the force of waves and winds for navigation. This
is the meaning of the famous motto laisser faire, laissez passer: it is not only
the catchword of economic liberalism; it is a paradigm of government, which conceives of security (sureté, in Quesnay’s words)
not as the prevention of troubles, but rather as the ability to govern and guide them in the right
direction once they take place. We should not neglect the philosophical implications of this reversal. It
means an epochal transformation in the very idea of government, which overturns the traditional
hierarchical relation between causes and effects. Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is safer and more useful to try
to govern the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governmentality. The ancien
regime aimed to rule the causes; modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom applies to every domain, from
economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to
rule the causes, they only want to govern the effects. And Quesnay’s
theorem makes also understandable a fact which seems
otherwise inexplicable: I mean the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal paradigm in the
economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police control. If government aims
for the effects and not the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.
Vote NEG to utilize the 1AC’s politics of biopolitical crisis as an impetus for radical
transformation
Prozorov 10 (Sergei – Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why
Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” in Philosophy Social Criticism, Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1056-1058,
November 2010, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract)
The second principle of Agamben’s optimism is best summed up by Ho ̈lderlin’s phrase, made famous by Heidegger: ‘where
danger grows, grows
saving power also’.20 Accord- ing to Agamben, radical global transformation is actually made possible by nothing
other than the unfolding of biopolitical nihilism itself to its extreme point of vacuity. On a number of occasions in
different contexts, Agamben has asserted the possibility of a radi- cally different form-of-life on the basis of
precisely the same things that he initially set out to criticize. Agamben paints a convincingly gloomy
picture of the present state of things only to undertake a majestic reversal at the end, finding hope
and conviction in the very despair that engulfs us.21 Our very destitution thereby turns out be the
condition for the possibility of a completely different life, whose description is in turn entirely devoid
of fantastic mirages. Instead, as Agamben repeatedly emphasizes, in the redeemed world ‘everything will
be as is now, just a little different’,22 no momentous transformation will take place aside from a ‘small
displacement’ that will nonetheless make all the difference. While we shall deal with this ‘small displacement’ in the follow- ing
section, let us now elaborate the logic of redemption through the traversal of ‘danger’ in more detail. It is evident that the danger at issue in Agamben’s
work is nihilism in its dual form of the sovereign ban and the capitalist spectacle. If, as we have shown in the previous sec- tion, the reign of
nihilism is general and complete, we may be optimistic about the pos- sibility of jamming its entire
apparatus since there is nothing in it that offers an alternative to the present ‘double subjection’ . Yet,
where are we to draw resources for such a global transformation? It would be easy to misread Agamben as an utterly utopian
thinker, whose intentions may be good and whose criticism of the present may be valid if exaggerated,
but whose solutions are completely implausible if not outright embarras- sing.23 Nonetheless, we must
rigorously distinguish Agamben’s approach from utopian- ism. As Foucault has argued, utopias derive their
attraction from their discursive structure of a fabula, which makes it possible to describe in great detail a better way of life, precisely
because it is manifestly impossible.24 While utopian thought easily pro- vides us with elaborate visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, since its site
is by definition a non-place. In contrast, Agamben’s
works tell us quite little about life in a community of happy life
that has done away with the state form, but are remark- ably concrete about the practices that are
constitutive of this community, precisely because these practices require nothing that would be
extrinsic to the contemporary condition of biopolitical nihilism. Thus, Agamben’s coming politics is
manifestly anti-utopian and draws all its resources from the condition of contemporary nihilism.
Moreover, this nihilism is the only possible resource for this politics, which would otherwise be doomed to continuing the work of negation, vainly applying it to
nihilism itself. Given the totality of contemporary biopolitical nihilism, any
‘positive’ project of transformation would come down
to the negation of negativity itself. Yet, as Agamben demonstrates conclusively in Language and Death, nothing is more nihilistic
than a negation of nihilism.25 Any project that remains oblivious to the extent to which its valorized
positive forms have already been devalued and their content evacuated would only succeed in
plunging us deeper into nihilism. As Heidegger adds in his commentary on Ho ̈lderlin, ‘It may be that any other salvation
than that, which comes from where the danger is, is still within non-safety’.26 Moreover, as Roberto Esposito’s work on
the par- adox of immunity in biopolitics demonstrates, any attempt to combat danger through ‘negative protection’
(immunization) that seeks to mediate the immediacy of life through extrinsic principles (sovereignty,
liberty, property) necessarily introjects within the social realm the very negativity that it claims to battle,
so that biopolitics is always at risk of collapsing into thanatopolitics.27 In contrast, Agamben’s coming politics
does not attempt to introduce anything new or ‘positive’ into the condition of nihilism but to use this
condition itself in order to reappropriate human existence from its biopolitical confinement.28 Thus,
while the aporia of the negation of negativity might lead other thinkers to res- ignation about the
possibilities of political praxis, it actually enhances Agamben’s opti- mism. Renouncing any project of
reconstructing social life on the basis of positive principles, his work illuminates the way the unfolding
of biopolitical nihilism itself pro- duces the conditions of possibility for radical transformation. We can now see
that the state of total crisis that Agamben has diagnosed must be understood in the strict medical sense. In pre-modern medicine, the crisis of the disease is its
kairos, the moment in which the disease truly manifests itself and allows for the doctor’s intervention that might finally defeat it.29 For this reason, the
crisis
is not something to be feared and avoided but an opportunity that must be seized. Similarly, insofar as the
sovereign state of excep- tion and the absolutization of exchange-value completely empty out any
content of pos- itive forms-of-life, the contemporary biopolitical apparatus prepares its self-destruction
by fully manifesting its own vacuity.
2nc topshelf
turns case
The axiom of security has depoliticized society and generated a permanent state of
exception, permitting the extermination of all entities under the cover of political and
economic necessity --- ecological catastrophe, torture, enslavement, and military
conflict are the end-points of a politics built on liberal economics and unprecedented
state and police control --- that’s Agamben
The plan reifies the failed logics at the foundation of the surveillance state --FIRST IS PRE-EMPTION: scenario planning results in threat creation because it relies on
turning possiblities into actualities
Massumi 15 (Brian – Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal, “The Remains of the
Day,” in Emotions, Politics and War, Ed. Åhäll and Gregory, 2015)
This isn't just stupidity or faulty reasoning. There is a perverse logic to it. Because if you accept that it's paramount to respond to threat, and that you have to act in
response to it even if it has not yet fully emerged, or even if it is hasn't really even begun to emerge, then you're facing a real conundrum. If you wait for the
emergence, you'll have waited too long -- too late. A
terrorist threat can strike like lightning. Like lightning it can strike anywhere
and any time. But worse than lightning, it can strike anywhere at any time in any guise. This time it might be planes crashing into
buildings. Next time it might be an improvised explosive device. Or a bomb in a subway. Or anthrax in
the mail. No one knows. This only makes the urgency of action all the more acute. Faced with urgent
need to act in the face of the unknown-unknown of a threat that has not yet emerged, there is only one
reasonable thing to do: flush it out. Poke the soft tissue. Prod the terrain. Stir things up and see what starts to emerge.
Create the conditions for the emergence of threat. Start the threat on the way to becoming a clear and
present danger, and then nip it in the bud with your superior rapid-response capabilities. Make it real so
you can really eliminate it. I'm not saying that the Bush administration consciously decided to make Iraq a staging ground for terrorism. I'm only
saying that the fact that their preemptive actions did in fact do that fits perfectly into the logic of preemption, and says something fundamental about what that
logic implies. It
is fundamental to the logic of preemption to produce what it is designed to avoid. That is the only
way to give its urgent need to "go kinetic" in response to threat something positive to attack. This is what distinguishes preemption from the logic presiding over the
previous age of conflict, the Cold War. The logic of the Cold War was deterrence: making something not happen. The goal, faced with the clear and present danger
of nuclear Armageddon, was to hold it in potential, to make sure the threat was never realized, precisely by refraining from preemptive attack. What was
fundamental to the logic of deterrence was the impossibility of a first strike – exactly what preemption requires. Deterrence
exercises a negative
power. In a way, it's logic is the inverse of the logic of preemption. Its aim is to prevent the unthinkable from happening by
transforming a clear and present danger into a threat, then to hold the threat in abeyance, so that it continues to loom over the present indefinitely, so that it
doesn't follow any action path back to the future. The aim of deterrence aim was to suspend threat. Preemption, by contrast, suspends
the
present. It puts us and our actions in that conditional time-loop of the would have/could have. It hangs us on
a thread of futurity. It does this in order to make the would-have-been/could-have-been a "will-have-been-in-any-case." The job of preemption is to
translate the unknown-unknown into a foregone conclusion. Preemption always will have been right,
because it exercises a positive power, a reality-producing power to make things emerge. There is a word for a
reasoning that is always right regardless of the objective situation, and that always leads a foregone conclusion in any case. The word is tautological. The logic of
preemption is a tautological logic. But that's just the half of it. The
logic of preemption is a tautological logic that has the
power to produce the reality to which it responds. In spite of being tautological, or because of the particular way it is tautological,
preemption works. It operates. It operationalizes the future of threat in a way that really, positively produces a
future. It is an operative logic. I call an operative logic that is positively productive of what will really come to be, an ontopower – "onto-" meaning being. An
ontopower is a power that makes things come to be: that moves a futurity felt in the present, into a
presence in the future. When threat becomes effectively tautological, and power becomes ontopower, everything has changed. We've entered a brave
new world, a new regime of power, and a new political era And yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In a recent book, Andrew Bacevich, a lifelong military careerist turned military critic, laments that "since taking office, President Obama has acted on many fronts to adjust the way the United States
exercized that leadership. Yet these adjustments have seldom risen above the cosmetic. … The
global war on terror [begun by Bush has
not only] continued [under Obama] .. it has metastasized." It has turned cancerous. It has turned into a selfdriving tendency that has swept Obama up in it. The operative logic of preemption is not a logic he has
– it has him. It has proven itself a self-propagating historical force, an operative historical logic whose
"rightness" is still, as always, a foregone conclusion. It has proven its ability to continue, as a tendency, across the break between
administrations and the changes on the level of explicitly stated doctrine. I will briefly go into how Bush's 9-11-fueled-"everything-changed" is now Obama's "more
off the same," despite the differences in doctrine, the change in the cast of characters, and the obvious differences in personal quality and leadership style. But
before I do that, I want to draw out a bit more some of the implications of the recentering of war and politics on threat. On the way, I want to respond to an
objection I've left my account open to. The example of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that was central to my argument that preemptive power is a productive power is just one
example. In many eyes it might seem a weak one, since it could be laid to unforeseen collateral effects, and dismissed as a mere anomaly or accident, or simply a
product of a miscalculation. The point I want to make is that in
the operative logic of preemption more-or-less unforeseen
effects are precisely what is and must be produced. If the situation is really one full of unknownunknowns, in a perpetually crisis-ridden, ungraspably complex, increasingly chaotic world, then unforeseen effects
will always accompany any action carried out according to any logic. That's a corrollary of the foregone conclusion. What's
particular about preemption is that makes a virtue of this. It turns this problem into something positive as well. It turns it into
a mechanism that fosters its own continuation and proliferation. It can't make the unknown-unknown known. It can't pre-form
or fore-see the exact nature of the reality it will produce. But if it is ready with fast-adapting rapid response capabilities, it can field the effects it
brings into being, by immediately going kinetic in a follow-up action. When it flushes out threat, it can contrive to keep the
emergence within parameters it can handle, more-or-less. There will be threat again. But if all goes well it will be in more controllable parameters.
Preemption can then re-legitimate itself affectively, and redeploy. In this way, to use the military theory jargon, the
operative logic of preemption "leverages" uncertainty. What preemptive power must do is remain
poised to go kinetic again and again, in serial response to the exercise of its own ontopower. Every time it acts,
it must already be poising itself to act again, with equal urgency. In that way, each of its actions will contain within it the seeds of
the next action, and that action, the action after, so that the deployment of preemption cascades,
bringing its affective legitimation by threat with it, step by step. Preemptive action has become selfdriving. It only stands to reason that if terrorist threat is ever-present and proliferates in unforeseen ways, then the
power mobilized against it must be similarly ever-present and proliferating. ow could anyone argue that we shouldn't
be capable of fielding uncertainty? We must always be poised for threat. We must assume the posture -- even if the stated doctrine has changed. If we sit on our
hands, all it will take to delegitimate a government would be another terror attack that happened on its watch. No
government can afford not to
be in a posture of preemption. We must assume the posture at every moment – we must be poised to go kinetic at a moment's notice, whenever
and wherever in the world that threat is felt to loom. Whenever and wherever. The realignment on time I mentioned earlier ends up driving a a tendency for the
logic set in motion to turn space-filling. The
operative logic of preemptive is not only self-driving; it is self-expanding. We
was in fact used as a terror training ground. Terrorist techniques such as the
improvised explosive device and suicide bombings were perfected there, then carried to the other front,
Afghanistan, where they fueled a resurgent insurgency. The preemptive follow-up response on the part of the US was to expand the
watched this happen. Iraq
use of counter-terrorist tactics that matched the IED attack in terms of their ability to strike by surprise with lightning speed, and to morph themselves to the shape
any kind of circumstance, taking any number of guises. The use of these techniques by the US military exploded. Chief among them were targeted assassinations
using rapidly-deployed special operations forces, and unmanned drone attacks. This
escalation began under Bush, but was taken to
new levels by Obama, who had criticized the war in Iraq and called for its winding down only in order to shift attention to Afghanistan, which he defined
as the "good war" and the right war. The right war overflowed to the wrong side of the border, into Pakistan. The blowback from US crossborder drone attacks and special operations in Pakistan have energized activity elsewhere in the world:
in Somalia, in Yemen. Yet another proliferation. US drone attacks and special ops have followed. Preemptive US military intervention has expanded to
yet another continent. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan may be winding down. But the preemptive military posture of the US has only spread. And
nowhere has terrorist threat stopped looming. Last month (July 2011) was the bloodiest for months for US military personnel in Iraq,
and terrorist attacks in Afghanistan picked up spectacularly with the assassinations of the governor of Kandahar province and the mayor of Kandahar city. Even after
the "withdrawal" of US troops from Iraq, there will be a continuing US presence indefinitely into the future, as Obama's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, in
order to "fill the gap in Iraqi Security Force operations." This continuing presence will be in the form of five high-tech compounds outfitted for drone operations and
housing aircraft and armored vehicles for rapid-response forays. The withdrawal from Afghanistan will similarly leave a permanent preemption-ready presence.
That presence has unprecedented reach. According to best estimates, the US preemptive presence stretches across more than 750 bases around the world. The less
focused it becomes on outright invasion, the more spread-out and tentacular it becomes. US special operations forces are now active in no less than 75 countries
around the world and carry out an average of 70 missions a day. The number of countries "serviced" is slated to rise to 120. A key to advisor to General Petraeus,
the commander of US troops in Iraq, then Afghanistan, and now incoming CIA director, was recently quoted marvelling at the reach of this "almost industrial scale
killing machine". Preemption
doesn't go away. It spreads its tentacles. Things change. Boots on the ground may recede as drones
advance, following the rhythms of public opinion and the electoral cycle of politicians' engrossment in domestic affairs. Nation-building might get backgrounded in
favor of targeted assassination campaigns. But the
operative logic of preemption only becomes more widespread and
insidious. The more it changes, the more it stays the same, ever-expanding. To the point that it can be said to become the dominant operative logic of our
times. Preemption octopuses on. Ontopower rules.
—risk da
Current debate reverses the logical burden of proof --- we begin from the presumption
advantages start from 100% risk instead of being built up by zero risk --- this distorts
our risk calculus
Cohn 13 (Nate – politics writer for the NY Times, debate coach at Georgia, “Improving the Norms and
Practices of Policy Debate,” in CEDA Debate forums, 11-24-13,
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=5416.0)
The fact that policy
debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning
indictment of nearly every coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a
pedagogically unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. That’s not to say there
hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very
successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. Judges
were receptive to the sentiment that
disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological
questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage,
rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear
war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?)
obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction. There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams
rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was
totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even
less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently
argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability. But even if a
“soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could
compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and
extinction. The
risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a
higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be replicating a real world
policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. . Why? Oddly, this is the
unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the
responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—
you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute
something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument.
That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of
their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one
of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures
a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts,
sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the
2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in
reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions, each of which
could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is
conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.” And then there’s a
bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly
ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been
reduced considerably. If
there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent
chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance
that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then
there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think
teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team
to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate
has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are
supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they
do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters
other than few true facts, like 2+2=4. Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So,
based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card
in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If
you apply this very basic level of
analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the
disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct response. Debaters
should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of
unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes
depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take too many additional sources of
uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background
noise of prediction. Now, I do think it would be nice if a good debate team would actually do the work—talk about what the cards say, talk about the
unmentioned steps—but I think debaters can make these observations at a meta-level (your evidence isn’t certain, lots of
undefended elements) and successfully reduce the risk of a nuclear war or extinction to something
indistinguishable from zero. It would not be a factor in my decision. Based on my conversations with other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it
off with even less work. They might be willing to summarily disregard “absurd” arguments, like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that it’s patently unrealistic,
that we know the typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios, and that judges should assess debates in ways that produce realistic assessments. I don’t
think this is too different from elements of Jonah Feldman’s old philosophy, where he basically said “when I assessed 40 percent last year, it’s 10 percent now.”
Honestly, I was surprised that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to this argument. For me, just saying “it’s absurd, and you know it” wouldn’t be enough
against an argument in which the other team invested considerable time. The more developed argument about accurate risk assessment would be more convincing,
but I still think it would be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. To be blunt: I want debaters to learn why a disadvantage is absurd, not just
make assertions that conform to their preexisting notions of what’s realistic and what’s not. And perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a
team to rely exclusively on this argument—I’m not convinced that enough judges are willing to discount a disadvantage on “it’s absurd.” Nonetheless, I think this is
a useful “frame” that should preface a following, more robust explanation of why the risk of the disadvantage is basically zero—even before a substantive response
is offered. There are other, broad genres of argument that can contest the substance of the negative’s argument. There are serious methodological indictments of
the various forms of knowledge production, from journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science. Many
of our most strongly
worded cards come from people giving opinions, for which they offer very little data or evidence. And
even when “qualified” people are giving predictions, there’s a great case to be extremely skeptical
without real evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are hard, and most
people are wrong. And again, this is before contesting the substance of the negative’s argument(!)—if deemed necessary. So, in my view, the low
probability scenario is waiting to be eliminated from debate, basically as soon as a capable team tries to do it. That would open to the door to all of the arguments,
previously excluded, de facto, by the prevalence of nuclear war impacts. It’s been tough to talk about racism or gender violence, since modest measures to mitigate
these impacts have a difficult time outweighing a nuclear war. It’s been tough to discuss ethical policy making, since it’s hard to argue that any commitment to
philosophical or ethical purity should apply in the face of an existential risk. It’s been tough to introduce unconventional forms of evidence, since they can’t really
address the probability of nuclear war. Yes, the affirmative would still need to debate counterplans. Sometimes, I get the impression that’s a point of controversy,
too. Quite frankly, I think counterplans are good. I don’t think the negative should only be forced to exclusively debate about harms. There’s no way we can have a
fair topic about, say, prison reform, if the negative can only defend the status quo. That’s especially true if you don’t want to debate the political cost of the action—
which, in many instances, is the reason why the government hasn’t made obvious policy changes. Yet at the same time, I think it’s probably time to retire a few
genres of generic counterplans. I think it’s time to retire the “alternative actor” counterplan, which isn’t a logical response to the affirmative. I also think it’s time to
require that teams read evidence at a comprehensible speed. Comprehensible in front of me would still be “fast” by non-debater standards, but it would make
debate far more accessible, it would solve the apparently rampant issue of card clipping, and, well, I don’t really know why it wasn’t required in the first place. I still
think judges should call for cards, but they should call cards for additional scrutiny, not to make up for the fact that they never understood the content in the first
place. Top policy judges and coaches should consider leading on this issues by writing and endorsing a pact establishing norms for clarity. The standard should be
simple: the relevant warrant and argument in the card should be on your flow. There are certainly other problematic norms that I haven’t addressed. I’d love to
hear others comment on specific norms and practices that they find problematic.
IR predictions are impossible --- IR theory is not as simple as assuming everyone is a
rational actor that always acts in a certain idea --- people base decisions off of
experiences and a set of unpredictable circumstances
Bernstein et al. 2k (Steven – Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Richard
Ned Lebow – James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government, Emeritus at Darthmouth
University and Professor of War Studies, King's College London, Janice Gross Stein – member of the
Order of Canada and the Royal Society of Canada, University Professor of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and
Associate Chair and Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation, and Steven Weber –
professor at the School of Information and the Department of Political Science at the University of
California, Berkeley, holds an M.D. and a Ph.D in political science from Stanford University, “God Gave
Physics the Easy Problems: Adapting Social Science to an Unpredictable World,” in the European Journal
of International Relations, Volume 6, Number 43, http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/6/1/43.short)
Many of the scholars responsible for the behavioral revolution in social science were European refugees who sought
to use the tools of social
science to analyze the causes of war, prejudice, civil unrest and poverty. Their commitment to social science flowed from
an even deeper commitment — to use disciplined methodologies to generate knowledge that would help prevent
the horrors of war and fascism and improve the world around them. They and their American collaborators were not
interested in theory for its own sake, but principally for the capacity it might provide to analyze and address world problems. This vision has been largely
lost. From the vantage point of the 21st century, it is sadly apparent that the founding fathers of the behavioral revolution failed to
transmit as clearly the value commitments that motivated their ‘scientific’ study of international
relations. For many of their students and grand-students, the ‘scientific means’ has become more an end in
itself, and the ‘science’ of the social, a jeu d’esprit, like chess. In the worst instances, researchers choose problems to investigate
because the problems are thought to be tractable, not because they are important. They evaluate
solutions in terms of the elegance of the logic rather than actual evidence. Meanwhile, on the other extreme, those who
do study policy problems frequently do so in isolation from those working seriously with theory. Both communities are thus impoverished. The founders of the
scientific study of international relations would bemoan the separation of theory from evidence and of logic from data.1 Most of all, the
founders would
reject the separation of theory from policy and its relative failure to address practical problems of the
political world. A deep irony is embedded in the history of the scientific study of international relations. Recent generations of scholars
separated policy from theory to gain an intellectual distance from decision-making, in the belief that
this would enhance the ‘scientific’ quality of their work. But five decades of well-funded efforts to
develop theories of international relations have produced precious little in the way of useful, high
confidence results. Theories abound, but few meet the most relaxed ‘scientific’ tests of validity. Even
the most robust generalizations or laws we can state — war is more likely between neighboring states,
weaker states are less likely to attack stronger states — are close to trivial, have important exceptions,
and for the most part stand outside any consistent body of theory. A generation ago, we might have excused our
performance on the grounds that we were a young science still in the process of defining problems, developing analytical tools and collecting data. This excuse is
neither credible nor sufficient; there
is no reason to suppose that another 50 years of well-funded research would
result in anything resembling a valid theory in the Popperian sense. We suggest that the nature, goals and criteria for judging
social science theory should be rethought, if theory is to be more helpful in understanding the real world. We begin by justifying our pessimism, both conceptually
and empirically, and argue that the quest for predictive theory rests on a mistaken analogy between physical and social phenomena. Evolutionary biology is a more
productive analogy for social science. We explore the value of this analogy in its ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions, and examine the implications of both for theory and
research in international relations.2 We develop the case for forward ‘tracking’ of international relations on the basis of local and general knowledge as an
alternative to backward-looking attempts to build deductive, nomothetic theory. We then apply this strategy to some emerging trends in international relations.
Newtonian Physics: A Misleading Model Physical and chemical laws make two kinds of predictions. Some phenomena — the trajectories of individual planets — can
be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty. Only a few variables need to be taken into account and they can be measured with precision. Other mechanical
problems, like the break of balls on a pool table, while subject to deterministic laws, are inherently unpredictable because of their complexity. Small differences in
the lay of the table, the nap of the felt, the curvature of each ball and where they make contact, amplify the variance of each collision and lead to what appears as a
near random distribution of balls. Most
predictions in science are probabilistic, like the freezing point of liquids, the expansion rate of gases
predictions appear possible only because of the large numbers of units involved
in interactions. In the case of nuclear decay or the expansion of gases, we are talking about trillions of atoms and molecules. In
international relations, even more than in other domains of social science, it is often impossible to assign metrics to what
we think are relevant variables (Coleman, 1964: especially Chapter 2). The concepts of polarity, relative power and
the balance of power are among the most widely used independent variables, but there are no
commonly accepted definitions or measures for them. Yet without consensus on definition and
measurement, almost every statement or hypothesis will have too much wiggle room to be ‘tested’
and all chemical reactions. Point
decisively against evidence. What we take to be dependent variables fare little better. Unresolved
controversies rage over the definition and evaluation of deterrence outcomes, and about the criteria
for democratic governance and their application to specific countries at different points in their history.
Differences in coding for even a few cases have significant implications for tests of theories of deterrence or
of the democratic peace (Lebow and Stein, 1990; Chan, 1997). The lack of consensus about terms and their
measurement is not merely the result of intellectual anarchy or sloppiness — although the latter cannot entirely be
dismissed. Fundamentally, it has more to do with the arbitrary nature of the concepts themselves. Key
terms in physics, like mass, temperature and velocity, refer to aspects of the physical universe that we
cannot directly observe. However, they are embedded in theories with deductive implications that have been verified through empirical research.
Propositions containing these terms are legitimate assertions about reality because their truth-value can be assessed. Social science theories are
for the most part built on ‘idealizations’, that is, on concepts that cannot be anchored to observable
phenomena through rules of correspondence. Most of these terms (e.g. rational actor, balance of
power) are not descriptions of reality but implicit ‘theories’ about actors and contexts that do not exist
(Hempel, 1952; Rudner, 1966; Gunnell, 1975; Moe, 1979; Searle, 1995: 68-72). The inevitable differences in interpretation of these
concepts lead to different predictions in some contexts, and these outcomes may eventually produce
widely varying futures (Taylor, 1985: 55). If problems of definition, measurement and coding could be resolved,
we would still find it difficult, if not impossible, to construct large enough samples of comparable
cases to permit statistical analysis. It is now almost generally accepted that in the analysis of the causes
of wars, the variation across time and the complexity of the interaction among putative causes make
the likelihood of a general theory extraordinarily low. Multivariate theories run into the problem of negative degrees of freedom,
yet international relations rarely generates data sets in the high double digits. Where larger samples do
exist, they often group together cases that differ from one another in theoretically important ways.3
Complexity in the form of multiple causation and equifinality can also make simple statistical
comparisons misleading. But it is hard to elaborate more sophisticated statistical tests until one has a deeper baseline understanding of the nature of
the phenomenon under investigation, as well as the categories and variables that make up candidate causes (Geddes, 1990: 131-50; Lustick, 1996: 505-18; Jervis,
1997). Wars — to continue with the same example — are
similar to chemical and nuclear reactions in that they have
underlying and immediate causes. Even when all the underlying conditions are present, these processes generally require a
catalyst to begin. Chain reactions are triggered by the decay of atomic nuclei. Some of the neutrons they emit strike other nuclei prompting them to
fission and emit more neutrons, which strike still more nuclei. Physicists can calculate how many kilograms of Uranium 235 or Plutonium at given pressures are
necessary to produce a chain reaction. They can take it for granted that if a ‘critical mass’ is achieved, a chain reaction will follow. This is because trillions of atoms
are present, and at any given moment enough of them will decay to provide the neutrons needed to start the reaction. In a large enough sample, catalysts will be
present in a statistical sense. Wars
involve relatively few actors. Unlike the weak force responsible for nuclear decay, their catalysts
are probably not inherent properties of the units. Catalysts may or may not be present, and their
potentially random distribution relative to underlying causes makes it difficult to predict when or if an
appropriate catalyst will occur. If in the course of time underlying conditions change, reducing basic
incentives for one or more parties to use force, catalysts that would have triggered war will no longer do
so. This uncertain and evolving relationship between underlying and immediate causes makes point
prediction extraordinarily difficult. It also makes more general statements about the causation of war
problematic, since we have no way of knowing what wars would have occurred in the presence of
appropriate catalysts. It is probably impossible to define the universe of would-be wars or to construct a representative sample of them.
Statistical inference requires knowledge about the state of independence of cases, but in a practical
sense that knowledge is often impossible to obtain in the analysis of international relations. Molecules
do not learn from experience. People do, or think they do. Relationships among cases exist in the minds
of decision-makers, which makes it very hard to access that information reliably and for more than just a
very small number of cases. We know that expectations and behavior are influenced by experience,
one’s own and others. The deterrence strategies pursued by the United States throughout much of the
Cold War were one kind of response to the failure of appeasement to prevent World War II.
Appeasement was at least in part a reaction to the belief of British leaders that the deterrent policies
pursued by the continental powers earlier in the century had helped to provoke World War I. Neither
appeasement nor deterrence can be explained without understanding the context in which they were
formulated; that context is ultimately a set of mental constructs. We have descriptive terms like ‘chain reaction’ or
‘contagion effect’ to describe these patterns, and hazard analysis among other techniques in statistics to measure their strength. But neither explains how and why
these patterns emerge and persist. The broader point is that the relationship
between human beings and their environment is
not nearly so reactive as with inanimate objects. Social relations are not clock-like because the values
and behavioral repertories of actors are not fixed; people have memories, learn from experience and
undergo shifts in the vocabulary they use to construct reality. Law-like relationships — even if they
existed — could not explain the most interesting social outcomes, since these are precisely the outcomes about which actors
have the most incentive to learn and adapt their behavior. Any regularities would be ‘soft’; they would be the outcome of
processes that are embedded in history and have a short half-life. They would decay quickly because of
the memories, creative searching and learning by political leaders. Ironically, the ‘findings’ of social science contribute to this
decay (Weber, 1969; Almond and Genco, 1977: 496-522; Gunnell, 1982: Ch. 2; Ball, 1987: Ch. 4; Kratochwil, 1989; Rorty, 1989; Hollis, 1994: Ch. 9). Beyond these
conceptual and empirical difficulties lies a familiar but fundamental difference of purpose. Boyle’s Law, half-lives, or any other scientific principle based on
probability, says nothing about the behavior of single units such as molecules. For many theoretical and practical purposes this is adequate. But social
science ultimately aspires — or should aspire — to provide insight into practical world problems that are
generally part of a small or very small n. In international relations, the dynamics and outcomes of single
cases are often much more important than any statistical regularities. Overcoming Physics Envy The conception of
causality on which deductive-nomological models are based, in classical physics as well as social science, requires
empirical invariance under specified boundary conditions. The standard form of such a statement is this — given A, B and C, if X
then (not) Y.4 This kind of bounded invariance can be found in closed systems. Open systems can be influenced by
external stimuli, and their structure and causal mechanisms evolve as a result. Rules that describe the
functioning of an open system at time T do not necessarily do so at T + 1 or T + 2. The boundary conditions
may have changed, rendering the statement irrelevant. Another axiomatic condition may have been
added, and the outcome subject to multiple conjunctural causation. There is no way to know this a priori
from the causal statement itself. Nor will complete knowledge (if it were possible) about the system at time T
necessarily allow us to project its future course of development. In a practical sense, all social systems (and many
physical and biological systems) are open. Empirical invariance does not exist in such systems, and seemingly
probabilistic invariances may be causally unrelated (Harre and Secord, 1973; Bhaskar, 1979; Collier, 1994; Patomaki, 1996; Jervis,
1997). As physicists readily admit, prediction in open systems, especially non-linear ones, is difficult, and
often impossible.
—normativity da
Normative legal thought obscures the pain and death of disciplinary systems with
language games
Schlag 91 (Pierre, Professor of Law, University of Colorado, “NORMATIVITY AND THE POLITICS OF
FORM,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review (April 1991),
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3741&context=penn_law_review)
Many legal thinkers understand this dramatic conflict in terms of an opposition between the "realities" of practice and the "ideals" of the legal academy. For these
legal thinkers, it will seem especially urgent to ask once again: What should be done? How should we live? What
should the law be? These are the hard questions. These are the momentous questions. And they are the wrong ones.
They are wrong because it is these very normative questions that reprieve legal thinkers from recognizing the
extent to which the cherished "ideals" of legal academic thought are implicated in the reproduction and
maintenance of precisely those ugly "realities" of legal practice the academy so routinely condemns. It is these
normative questions that allow legal thinkers to shield themselves from the recognition that their work
product consists largely of the reproduction of rhetorical structures by which human beings can be coerced
into achieving ends of dubious social origin and implication. It is these very normative questions that allow legal
academics to continue to address (rather lamely) bureaucratic power structures as if they were rational, morally
competent, individual humanist subjects. It is these very normative questions that allow legal thinkers to assume
blithely that-in a world ruled by HMOs, personnel policies, standard operating procedures, performance requirements,
standard work incentives, and productivity monitoring they somehow have escaped the bureaucratic power games. It
is these normative questions that enable them to represent themselves as whole and intact, as self-directing
individual liberal humanist subjects at once rational, morally competent, and in control of their own
situations, the captain of their own ships, the Hercules of their own empires, the author of their own texts.
—value to life
The state of exception reduces humans to the bare state of existence
Dillon 5 (Michael – Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, “Cared to
Death: The Political Time of Your Life,” in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)
One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of biopolitics. In the process of reducing life to stuff, biopolitics
must determine the
quality of the stuff so that investment in its extraction, promotion and refinement may itself be continuously
assessed. It follows that some life will be found to be worth investment, some life less worth investment, while other life
may prove intractable to the powers of investment and the demands it makes on life. Here, assaying morphs into
evaluating the eligibility and not simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to be positively inimical to
the circulation of life in which this investment driven process of biopolitics continuously trades, and have
to be removed from life if its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot otherwise be adapted, correctedor contained.
Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the biologisation of life to which biopolitics is
committed, the violence of that biologisation and the reduction of the classical political question
concerning the good life (and the good death) to that of the endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life. The good life
Agamben refigures in terms of the pure - he also says 'profane' but note that there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of 'happy life'.
at: framework
a. their framework is responsible for an affective terror that locks us into prisons of
fear --- link turns political engagement
Debrix & Barder 12 (François – Professor of Political Science at Virginia Technical University, Director of
the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought program, and Alexander – Professor of
Political Science at the American University of Beirut, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, violence, and horror in
world politics, Routledge, 2012, p. 66)
Among other things, what
Dillon's thought on emergent living/being indicates is that it is time to push
Foucault's thought on the biopolitical production of fear much further, perhaps beyond its biopolitical confines. For when
we (and others) intimate the presence of a biopolitical productivity of fear or terror today, what we are
pointing to is the existence of a fear of fear itself, or of a fear of being fearful. Docile and normalized
bodies of biopolitical and governmentality regimes are not just afraid of not being able to live their
normal life, as we hinted at above. They are also to be seen as emergent living forms that are designed to fear
being afraid of living a life that has fear/terror as its vital impulse but also that are incapable of escaping
such a terror. This is yet another dimension of the horror that awaits emergent “living things” as they are
fixed or frozen by a fear of being afraid that, once again, allows them to be anticipatory and on the qui vive,
but also prevents them from moving away from such a condition (here, we can recall Cavarero's useful distinction between
terror and its capacity to put bodies in motion and horror and its paralyzing effects, as we mentioned in the “Introduction”). As we saw with the
“swine flu” case, emergent humans fear being afraid not so much of the spreading disease and its social
and physiological effects. Rather, they fear the terror that the disease (or any other danger) comes to represent.
But this fear of the terror itself is unavoidable and, in a way, desirable or required for emergent life. By
treating the pandemic (or the weather catastrophe, or the terrorist attack, or the nuclear scare, and so on) no
longer as a possible natural or man-made disaster but as terror itself, a terror that, as Cavarero has argued,
envelops one in fear but also opens up the door for horrific violence, 78 emergent living things deprive
themselves of any possible solution or any resistant technology of living or being human that, perhaps,
could tackle the problem that is said to be at the source of the terror (the so-called danger, although one should wonder
whether such a danger matters at all as any encounter or circumstance in the life of emergent beings appears to be amenable to being the next terror). 79
Instead, the only way for emergent living things to deal with the impending doom is to fear more and
more, that is to say, to produce more and more terror situations that will end up proliferating even more selfmonitoring, self-carceralizing, and self-effacing techniques and dispositifs that, in turn, will confirm that
they indeed had good reasons to be fearful in the first place. For today's emergent humanity, there is indeed
nothing to fear but fear itself.
b. the logic of speed bypasses their deliberation standard and internal link turns
solvency
Glezos 9 (Simon – Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, “Introduction:
Fear of a fast planet,” in The Politics of Speed: Capitalism, the State and War in an Accelerating World, p.
1-4)
This project started in despair and ended in hope; despair over the acceleration of the world and hope in the possibilities that speed can bring. I would be lying if I
said that this sense of fear and anxiety wasn’t in some way influenced by my move to the United States from Canada in mid-2002. Arriving in a country still reeling
from the September 11th attacks, I was overwhelmed by the runaway pace of events (and in this, I’m sure I was not alone). The
war in Afghanistan
not even over, the Bush administration had already started the push to invade Iraq, justifying the rush to action
by the imminent threat they claimed Saddam Hussein posed. We were told that action had to be taken
immediately, that we could not wait to allow inspectors to determine if the threat was, in fact, real. We were
told that we could not afford to wait and allow “the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom
cloud.” Implicit in this quote, and countless others like it, was an exposition of the new temporal order of the political
world: in this accelerated world, the pace with which new threats can materialize leaves no time for hesitation.
Decisions must be made quickly and efficiently by a centralized and authoritative executive. Slow-moving
processes of deliberation and debate (not to mention investigation) are no longer viable. Indeed, they potentially threaten our survival.
This claim, that the pace of events necessarily privileges the power of a unified executive and marginalizes the possibility of democratic deliberation is one of the
central charges leveled at speed, and one which I discuss in detail in chapter one. I, like many citizens of both America and the world, was not convinced by the
American President’s claims of the imminent threat posed by Iraq to the free world, and joined the hundreds of thousands in the streets of Washington, D.C. (and
millions in cities all over the world) in protest. However, these protests produced little to no effect, and in this I was again attuned to another worrisome aspect of
speed. At the same time that the
pace of events in the world encourage the government to act in ways too fast for democratic deliberation, it also
allowed them to act so quickly as to escape democratic censure. At this point, five years into the war, it feels as if those in
power have gone from one reckless action to another, always moving too fast to be held accountable
for their destruction, lies and illegalities. A quote from an article in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, profiling the character of
the Bush administration, seemed to get to the heart of this new freedom of those in political power. In it, reporter Ron Suskind interviews a high-level aide
within the Bush administrations. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people
who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're
an empire now, and when we
act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and
you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." In addition to informing us that, apparently, members of the Bush administration
have been reading a lot of Baudrillard, this quote gives insight into the new temporal order of politics. It tells us that the actions of those in positions of political
power now move too fast for traditional mechanisms of oversight and accountability. And the news media which is
supposed to exercise this accountability must itself move so fast that, in moving from scandal to scandal, those in power need only
wait for the news cycle to move on. Thus, when a decision is made, by the time we figure out what has
happened, and discuss whether or not it is a good thing, the decision makers have “act[ed] again, creating
other new realities.” The process of democratic deliberation and popular accountability becomes a never-ending game
of catch-up, freeing the powerful from real responsibility. This is because responsibility and accountability are
necessarily backward looking, while, in a fast paced world, we are pressed to focus our eyes on the future
(there is no time to play the ‘blame game’). I think this is what is at the heart of Sheldon Wolin’s critique of speed which we will discuss in the next chapter.
c. The alternative is to tear down the system and replace it with a new politics of
interconnectedness and true democracy
Giroux 06 (Henry A., Prof of Cultural Studies @ McMaster University, “Reading Hurricane Katrina:
Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability”,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v033/33.3giroux.html)//BW
Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American life and culture must
do more than unearth the powerful antidemocratic forces that now govern American economics,
politics, education, media, and culture; it must also deepen possibilities of individual and collective
struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of civil society and the creation of a vast network of democratic
public spheres such as schools and the alternative media in order to develop new models of individual and social
agency that can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life. This is a call for a diverse "radical party,"
following Stanley Aronowitz's exhortation, a party that prioritizes democracy as a global task, views hope as a
precondition for political engagement, gives primacy to making the political more pedagogical, and
understands the importance of the totality of the struggle as it informs and articulates within and across
a wide range of sites and sectors of everyday life—domestically and globally. Democratically minded citizens and
social movements must return to the crucial issue of how race, class, power, and inequality in America contribute to the suffering and hardships
experienced daily by the poor, people of color, and working- and middle-class people. The fight for equality offers new challenges in the process
of constructing a politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination, and a resurgent racism. Such
a politics would take
seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations
of power as they affect diverse individuals and groups at the level of daily life. Such struggles would
combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at
offering workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, one that provides a
decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United States. Biopolitics is not just
about the reduction of selected elements of the population to the necessities of bare life or worse; it is
also potentially about enhancing life by linking hope and a new vision to the struggle for reclaiming the
social, providing a language capable of translating individual issues into public considerations, and
recognizing that in the age of the new media the terrain of culture is one of the most important pedagogical spheres through
which to challenge the most basic precepts of the new authoritarianism. The waste machine of modernity, as
Bauman points out, must be challenged within a new understanding of environmental justice, human rights, and democratic politics (2000, 15).
Negative globalization with its attachment to the mutually enforcing modalities of militarism and racial
segregation must be exposed and dismantled. And this demands new forms of resistance that are both more global and
differentiated. But if these struggles are going to emerge, especially in the United States, then we need a politics and pedagogy of hope, one
that takes seriously Hannah Arendt's call to use the [End Page 189] public realm to throw light on the "dark times" that threaten to extinguish
the very idea of democracy. Against
the tyranny of market fundamentalism, religious dogmatism, unchecked
militarism, and ideological claims to certainty, an emancipatory biopolitics must enlist education as a
crucial force in the struggle over democratic identities, spaces, and ideals.
at: alt doesn’t solve
Abandoning institutions in favor of collective resistance to political monopolization
through a repoliticization of bare life allows for a re-structuring of sovereign power
*3pt font for long passages with no relevance
Zevnik 9 (Andreja – Lecturer in International Politics at Manchester University, “Sovereign-less Subject
and the Possibility of Resistance,” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Volume 38, Number 1,
p. 14-22, http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/07/09/0305829809336255.full.pdf)
In global politics, for example, the demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in 1989 can be perceived as both an
act and an Event. As such, Tiananmen differs from other protests, and in particular from more recent ones that have occurred in the
West. It started without any common demands or offical leadership - it might be even possible to argue that Tiananmen, in its
foundations, was a spontaneous gathering that commemorated the death of a popular Chinese leader,
attracted masses of people and in its late stage triggered sovereign violence in its purest form. As seen, not all
demonstrations push sovereign power to react in this manner. In contrast, most protests and in particular those that start by
voicing specific demands or with a wish to protest against the ongoing activities of sovereign power, like
the protests against the war in Iraq, are either overlooked, ignored or even welcomed by sovereign
power. These protests, instead of questioning the authority of sovereign power, reinstate the system and
grant it additional legitimacy. To return to Agamben, if we are to assume that bare life bears the possibility of action and transformation of the
existing order of sovereign power, it has to embody two practices: a demand of being and passage a l'acte. The latter idea derives from Lacanian clinical
psychoanalysis, where it illustrates the death of the subject, or an act with which the subject abandons an existing subjectivity/form of subject and becomes a new
subject. The concept, especially when accompanied by violence, indicates that the
subject breaks off from the place assigned to it by
the sovereign power and becomes alienated from the determinations and identifications thrust upon it
by the sovereign power. On the other hand, the general idea behind the 'demand of being' resembles Agamben's 'whatever being'; the difference,
however, would be that a 'demand of being' is an act or a way of resistance, whereas 'whatever being' refers to a
new form of being that emerges within the process of resistance or as its result. Both 'demand of being'
and 'whatever being' are without any determinative substance as such. In the demand of being, the sovereign
power is asked for something it does not possess and indeed cannot possess. In other words, those who represent the
demand of being, demand a place in the order that is not the existing order of sovereign power, but rather a place that opens up after the collapse of this order.
The demand of being is a demand that transgresses the powers of the existing sovereign and demands
its decline, its symbolic death. It is a demand which the sovereign cannot fulfil, because the consequence
of its fulfilment is the vacillation, fading or obliteration of sovereign power. Therefore, if the being has not been allocated
its place beforehand, finding a place in the order entails the questioning of sovereign's authority. A demand of being sends a message to the sovereign power that it
is not whole and that what is lacking in its wholeness are 'us'. A necessary consequence of a successful demand of being is then a radical transformation of the
structure of the sovereign power which in its last instance leads to either the creation of a new sovereign or to its obliteration. The
demand of being is
so specific, because in the political realm, most demands are voiced from a place which presupposes the
existence of common identity, community, upon which certain demands are formed and represented.
While the demand of being is addressed to the sovereign power by whatever, and therefore generic, singularities which withdraw from any kind of identity or
belonging to a community, the recognition of such a demand implies a breakage of all social bonds. I argue that the protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 can be
read as a form of resistance that corresponds to the above presented idea of resistance. Tiananmen, as already mentioned, started
as a
spontaneous gathering to commemorate the death of Hu Yaobang. People, mostly students and
intellectuals, assembled on the Square on 16 April 1989 to mourn his death and to demand a revision of
Party's view of him. Hu had been forced to resign from the position of Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1987 because of his call
for rapid reforms and pro-democratic statements. His death was an opportunity for the people of China to rise up in support of him for the last time. Up until his
funeral on 22 April, students voiced a series of requests concerning the status of Hu and urged to meet with leading officials of the Party. However, the Party did not
respond and the protesters decided to proceed with their activities. The
protest which was initiated by students and intellectuals
gradually gained in size and soon attracted the support of urban workers and peasants. By 4 May the protest
became a national phenomenon. The number of protesters on Tiananmen rose to 100,000, with millions supporting the movement throughout the country, and the
demands surpassed the initial political revival of Hu. Instead, protestors campaigned to end corruption, to gain political freedom, democracy, freedom of speech,
new media laws and other political reforms. Because the background of the protestors was so diverse, the demands remained dispersed. It
was impossible
to point out one common demand, as it was impossible to pin down all individual demands. It soon became
obvious that the ruling Party could not cope with the demands voiced by protestors as they were addressing
almost every aspect of the existing political order, demanding its rapid reformation. By then, the protest had
outgrown its spontaneity; leaders were elected and talks with the government begun. However, the decision was taken to start a hunger strike on 13 May to
preserve the spirit and the momentum of the protest, only two days prior to the visit of Soviet reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev. This proved to be a brilliant
strategy as it not only demonstrated the determination of those gathered on the Square, but also strengthened the voice justifying the need for reforms similar to
those done by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. In the following 10 days, local hospitals treated almost 10,000 students who collapsed or required hospitalisation.
People became sympathetic and emotionally involved with students' action in show of support came to the Square. On 20 May the
although initially reluctant to intervene with force, saw
Chinese leadership,
no alternative but to declare martial law. Despite this decision, the military was
denied access to Beijing by throngs of protesters. However, on the evening of 3 June the final call was taken to clear the Square by allowing the military to use all
force necessary. The intervention began on 3 June at 10.30 pm. The
army used tear gas, rifles and tanks. During the night, heavy fighting was
and foreign journalists reported that the leaders of the protest
ordered people not to use weapons. Many tried to leave the Square before the fighting began, but the army captured and beat
them. Those who knew what was coming wrote their final wills, hoping it would not come to that: By morning, the Square had been cleared and occupied by the
reported on and around the Square. Eyewitnesses
army. It came as no surprise that people had died that night, but no one knew how many. The official figure given by the Chinese government stated 241 victims
and 7000 wounded, Amnesty International reported 3000 deaths and 8000 wounded, and the Chinese Red Cross estimated approximately 5000 deaths. After the
crackdown, the protest continued for another week, although it became clear that the government had managed to forcefully suppress the uprising. These events
can be read as a form of resistance in three ways: the
protesters can be associated with bare life; they were willing to
sacrifice their own being and therefore portray Tiananmen as an Event; and through sacrifice, the
protestors were able to voice a form of demand (the demand of being) the government could not ignore
.
I will further explore these three points in turn. The protesters on Tiananmen Square occupied a very distinctive position - they were perceived by the government as bare life. However, this was not only characteristic of the protesters, but potentially of the entire Chinese population. The Chinese were subjected to various human rights abuses and deprivations of personal freedom,
all of which prevented them from acting outside the existing symbolic and political order. After the protests had begun, the government placed the protestors outside the existing order and initially tried to ignore their demands. However, their demands became too obvious to be overlooked, but equally impossible to address in their entirety. What is more, the protesters' demands
mostly corresponded with the proposed reforms of the Party's pro-democratic stream. As such, the protesters were not aiming for their exclusion or for something that the Party might deem as being impossible. If the Party wanted to proceed on their reformist path it could not exclude or ignore protestors' demands. As Nathan writes: 'most of [the protestors] stayed within the
bounds of certain pieties, acknowledging party leadership and positioning themselves as respectful, if disappointed, supporters of the Party's long term reform project'. The difficulty of the protestors' position and the Party's response then derived from the fact that the protestors should have remained part of the community, and the Party should have embraced their demands and
their willingness to support the regime. However, it was the Party's disapproval of the means by which these demands were voiced that placed the protestors in the space of indistinction. By sending the military to deal with the protestors, the government recognised the protesters' existence, but decided that their life could be sacrificed for the sake of the Party and its monopoly
over power. As such, the military action reaffirmed the spatiality of indistinction and protestors' (re-)inclusion through the exclusion. The Party recognised the protesters' existence, but kept them excluded from sovereign laws. Such exclusion from sovereign laws, however, does not mean that the protestors were apolitical or politically excluded; on the contrary, they represented a
very strong political entity that managed to disrupt the normality of CCP power politics. The protestors, on the other side, acknowledged their particular form of being that resembled 'whatever being' and created a space inside the sovereign power from which the sovereign power itself was excluded and where it could no longer draw lines between different types of subjectivity.
The spatiality of the zone of indistinction was opened on Tiananmen Square. According to one eyewitness: Central Beijing was in effect a liberated zone. There were no police in sight, no soldiers, no symbols of authority. Troops had advanced to the capital's outskirts after martial law was declared but had been withdrawn back to their bases after being immobilised by crowds of
residents and street barricades. And it seemed to work fine. People laughed and shouted, and no one had any idea of how it would all end The police, if they were around, did not show themselves. The army was out of sight. No one was in charge, authority was suspended. And the city continued to work in an atmosphere of freedom never before experienced. For a few days,
sovereign power had nothing to say on Tiananmen Square, it was a space of a new being. The protesters took their resistance further with hunger strikes and a call for no weapons and violence when the crackdown began. According to the eyewitness accounts, the protesters were not worried about their own being, they were prepared to sacrifice their existence, their body, and
they were aware that this is what they were required to do. In support of their demands they were willing to become a different being. However, they were not disillusioned, but knew precisely what the sovereign power, in the form of the Politburo, was capable of doing and what consequences they could face. By writing their last wills the protestors showed their awareness of the
situation and demonstrated how far they were prepared to go. Their action had more than just a performative value; it was an Act in the Lacanian sense. The protestors were first prepared to sacrifice their own lives in support of the political reforms and the Chinese Party - something the Chinese political regime of that time could not fully comprehend; and, second, they were
equally prepared to sacrifice their subjectivity, their social and symbolic position within society. During the crackdown and in its aftermath, many were actually deprived of these: killed or put in prison and later executed; or caught, put in prison and convicted of supporting or organising hostile acts to undermine the system. A number of student leaders were forced to flee to the
United States. Perhaps the most vivid and publicised example of the willingness to use one's own body against sovereign power is the example of the 'Tank Man'. On 5 June 1989, a day after the Tiananmen crackdown, the military took over Beijing with tanks. On their way, these were stopped by a single man, unarmed, carrying only white plastic bags in his hands. The man walked
onto the Square and stood in front of the moving tanks. For a few minutes, he managed to stop them, even climbing on one and talking to the soldiers. Reportedly, he asked them why they were there. Although he was soon removed from the scene by fellow protesters who feared for his life, his image was inscribed in history as one of the most influential images of the 20th century.
It became a symbol of resistance against political oppression. However, the consequences of this act were unclear; whether the 'Tank Man' physically and symbolically sacrificed his life remains unknown; divergent accounts of his fate suggest that he was either imprisoned and killed a few weeks after the event, or is still in hiding in mainland China. And finally, Tiananmen embodies
the demand of being. As such, these demands initially outgrew individual interests and a political reinstatement of a dead person. With the exception of a demand concerning corruption, these were not demands for something particular that existed in the present political order, but neither were they entirely out of context. They aimed at bringing in something new but,
nevertheless, many significant people in the CCP publicly endorsed them. Zhao Ziyang, the leader of the Party at that time, even acknowledged that all student slogans supported the Constitution as they favour democracy and oppose corruption. These demands, as Zhao observed, 'are basically in line with what the Party and government advocate, so we cannot reject them out of
hand'. Thus nonchalant rejection was impossible, in particular because of the extent of the protests and the involvement of all classes. However, the Party was unable to recognise the demands because they could not recognise the identity of the group and therefore take control of it. The Party believed that 'as soon as it gives in to any demand from any group that it does not
control, then the power monopoly that it views as an indispensable organisational principle of the political system will be destroyed'. But what the Party perceived as an additional problem was the students' hunger strike. They were aware that demands voiced with such backing carry more weight and could not be ignored permanently, or else the Chinese government would be
disgraced in political or humanitarian terms. Thus, in the words of Zhao, the tactic of the Party was initially 'to get the students to de-link their fasting from their demands and then get them put off the Square and back to their campuses'. If the Party's endeavours failed, as Zhao observed, anything could happen 'in the blink of an eye'. Although the Party's analysis of the situation was
The demonstrators transformed their being in the process of
resistance; they were no longer understood as the subjects of the Party's regime, but rather as 'whatever
being'. By posing a demand of being they asked for their place in the sovereign order - but no place could
be allocated to them, because their political inclusion in the system would demand a radical
transformation of Chinese political space. Their desire was to transform the political system by remaining part of it. Such a stance was of
sober and extremely realistic, they could not and did not want to sacrifice the supremacy of their sovereign power to prevent bloodshed.
course in contradiction to that of the Party - the sovereign power aimed to preserve the supreme power by excluding the protestors. However, whatever the
decision of the sovereign power would be, to either officially politically include or to exclude the protestors, in situations where the protestors become 'whatever
being' and manage to voice a demand of being, the specificity and the character of the protestors' demands made it impossible for the government to make a clear
distinction and to act in its own favour. If they employed violence, as they did, they had to manipulate the 'truth' of Tiananmen, hide the victims and deal with the
leaders of the protest. If no violence had been employed, the supremacy of sovereign power would have been called into question. On the one hand, the Party
would have to admit its faults and the necessity for urgent reforms, and, on the other hand, its sovereignty would be infringed by the emergence of the power of
'civil society'. Through
such an act, the protestors established themselves as singularities. Instead of being the
'subjects of sovereign power', they became a form of being that is neither determined nor created by the
sovereign power; it is a being whose existence emerges from the singularities themselves. And without
the need for a common identity, such singularities or 'whatever beings' threaten the existence of the
sovereign power. In the aftermath of the Event, the sovereign power reinstated its superiority and primacy over territory and population first through
violence and a political purge, and second through the politics of fear. Although the students were prepared for a violent reaction from the sovereign power, a
military reaction of that size was unthinkable. During that night, the protestors faced the real and the traumatic. As a result of this encounter, the confidence that
civil society and pro-democratic activists gained in the time of the protest vanished overnight. The protest lost momentum; the space of indistinction was closed and
the faithfulness to the Event lost. In the days and weeks following the crackdown, the CCP regained its political power, and appeared stronger than before.
Despite the final outcome, the Tiananmen protest challenged sovereign power in a very particular way.
Unlike the asylum seekers from Edkins and Pin-Fat's example, the Tiananmen protestors did not demand their political recognition and inclusion. Quite the
opposite, the force of the protest came from the fact that their demands were recognised by the Party as being legitimate; however, after being voiced publicly and
in such a manner, the Party could no longer afford to acknowledge these demands as being legitimate without losing the monopoly over political power in China.
We control uniqueness --- structures of biopolitical control have emptied themselves
of positive content, possible of only inflicting death or doing nothing --- we should
desert biopolitical apparatuses rather than reform them
Prozorov 10 (Sergei – Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why
Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” in Philosophy Social Criticism, Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1059-1060,
November 2010, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract)
In a later work, Agamben
generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical imperative of his work:
‘[There] is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a
liberatory intent. What is disgraceful - both politically and morally - are the apparatuses which have
diverted it from their possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses - from all apparatuses the possibility of use that they have captured.’32 As we shall discuss in the following section, this is to be achieved by a
subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves them in a jammed, inoperative state.
What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by
emptying out all positive content of the forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on ‘empty’,
capable only of (inflict ing) Death or (doing) Nothing. On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses
illuminates the ‘inoperosity’ (worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed from his earliest
works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihilism brings to light the absence of work that
characterizes human existence, which, as irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny,
vocation, or task that it must be subjected to: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential
inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics
because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation, that is, beings of
pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.’34 Having been concealed for centuries by religion or
ideology, this originary inoperosity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the
inoperative character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the
sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive form-of-life:
[T]oday, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It
was evident start-ing with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capa ble of taking on historical tasks and that peoples
themselves were bound to disappear.35 Agamben’s metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: ‘One of the few things that can be declared with certainty is that all
the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt’.36 Thus, the
destructive nihilistic drive of the
biopolitical machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive
forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that Agamben famously terms
‘bare life’. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely contained in its existence, is precisely what
conditions the emergence of the subject of the coming politics: ‘this biopolitical body that is bare life
must itself be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form-of-life that is
wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.’37 The ‘happy’ form-of-life, a ‘life that cannot be
segregated from its form’, is nothing but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this
reason is no longer separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that
functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the appara tuses of biopolitics
leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, ‘nothing
reprehensible’ aside from its con finement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a ‘whatever singularity', a being that is
only its manner of being, its own ‘thus’.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this irreducibly potential ‘whatever
being’ that makes possible the emergence of a generic non-exclusive community without
presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possi bility of a happy life. [If] instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper
and sense less form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and
individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first time enter into a community
without presuppositions and without subjects.40 Thus, rather
than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave
them to their self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be achieved by the
practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.
at: perm
either it doesn’t solve or it severs --- that’s bad because it makes rejoinder impossible
and hampers argumentative responsibility --- links are DAs to the permutation
1. it does not refuse the sovereign ethos of endless line-drawing on which biopolitical
control is founded
2. it does not begin from the position of bare life which ensure its cooption under
national/social movements
3. the perm does not ensure that the state of exception ends which means its singleissue legal solution will be circumvented
*2pt font for long passages with no relevance
Zevnik 9 (Andreja – Lecturer in International Politics at Manchester University, “Sovereign-less Subject
and the Possibility of Resistance,” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Volume 38, Number 1,
p. 2-9, http://mil.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/07/09/0305829809336255.full.pdf)
Edkins and Pin-Fat draw upon Giorgio Agamben's understanding of sovereign power further. They argue that sovereign
power has the means
and authority to draw lines or to distinguish between different types of subjectivities. It has power to
determine and allocate someone a place inside or outside of community and, therefore, to grant or deprive
that person of their political rights. As Agamben writes in Means without Ends, since the 1789 Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are
'attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immedi ately vanishing presupposition of the citizen'. In other words, Agamben is saying
that human
rights or any kind of rights belong to a subject in a community and not to the subject or to the
being as such. Exclusion from the community not only deprives that individual of citizenship but also of
(human) rights. Therefore, as Edkins and Pin-Fat argue, sovereign line-drawing strategies, a politics of inclusion and
exclusion, condition to some extent the existence of a community and of each and every human being.
Sovereign power, as a power which makes the decision as to who counts as a subject and who does not, is
precisely this line-drawing politics that includes, excludes or places beings in-between, in the zone of
indis tinction. Following the argument in Agamben's Homo Sacer, we can say that the current biopolitical imaginary, where sovereign power imposes
human/non-human distinctions on every 'being' subjected to sovereign power, is exactly the imaginary in which subjects are constantly faced with the threat of
being deprived of their rights, subjectivity or 'human ity'. The
rise of unjust, exclusionary and de-privileging political practices
through which this power is manifest, may provide an occasion for sub jects to resist the sovereign
politics of drawing lines.
This article explores and aims to theorise the possibility of resistance to sovereign power that entails the emergence of a new kind of 'being' - a 'whatever being' - whose identity and sense of belonging to a com munity are altered. It follows Edkins and Pin-Fat's theoretical lead and adopts the theory of Giorgio Agamben, in particular his understanding of bare life and 'whatever being', in order to explore forms of resistance. Yet, I would like
to suggest, Agamben's theory is insufficient for think ing resistance, for he left unexplored the transformation from bare life to 'whatever being'. To fill this gap I introduce the theory of Jacques Lacan. The main purpose of looking at Agamben's and Lacan's explorations of resistance to sovereign power is to find grounds for a challenge to sovereign power which do not fall back into sovereign discourse. An alternative mode of resistance cannot derive from revolution - all revolu tions, as Lacan argues, result in the re-instalment of another sovereign and the revolution
continues - but must proceed from the subject's posi tion, which withers away sovereign power as we know it, and brings to the forefront a 'subject' or a kind of 'being' whose existence no longer requires the intervention or recognition of sovereign power. This article searches for an alternative to the exclusionary practices of contemporary politics and a form of resistance through a challenge to Edkins and Pin-Fat's argument in the article 'Through the Wire'. The article argues that when suggesting a refusal to draw lines and the assumption of bare life as a potential form
of resistance, Edkins and Pin-Fat overlooked an important aspect in Agamben's thought and thereby their proposal of resistance falls short of their goal, which is a successful challenge to sovereign power and the forms of life that it produces. The article first elaborates on Agamben's theorisation of bare life as a potential form of resistance; second, it introduces Edkins and, Pin-Fat's alternative forms of resistance and further engages with and critiques their understanding of bare life and 'the politics of drawing lines' presented as the 'refusal' and the 'assumption of bare
life'; and, third, it develops an alternative challenge to sovereign power by referring to the theory of Jacques Lacan and the concepts of passage a I'acte and a demand of being. By exploring the events at Tiananmen in 1989, which, as argued in the article, represent an innovative way of thinking resistance and lead to the emergence of a new form of being, the article searches for the embodiment of a product ive challenge to sovereign power. Unlike Edkins and Pin-Fat's example of the asylum seekers, the article argues that the events at Tiananmen can be understood as
the embodiment of a particular political form of being distinct from bare life. The Bare Life of Giorgio Agamben Agamben has recently become a leading philosopher in the theorisation of resistance. His theory offers two ways of thinking resistance: bare life and whatever being. Both concepts theorise a particular form of existence. While the latter represents an alternative form of being, the former - bare life - can be read in two ways. It can signify a closed form of exis tence where no resistance can be thinkable, or, in a more Marxist way, it can be seen as a necessary yet
destructive by-product of sovereign power. These readings correspond to Slavoj Zizek's observations of the relation ship between Foucault's and Agamben's theorisation. Agamben's dis tinctive way of engaging with the political, as Zizek argues, defines him as a philosopher whose theoretical conceptualisation is biopolitical, but the notion of biopolitics is picked up from where Foucault left off. While Foucault's understanding of biopolitics, according to Zizek, leaves space for resistance, Agamben's, with a distinctive conceptualisation of life, does not. Although I agree with
Zizek's observation on the status of bare life, my reading of Agamben's theory contradicts Zizek's. I argue that Agamben's theory has space for resistance; however, this space is narrow, underdeveloped and has remained largely unaddressed by Agamben himself. Here I explore this space of resistance. In the Introduction to Homo Sacer Agamben discusses two concepts from Greek philosophy: zoe and bios. Aristotle associated them with two forms of life: 'natural life' and 'good life'. Agamben elaborates on Aris totle's two forms of life by understanding zoe as a form of life
common to all living beings and bios as a form of life distinctive of a group or politi cal community. This reading of zoe and bios is not new. It originates, as Foucault wrote in History of Sexuality, in the transformation of politics to biopolitics - biopolitics then being a result of the entry of zoe into bios. In other words, the emergence of biopolitics, where zoe and bios are equally present, does away with the ancient Aristotelian separation between public/political and private sphere. As a consequence of zoe's relocation in the centre of biopolitical mechanisms and practices,
both private and public sphere become political. Thus, as Agamben argues, zoe enters the 'political' as a biopolitical body and a product of sovereign power. The relationship between zoe and the political embodies the manner in which law refers to life - inclusive exclusion, where the exception remains included in relation to the rule through its very suspension. As such though, zoe is never fully part of bios, but always already included by its exclusion through the distinctively sovereign nexus of law and life. The practice of such 'inclu sive exclusion' in the Western sovereign
biopolitical imaginary blurs the distinctions between zoe and bios, in a way which makes them inseparable or indistinct. Agamben's sphere of in-between-ness or indistinction opens with the proclamation of a sovereign exception. The exception is ontologically indefinable space, where inclusion and exclusion are non-existent and dividing lines cannot be drawn. It is a place, as argued by Agamben, where 'the exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already excluded'. The
topological structure of the state of exception then takes the form of 'being outside and yet belonging'. It resem bles at least two specific relationships, the one between sovereign and law, and the other between law and life. For as long as the former prob- lematises the indistinct place of the sovereign, neither inside nor outside the law but in a position to declare the exception, the latter resembles the spatial problematic of the camp, where sovereign violence takes place under the exception of law and, in biopolitical terms, produces lives with no political power - bare
lives of survival. However, for Agamben, the camp is not a random product of the state of exception, but a symptom of the Western political system and its juridical order, whose task is to strengthen security by dividing, excluding and generalising. For Agamben though, the decisive force in the reconceptualisation of Western political imaginaries is not merely the inclusion of zoe into bios, but the emergence of a space of indistinction where zoe cannot be sepa rated from bios and of which the product is bare life. Once, bare life used to be situated at the margins of the
political, now it gradually coincides with the centre of the political. Bare life, then, 'is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. [But] the bare life of homo sacer ... [is] a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between men and beast, nature and culture'. It is a creation of sovereign power for sover eign power in the zone of indistinction which always already produces us as bare lives or homines sacri in becoming. In this way Agamben unties bare life from zoe and bios and illustrates the way in which the subjectivities
of bare life are stripped of legal and political protection. Bare life is a product of sovereign power par excellence: it is both included and excluded from the political. It is excluded because zoe to which bare life partly relates is an apolitical form of life, but it is included because it belongs or is a product of that very same order of sovereign power. As such, bare life then does not possess power; in fact it is stripped of any legal and political protection and unable to redefine political power rela tion or have an impact on sovereign power.
However,
there is another side to bare life. As a by-product of sov ereign power, bare life can also be a form of life
that is out of reach of sovereign power. In the biopolitical, where bare life gets created, the sovereign
power exercised all its power for the creation of bare life, and is therefore left without any control over
its own 'by-products'. Thus sovereign power becomes power-less in relation to bare life. Once bare life is
understood in such a way, 'the sovereign' can no longer exercise its powers. In this context, bare life, instead of being disabled and
separated from sovereign power, becomes its primary enemy and a destructible force. The form of life associated with bare life is in
this context onto logically different from bare life that is stripped of any legal and political protection. Such form of bare life can no longer be seen as apolitical,
but it rather constitutes a form of being that inhibits a space where sover eign power cannot draw lines or
further exclusions. In fact, bare life now becomes explicitly and immediately political. It attacks sovereign
power 'from the outside' where the categories of acceptance, inclusion or exclu sion no longer hold. Equally,
in the discourse of this 'new form of being' notions like state order or human rights become obsolete. Such a form of life then, although it remains 'deprived' of all
the attributes of humanity, can embody a singular and sovereign-less form of being. In my reading of Agamben, such
being has political power;
which enables it to enter and alter political power games and to resist. Therefore, this new political form of life can no longer be understood as
'bare life' in its original sense. What is proposed here is rather the understanding of life that exists by itself, life as such, or in 'medieval terms', life in quodlibet. It is a life that has no other conditions of existence but itself or, as
Agamben writes, life that is its own potentiality. In fact, in The Coming Community Agamben describes this form of being as 'whatever being'. He writes that 'whatever being' is a form of being that is included in political realms
through its exclusion while at the same time deprived of all attributes of humanity. The 'whatever- ness' of this being implies its break with the Enlightenment's under standing of the subject. This being is 'that which is neither
particular nor general, individual nor generic'. It is a being such as it is, with all its properties. However, as Agamben writes, it is also a being that is immate rial and indefinably human or inhuman, politically qualified or excluded.
Whatever being is outside the binary logics of the universal and the par ticular, inclusion or exclusion; it is free from the question of belonging to a class or a set of common identities. Instead, whatever being is a being that is
inherently hidden in the condition of belonging. It refers, belongs and relates to other 'whatever beings' through the condition of belonging as such, and not through the possession of common identities, race, class, religion,
language, culture or any other form of belonging to a commu nity. Thus, 'whatever beings' relate to one another through means which do not fall under the logic of sovereign power. 'Whatever being' is 'a being whose community
is mediated not by any condition of belonging ... nor by the simple absence of conditions ... but by belonging itself.' As such, the communities of whatever being are defined by negativity and not by present characteristics - rather
'Whatever beings', as Agamben argues, cannot form social or
national movements that would demand recognition of their identities or nation alities as there is no
identity or nationality upon which such a move ment could emerge - there are no common identities that
would seek recognition, as well as no particular demands to fight for. While sub jects of sovereign power
form political communities or social movements based on their identity in order to voice demands and
to seek recognition, the togetherness of 'whatever beings' has no grounds in identity or in demands that
arise from such commonalities. Instead, 'whatever beings' voice their demands regardless of the sovereign power. These
demands are intolerable or make no sense in the existing sovereign order, and are as such hostile to
sovereign power. Sovereign power, as Agamben writes, in fact cannot tolerate 'that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging ... [or] that singularities form a community with out
than being a community of similar ities, it is a community of difference, a community of 'non-community'.
affirming an identity'. What is more, demands voiced by groups of 'whatever beings' are perceived as a threat to the system, because sover eign power does not know the direction from which they are coming, nor does it know
how to address them. I argue that 'bare life in itself' is apolitical and has no capabilities of resistance; however, that changes when and if bare life is understood as a form-of-life?4 Only in circumstances that lead towards the
emergence of 'whatever being' can bare life be perceived as a potential path towards resistance. However, while there seems to be a continuing line of thought that leads from bare life to 'whatever being', the gap of how this trans
formation could appear, I argue, is left largely unaddressed. In the next section I will look at how Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat try to adopt Agamben's theory to further their conceptualisation of resistance. Refusal of Bare
Life, Assumption of Bare Life and Whatever Politics Drawing on Agamben's idea of bare life, Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat pushed forward alternative paths of resistance and challenges to sovereign power. Here, it should be
acknowledged that they are not argu ing for 'a challenge to a particular sovereign order, but to sovereignty, or sovereign power, in general, as a form of order that entails specific forms of life'. As such, they are not searching for a
new political order with another, different sovereign, but a form of sovereign-less political commu nity. Although Edkins and Pin-Fat declare their opposition to sovereign power as a form of order, they do not deny the general
possibility of order or political life. In their view, both political life and order can exist outside sovereign imaginaries, though such order would be a very different one. Edkins and Pin-Fat propose two forms of resistance in this
context: refusal and the assumption of bare life. In the former, the subject refuses the line-drawing policies of sovereign power and the ability to make dis tinctions between forms of life upon which the sovereign power relies; and
Refusal to draw lines between zoe and bios or inside/outside, as
potentially contest the violence of sovereign power. Edkins and Pin-Fat, by following Agamben, suggest
that 'it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between forms of life ... that sovereign power as a
form of violence can be contested and a prop erly political power relation reinstated'. This, according to the
authors, implies that a refusal to draw some lines will not suffice, because if some lines are accepted then the
right of a sovereign to draw lines remains uncontested. As such then, a refusal has to refer to the line-drawing
poli tics which prevents the drawing of any lines of the sort that the sovereign power demands.
in the latter, the subject takes on the form of life that sovereign power seeks to impose.
both authors believe, could
4. the perm devolves into political conservativism, which inherently falls short
Bryant 11 (Levi – Professor of Philosophy at Colin College and Ph.D. from Loyola University, “Lacan and
the Closure of Political Realism,” in Larval Subjects, 8-1-11,
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/lacan-and-the-closure-of-political-realism/)
Returning to my critique of political realism from a few days ago, political
realism is always an attempt to instantiate a closure of
reality. What it aims for is a “politics” of reality against a politics of the real. This closure consists in a restriction of being to
reality, to the system of appearance defining places and positions of the beings involved in a system, that strives to erase the anarchic and
contingent ground of this order, thereby hoping to eradicate the eruption of the real. Its fiction is that all those entities
involved in the situation have clearly defined and counted identities and positions that can be smoothly
calculated and managed in a governmental decision process. Yet to establish this, political realism must
perpetually have recourse to the logic Lacan outlines in the masculine side of the graph of sexuation, pointing to a supplementary
sovereign, God, natural order, king, charismatic leader, transcendent authority, etc., that covers or veils
the absence of foundation, the excess, upon which reality is contingently founded, fixing this order. Political
realism’s thesis is always that 1) all entities involved are counted and accounted for, and 2) that no other order is
possible. Of course, this order also disguises the fact that the interests it claims to be in everyone’s interests are
really the interests of a few. In repressing this anarchic and contingent ground of the reality system, political realism thereby
promotes the lie that such and such a course of action is the only possible course of action, the only
thing that can be done. As Naomi Klein showed so nicely in The Shock Doctrine, political realism manufactures crisis as a way
of forcing the demos to accept their exploitation as the only way to avoid catastrophe. If “politics” must be
placed in square quotes when discussing political realism, then this is because political realism is not really a politics at all, but is rather
mere administration (in all the terms literal and connotative senses). Insofar as political realism treats all elements as counted
and accounted for, insofar as it treats all possibilities as pre-delineated in the anticipatory system of reality,
“politics” becomes mere administration in determining which vectors should be pursued in these pre-delineated systems of anticipation (usually
constructed around what Lacan calls a “forced vel” or disjunction, where the people are forced to choose, as in the muggers scenario, between their money or their
life). Genuine politics, by contrast, is a politics not of reality, but of the real. Following Ranciere, a politics of the real is that politics that contests
the
very system of counting and distributing positions, that refuses the closure of reality that would claim
that all is counted, accounted for, and with a proper place, and that orients its praxis with respect to the
contingent appearance of the inapparent. Yet above all, a politics of the real is a politics that refuses the very system of counting, both at the
level of the entities populating the social order and at the level of predelineated possibilities, refusing the system of predelineation governing appearances. A
politics of the real gives birth to new possibilities, possibilities with no place or count within the reigning
system of possibility. Where political realism says “this is all that is possible and therefore we must do x”,
a politics of the real contests this very system of ordering the world and invents new possibilities
inimical to this gamed system of counting. Thus, for example, with Civil Rights the reality was that there was no
place for African-Americans as equal citizens. The system of reality said that African-Americans are
counted in this way such that they go to these schools, use these fountains, go to these restaurants, sit
on these seats on the bus, etc. Any other way of participating and relating, said political realism, was impossible
insofar as people were not ready for it, it would ruin re-election chances of various politicians
sympathetic to equality, thereby undermining efforts of equality, etc. Thereby, we were told, only
incremental steps were possible. Anything else would produce catastrophe. Yet the civil rights movement
founded itself not on political realism, but on a politics of the real. Everywhere in civil rights struggles we saw the appearing of
the inapparent. We see the appearing of the impossible, of the strange spectre of that which is simultaneously counted (in a particular way
by the oligarchic order) and the uncounted when Rosa Parks refuses to go to the back of the bus. We see it when people
refuse to go to their assigned seats in restaurants or to go to assigned restaurants. We see it in the speeches that
evoke the oligarchic order’s claim to be equal (“separate but equal”) demanding the truth of the principle of equality while denouncing the inequality its reality
function practices. We
see it in people being attacked by dogs and fire hoses without fighting back. In this way the
inequity beneath the reality claiming to be revealed is simultaneously revealed and the excess of the
real, of that which is not counted within this reality, is also revealed challenging the closure of this order.
Above all, in refusing to go to the back of the bus or eat at the counter, the contingency of the so-called “natural order” (“blacks
“naturally” want their places and to be among their kind just as whites do”) is disclosed, revealing the possibility of a different
order. From the standpoint of political realism and incrementalism, these eruptions are understood to be
both ontologically impossible (as everything has a proper place) and to be avoided at all costs. The reality-order becomes a
massive regulatory mechanism, a defense formation, designed to forestall any eruption of the real within the social order. Yet in defending the
position of incrementalism and political realism what one really defends is the reign of oligarchs
claiming to act on behalf of the interests of everyone. And, of course, here it goes without saying that politics is generally
what takes place outside government. Government is always a political realism that attempts to reduce
the social order to the system of the count. Politics is what contests that system of counting, revealing its anarchic and contingent nature.
Politics is not what presidents, congressmen, etc., do; nor is it what takes place in the voting booth. All of
these things belong to the order of reality that effaces and erases the real. Politics can, of course, address governance, but always in a polemical mode that contests
its symbolico-imaginary sorting.
2nc at
2nc – at: h-triv
Agamben isn’t making a direct comparison, and his theories have clear reasons for the
parallels he draws
Robinson 11 (Andrew – political theorist, activist based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the
Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “In Theory Giorgio
Agamben: the state and the concentration camp,” in Ceasefire Magazine, 1-7-11,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-the-state-and-the-concentration-camp/)
Doubtless some
will reject his theories for violating “Godwin’s Law”, or because they feel it is trivialising or
decontextualising the camp to compare it to every instance of repression. This, I suspect, is based on a
misunderstanding. For one thing, Agamben is not actually saying that we are all treated like camp inmates,
simply that we’re all at risk from being treated as if we are of this status – we could be killed by the state
with impunity, even if we aren’t. Also, this is not just a case of Agamben calling people he dislikes Nazis. There are clear, structural
reasons for the parallels he draws. I would argue that, in contrast, the tabooing of discussion of fascistic elements
of present state practices is based on a kind of irrational splitting, which wards off the subversive
implications of “never again” by keeping them at a distance, pretending they “don’t apply to us”, they
only apply to issues behind some imaginary boundary (in “undemocratic” societies for instance) which historically
would prove to be far more porous. It is, I think, a peculiar perspectival blockage of radicalisms in countries like Britain to confine anti-fascism to
opposing small neo-Nazi groups. In contrast, German antifa have long recognised the parallels between the repressive practices (and even the personnel) of the
current German state and those of the Third Reich; so have radicals in Italy, Spain, Greece and Japan. It is only in countries like Britain and America, with no recent
fascist past to compare to, where the existence of a continuum between fascism and the ‘deep state’ is something of a public secret, even among radicals.
The Holocaust happened for contingent, historical reasons but the camp was a key
precondition
Robinson 11 (Andrew – political theorist, activist based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the
Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “In Theory Giorgio
Agamben: the state and the concentration camp,” in Ceasefire Magazine, 1-7-11,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-the-state-and-the-concentration-camp/)
The concentration camp, and Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz in particular, are for Agamben particularly definitive or telling examples of sovereignty. The
camp (which preceded the Holocaust by a long time) was a turning-point for Agamben because it made
the temporary state of exception permanent, locating it in space instead of time (unlike the declaration of a state of
emergency), and local to the core area of power, within its territory but outside its law (unlike the colony or warzone). This fixing of the state of
exception as a permanent feature at a site in time and space intensifies the danger to people declared homo sacer. Formerly, an outlawed person
would be literally banished, becoming a wandering figure driven into exile. Now, an outlawed person is not allowed to go into exile
(think for instance of the immense efforts put into catching high-profile fugitives), but rather, is put in a situation suspended between
inside and outside, constantly at risk of arbitrary power. For Agamben, camps differ from other disciplinary spaces (prisons,
asylums and so on) because in them, anything is possible, and the guard is absolutely sovereign. The Nazi Holocaust marks
a second turning point in which the horrors of the camp are revealed in all their monstrosity. The Holocaust happened when and where it
did for contingent, historical reasons, but its real causes were the creation of a particular kind of space,
the ‘camp’, where people were defined as having lives not worth living, and as being vulnerable to being
killed with impunity. Auschwitz is the high point of the logic of sovereignty, showing its ontological nature in its realisation: it shows where the
combination of biopolitics and sovereignty leads. Auschwitz marks the point of no return which reveals the nature of sovereignty for what it really is. It thus marks
the starting point for a new politics.
2nc – at: try or die
Timeframe based try or die calculations justify consolidation of power and radical,
unprecented violence
Vivian 13 (Bradford – Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, Ph.D.,
Pennsylvania State University, “Times of Violence,” Published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech,
Volume 99, Issue 2, 2013, pg. 1,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00335630.2013.775704?journalCode=rqjs20#.VGaEkvnF
90o)
The ways that authoritative institutions invoke and order time as a means of consolidating and
expressing power often engender violence. Conflicting interpreta- tions of holy writ and spiritual obligation have incited bloody religious
persecutions and armed conflicts for centuries. Slavoj Zizek contends that secular (not only religious) regimes justify radical
police or military action by invoking apocalyptic senses of time: ‘‘Apocalyptic time is the time of the end
of time, the time of emergency, of the state of exception when the end is nigh.’’2 States of exception in
liberal-democratic nations are also times of exception: executive authorities exercise unprecedented
forms of violence both within and without national borders by citing as justification allegedly
temporary episodes of state emergency.3
2nc – at: determinate site
Sovereign exceptionalism is spatializing, not spatially bounded
Belcher et al. 8 (Oliver Belcher – postdoctoral researcher on the RELATE Center of Excellence located at
the University of Oulu, Finland, former postdoctoral researcher on the BIOS Project at the Arctic Center,
University of Lapland, Finland, Lauren Martin – Academy of Finland, Postdoctoral Researcher, RELATE
Centre of Excellence, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland, PhD in Geography,
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, Anna Secor – Full Professor,
University of Kentucky, Geography Department, PhD, University of Colorado, Stephanie Simon, Tommy
Wilson, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Exception and the Topological Challenge to Geography,”
Published in Antipode, Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 499–503, September 2008,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00620.x/abstract)
Geography's use of Giorgio Agamben's work has proliferated in recent years. While approaches and interpretations of Agamben's political theory have varied, a
common aim has been to apply his theory of exception to socio-geographical phenomena and to disclose “the ban” as the “originary political relation” (Diken and
Laustsen 2005:24–25; Ek 2006:363; Kearns 2006; Minca 2005, 2006). The result has been a focus
on the “space” of the exception as a
determinate socio-temporal site, such as Guantanamo Bay. We argue that this focus on determinate spaces elides the real
spatializing work of the exception, which, we emphasize, is topological (see also Coleman 2007). The problem with
focusing on a static geometry of exceptional spaces is that it obscures the ways in which the exception
operates as an unlocalizable process of transformation. As Brian Massumi (2002:184) puts it, the distinction between
topology and static geometry is the distinction “between the process of arriving at a form through
continuous deformation and the determinate form arrived at when the process stops” (see also Hannah 2006).
Topologies, unlike topographies, do not map discreet locations or particular objects. While it is true that we
can identify operative spaces of exception, the exception also materializes ordinary spaces. As a
topological figure that creates the conditions for particular materialized sites, the exception is emergent,
which is to say that it is not a preformed category but a dynamic set of techniques of power. In this way, we emphasize
Agamben's relationship with Foucault, an affinity that is often lost in various interpretations of his writings. The implications of a topological and emergent
understanding of the exception become clearer in the context of Agamben's idea of sovereignty as potential and actual. At the same time, our intervention aims to
show how a topological, emergent understanding of the exception might open up a potential for radical politics. If
the spatiality of Agamben's
political theory has been treated in too fixed a manner, this tendency might in no small part be due to a
confusion between Agamben's political theory and that of the primary theorist of the sovereign exception, Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt argues that juridical rule and State authority are made possible by the decision on what
constitutes the “normal” case (where the rule of law holds) versus the exception (where the law is suspended) (Schmitt 1985).
Schmitt's idea of the “ordering of space” involves above all the decision on the exception that establishes
the inside and the outside of the law. The state of exception, according to Schmitt, “designated a zone of free and empty space”, that is, “a
suspension of all law for a certain time and in a certain space” (Schmitt 2003:99). For Schmitt, therefore, the decision on the exception performs a juridical and
territorial ordering at the same time as it demarcates a specific spatio-temporal order—the space of the exception. Agamben's
departure from
Schmitt on the question of space is clear in Homo Sacer, where he writes: In its archetypal form, the
state of exception is therefore the principle of every juridical localization, since only the state of exception
opens the space in which the determination of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first
becomes possible. As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite
spatio-temporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time) (Agamben 1998:19). Thus for Agamben the state of exception is
the principle of territorialization (ordering and orienting) but is itself essentially unlocalizable. While Schmitt explicitly renders the state of exception as spatially and
temporally bounded, Agamben's contribution to the theory of the exception is to reread Walter Benjamin's engagement with Schmitt and to bring into sharp relief
its contemporary relevance. For Agamben, this state inaugurates a rupture within the Schmittian correspondence between order and orientation, between law and
space. For Schmitt the decision on the exception merely demarcates the inside and the outside of the law, but for
Agamben the exception also
produces and diffuses a “zone of indistinction” within which the law and its suspension become
indistinguishable. This state of exception is not itself a kind of space, but rather a technique of
government (Agamben 2005:2) that produces a topographical juridical-territorial order by determining the
inside and the outside of law (as Schmitt also argues); establishes the principles by which we distinguish law from
its application; and produces a topological relationship between the inside and outside of law such that
they become indistinguishable (delocalization). Because topological space is always a process of becoming, we use analytics of governmentality,
which itself refers to the everyday emergence of power and control, to think through how the exception works. For Foucault, governmentality refers to a field of
everyday practices, organized by a complex of techniques of power that govern and optimize processes immanent to a population. In this field, discipline,
government, and sovereignty are imbricated and indistinguishable, so that the exception operates as a potential (dis)ordering principle, a potential technique of
government (Foucault 1991:102). For Agamben, “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the
paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (Agamben 2005:14). This governmentalization
of the structure of the
exception forms a “complex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the
state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Agamben 1998:37). As a technique of
government, then, the exception is never completely hidden, nor is it purely manifested. The state of
exception produces material effects, even when it remains virtual. This poses an important question for geographers: how do
we analyze the material effects of the virtual? If the topological character of the state of exception means that it operates at the edges of materiality, how should
we make use of Agamben's theories to understand the spatiality of the exception (and governmentality, for that matter)? We argue that Agamben's
limit
case, the state of exception, is spatializing, not spatialized. When we say that the exception is spatializing, we emphasize
processes of transformation and emergence (the topological) and fold the operation of spatialization
into the field of potential. The exception thus produces a governmental potential to link specific arrays of
discursive objects, procedures, and rationalities towards particular ends. Based on this understanding of Agamben, which
emphasizes the emergent spatialization of the exception rather than its determinate spaces, we argue for foregrounding the idea of
potentiality in geographical analyses of the exceptional. Situated on the edge of materiality, the state of exception has the potential
to materialize or not to materialize actual spaces of exception. Potentiality, for Agamben, is the tension between actuality (materialization)
and the potential not to be—the faculty to say “I can”, without the action being materialized (Agamben
1999:179). To have a faculty, argues Agamben, means “to have a privation”, ie the potential not to be. This potentiality, argues Agamben, “maintains
itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is
sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality” (Agamben 1998:45). For example, in his discussion of sovereignty, Agamben poses
“abandonment”, the rationality of power that marks the exception, as topological in that it has the ability not to be: it is potential. The exception is the
zone of indistinction between constituting and constituted power. The decision on the exception
“realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be” (Agamben 1998:46).
Topological space is therefore not only emergent and governmental, but also always potential—that is,
both capable of becoming and of not becoming. It is no coincidence that in the denouement of his essay “On potentiality” that
Agamben finds the “root of freedom” also within the “abyss of potentiality” (Agamben 1999:183). Agamben's
political praxis is one of radical desubjectivation, a desubjectification that refuses to be captured in a
topological state of exception [a synthesis between Walter Benjamin's “divine violence” (1996) and Gilles Deleuze's (2006)“Immanence: a life …”].
He writes, “We can say that between immanence and a life there is a kind of crossing with neither distance nor
identification, something like a passage without spatial movement” (Agamben 1999:223). This “passage without a
spatial movement” is a matrix of infinite desubjectification (Agamben 1999:232). Absolute immanence (ie potential freedom) is a call for
Benjamin's barbarians: those law-destroying lives that cannot be captured in a sovereign's state of exception. It is “a life …” whose principle is
“infinite desubjectification”, which cannot be abandoned—a de-subject that preempts the potential
state of exception, and therefore cannot be striated into the biopolitical subject of bare life, that
succubus that haunts our political landscape. Just as the subjective homo sacer is the material kernel for the sovereign exception,
Agamben's radical desubjectification is the material kernel for freedom. This praxis of Agamben's may be what Deleuze
once said was “philosophy, nothing else but philosophy” (cited in Ek 2006:363) in response to a question on the utility of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari
1980). This poses a challenge to geographers of how to produce knowledge and geographical imaginaries that at once promote just political and intellectual projects
and refuse to produce subjects that can be captured.
2nc – at: ‘state of exception’ bad
Misreading --- our point is the duality of power feeds into itself
Prozorov 10 (Sergei – Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why
Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” in Philosophy Social Criticism, Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1056-1057,
November 2010, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract)
This totalized image of the global state of exception has been criticized as both hyperbolically excessive and internally
contradictory. Paul Passavant has argued that Agamben’s theory suffers from a contradictory concept of the state that also plagues his affirmative vision of the
‘coming politics’.7 While
Agamben is most famous for his deconstruction of the logic of sovereignty that
radicalizes Schmitt’s conception,8 he has also, from his earliest work onwards, confronted the more
dispersed, ‘governmentalized’ modes of power relations characteristic of late capitalism in the manner highly
influenced by Guy Debord’s work on the society of the spectacle.9 Against the argument that this conjunction of sovereignty and
governmentality in the analysis of late-modern power relations constitutes a contradiction, we must recall that this duality of the contemporary
apparatus of power is explicitly affirmed by Agamben himself, who, similarly to Foucault’s claim for the indissociability of
sovereignty, discipline and government,10 regularly insists that ‘the system is always double’.11 The inextricable link between the two
aspects of the contemporary social order consists in the nihilistic deployment of life itself as a (post-)historical task. Both state sovereignty and the
late-capitalist society of the spectacle are biopolitical and thus permanently feed into each other. The
contemporary neo-liberal governmentality extends the operation of economic rationality to life itself, whereby life is conceived as a paradigmatic form of
enterprise,12 and in this manner expropriates the being-in-language that defines human existence and subjects it to the laws of exchange-value or, in Agamben’s
later works, ‘exhibition value’.13 Conversely, sovereign power expropriates the potentiality of human existence, transforming it into the bare life that it then
grounds itself in and applies itself to in the perpetual state of exception. The state does nothing more than sustain the spectacle with its apparatuses of security,
while the spectacle does nothing more than perpetually produce the degraded forms-of-life that sovereign power can apply itself to.
2nc – at: utopian/mwajeh 5
We are manifestly anti-utopian --- possibility for change is always already present
Prozorov 10 (Sergei – Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why
Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” in Philosophy Social Criticism, Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1057,
November 2010, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract)
It is evident that the danger at issue in Agamben’s work is nihilism in its dual form of the sovereign ban and the capitalist spectacle. If, as we have shown in the
previous sec- tion, the reign of nihilism is general and complete, we may be optimistic about the pos- sibility of jamming its entire apparatus since there is nothing in
it that offers an alternative to the present ‘double subjection’. Yet, where are we to draw resources for such a global transformation? It
would be easy to
misread Agamben as an utterly utopian thinker, whose intentions may be good and whose criticism of
the present may be valid if exaggerated, but whose solutions are completely implausible if not
outright embarras- sing.23 Nonetheless, we must rigorously distinguish Agamben’s approach from utopianism. As Foucault has argued, utopias derive their attraction from their discursive structure of a fabula, which makes it
possible to describe in great detail a better way of life, precisely because it is manifestly impossible.24 While utopian thought easily pro- vides us with elaborate
visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, since its site is by definition a non-place. In contrast, Agamben’s
works tell us quite
little about life in a community of happy life that has done away with the state form, but are remarkably concrete about the practices that are constitutive of this community, precisely because these
practices require nothing that would be extrinsic to the contemporary condition of biopolitical nihilism.
Thus, Agamben’s coming politics is manifestly anti-utopian and draws all its resources from the
condition of contemporary nihilism.
This is offense against you --- an inability to imagine a different world doesn’t change
its possiblity
Kelly 14 (Mark GE – Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, “Against
prophecy and utopia: Foucault and the future,” in Thesis Eleven, Volume 120, Number 1, p. 112-113,
http://the.sagepub.com/content/120/1/104.full.pdf+html)
It might be said that such a position is itself utopian, positing a utopian vision of a world devoid of utopianism, by which to condemn
the present, predicting, without knowing it, that things will work better without utopianism. Neither Foucault nor I do this, however. We offer no vision of how a
world without utopianism might operate, no claim that it will lead to any particular practical consequence. We
only identify a certain form of
practice existing in the present that we advocate, over other practices in the present that I argue are
immanently self-contradictory. I make no claim about the dangers or lack thereof in non-utopian procedures, only that they avoid the specific
dangers of utopianism and prophecy. Another possible line of objection is that anti-utopianism is associated today with reactionary politics. Alain Badiou (2001: 13)
points out that today any
positive political project is attacked as utopian, which is to say as unrealistic. It is true that
such criticisms are widespread, but they are often incorrect. While there are utopianisms on the left, revolutionary
thought is not generically utopian. Revolution is compatible with my position, in the form of an immanent revolution from below, in which the
participants attend to and deal with the radically new and unforeseeable conditions as they emerge in a revolutionary situation. The point is to prevent revolution
being utopian or prophetic. The
critique that castigates left-wing politics in general as utopian is the inverse of our
critique of utopianism. Where we claim that utopianism fails because it attempts to say how society should work, critiques of left-wing
thought as utopian tend to claim that left-wing positions are insufficiently articulated, hence ‘utopian’
because they cannot offer an alternative vision. We would argue that utopianism is marked not by the absence
of a utopian vision, but by its presence. According to my argument, the inability to imagine how something would
work is no argument against its possibility, just as the ability to imagine how something would work
does not adequately demonstrate that it is actually possible, since the complexity of the social outstrips
our ability to model society in our minds. There is nothing utopian about saying that ‘another world is
possible’, where this slogan is raised without detailing what this world would look like. Badiou’s own position is utterly non-utopian, because it is a matter of
fidelity to a truth event in the past that is neither about reviving the past situation nor aiming at producing any particular future situation. Badiou’s philosophy is
one of profound openness which is inimical to utopianism as I have described it. Conversely, however, it
is problematic to say that another
world is not possible, that ‘there is no alternative’. Such pronouncements are prophetic. The claim that communism is
impossible has the same flaw as the claim that communism is inevitable: we cannot know whether a
determinate form of social organization is either inevitable or impossible, possible or desirable, in
advance. Grand historical claims are prophetic, even if they are negative, like Fukuyama’s famous neoHegelian diagnosis of the end of history
2nc – at: ojakangas 5
Ojakangas elides the intrinsic relation between caring for living and adjudicating death
Dillon 5 (Michael – Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, “Cared to
Death: The Political Time of Your Life,” in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)
The key point of dispute with Ojakangas concerns the self-immolating logic of biopolitics. "Not bare life that is
exposed to an unconditional threat of death," he says in the introduction to his paper, "but the care of'all living' is the foundation of biopower." (emphasis in the
original). Ojakangas says: "Foucault's biopower has nothing to do with that [Agamben] kind of bare life." I agree. Foucault's biopolitics concerns an historically
biologised life whose biologisation continues to mutate as the life sciences themselves offer changing interpretations and technical determinations of life. This
biologised life of biopolitics nonetheless also raises the stake for Foucault of a life that is not a biologised life. So it does for Agamben, but differently and in a
different way. For Foucault, the biologised life of biopolitics also raises the issue of a life threatened in supremely violent and novel ways. So it does for Agamben,
but again differently and for the same complex of reasons. In contesting Agamben in the ways that he does, Ojakangas marks an important difference, then,
between Foucault and Agamben. That done, perhaps the difference needs however to be both marked differently and interrogated differently. I have argued that
there is a certain betrayal in the way Agamben reworks Foucault. There is however much more going on in this 'betrayal' than misconstruction and
misinterpretation. There is a value in it. Exploring that value requires another ethic of reading in addition to that of the exegesis required to mark it out. For
Agamben's loathing of biopolitics is I think more 'true' to the burgeoning suspicion and fear that progressively marked Foucault's reflections on it than Ojakangas'
account can give credit for, since he concentrates on providing the exegetical audit required to mark it out rather than evaluate it. In
posing an intrinsic
and unique threat to life through the very ways in which it promotes, protects and invests life, 'care for
all living' threatens life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have become vital. The threshold of
modernity is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own (bio) political strategies.
Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It does teach us how to punish and who to kill.
Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it distributes live across terrains of value that
the life sciences constantly revise in the cause of life's very promotion. It has to. That is also why we now
have a biopolitics gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of intervention and martial doctrines
of virtuous war. Here, also, is the reason why the modernising developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: "So you can understand the importance - I
almost said the vital importance - of racism to such an exercise of power." In racism, Foucault insists: "We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to
work." But: "The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with the
techniques of power, with the technology of power." In
thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a revision of the question
of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised; comprehensively subject to biopolitical
governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance, whether in terms posed by Foucault or Agamben.
Emphasising care for all living - the promotion, protection and investment of the life of individuals and
populations - elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the issue of the life
that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably
applies in a politics of life that understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that Agamben's bare life
contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics, Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical
dissociation. One, moreover, which threatens
to elide the intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its essential relation
with correction and death.
If life is a production of biopolitics it is circular to claim biopolitics saves lives
Dillon 5 (Michael – Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, “Cared to
Death: The Political Time of Your Life,” in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)
The nomological concerns the law, the biological concerns 'life' and the theological concerns the relation of life to transcendence in the form of divinity. At a
philosophical level, the life of politics may be said to find its bearings in relation to the changing interpretations and correlations of force that characterise the
intimate relationality of this trinity of nomos, bios and theos. Agamben takes Foucault's account of biopolitics away from history and relocates it back in the centre
of these key determinants of political philosophy. Whereas Agamben's nomological account of biopolitical violence threatens a certain kind of political paralysis,
however, in as much as it ontologises that violence, Ojakangas'
insistence on the productivity of biopolitics threatens to
elide the violent inner logic of biopolitics and to miss what Agamben's nomologically driven
ontologisation nonetheless does rigorously expose. Incomparably the most interesting thinker thinking today, one of the things
that Agamben is thinking in response to the provocations of biopolitics is the question of life
undetermined by the life of biopolitics, a life elevated in addition by a refiguration of transcendence without a godhead, in the form of
the immanence of the messianic. He also thinks the facticity of a corporeality beyond the reduction of the body to biology. It is in these moves,
among others, that he thinks beyond the initial provocation to political thought that he takes from Foucault's biopolitics. Like any such response, the issue becomes
less the degree of faithlessness than the worth of the betrayal.
Death is a function of biopolitics --- it must eliminate the threat to life
Dillon 5 (Michael – Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, “Cared to
Death: The Political Time of Your Life,” in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)
Moreover, in
the biopolitical context of the circulation of life as species being, Foucault says death is not so much
to be hidden away." It loses that spectacular ritual character it once had, marking the move from one power, that of
secular sovereignty, to another power, that of a sovereign God. Death does not disappear from biopolitics. Neither is it attenuated beyond
disqualified, but, "something
political concern, quite the contrary. It changes its character, undergoing political transformation as biopolitics re-inscribes death in the process of 'recuperating the
death function'. Whereas
no power can ultimately exercise power over death, biopower can and does exercise
power over life. One of the means by which it does so is via the biopolitical preoccupations with mortality, morbidity, pathology and mutation.
Concerned with death in terms of the vital signs of life, biopolitics is also increasingly concerned these
days with the re-inscription of the vital signs of life in terms of code, both molecular and digital. Contra Ojakangas, then,
biopolitics does reclaim the death function, for a number of reasons and in a variety of changing ways. It must do so. Reclaiming
the death function is integral to its logic. It also reflects the changing operational dynamics of biopolitics. In relation to biopolitical logic: " In
the biopower system... killing, or the imperative to kill, is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over
political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the
species or race." It is acceptable and biopolitically necessary to kill, if not necessarily in the nomological sense of being exposed to death formulated in
Agamben's thesis of bare life. In relation to the operationalisation of biopolitics: if biopolitics is to promote, protect and invest life, it must engage in a continuous
assay of life. This
continuous biopolitical assaying of life proceeds through the epistemically driven and
continuously changing interrogation of the worth and eligibility of the living across a terrain of value that
is constantly changing. It is changing now, for example, in response to what the life sciences are teaching about what it is to be a living thing. It is
changing as biopolitical investment analysts (politicians, risk analysts, governmental technologisers) also interrogate where the best returns on life investment
happen to be located in the manifold circulation and transformation of life locally and globally. Life itself mutates in and through these very circuits, not least in
relation to molecular biology and electronic communication. We can broadly interpret life science now to range from molecularised biology, through digitalization,
to the new social and managerial sciences of development now prominent in the fields of global governmentality, global development policies, human security and
even military strategic discourse including, for example, 'Operations Other than War".
2nc links
crisis
Modern security fortifies the line-drawing depoliticisation and violence of sovereign
power, while closing off alternative political logics
*4pt font for long passages with no relevance
Raw 11 (Jessica – M.Sc. from Aberystwyth University, “Exploring Security and Community: Inoperativity,
Immunity and Political Organisation,” MSc(Econ) in the Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University, 9-19-11,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/7811/raw%20jessica%20ipm0060.docx?sequen
ce=1)
Modern security politics which place primary importance on preserving the life and security of
individual subjects and work to reduce politics to practices of management and control, simultaneously
defend a specific notion of political community that is antithetical to qualified political life and
circumscribes the ways in which we can imagine being with one another. The global ubiquity of
security, along with the notion that security is a positive political value which is to be achieved by privileging sovereign power, has
become so uncontested and unquestioned that we frequently fail to adequately trace the historical specificities of
the idea and the foundations and assumptions underpinning it. The logic of securitisation is too often accepted and reified, even, I argue in this thesis, within
critical security studies literature. Despite efforts by some, including CSS scholars, to problematise the term, its pursuit – what I refer to as the “will to security” –
remains an unquestioned assumption of the universal state system. We
thus see what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe term the retreat (retrait)
over-determination of the political by a philosophical concept becoming that which
determines the nature of political life and, simultaneously, a withdrawal of such concepts from questioning
and contestation. The concept in this case is the idea that activity must be geared towards the pursuit of secure communities, and that this is able to
of the political, which is the
condition the ways in which we might imagine being with one another politically. It is argued here that as soon as a particular idea of security or organising
politically is simply assumed to be the case, we lose the potential to challenge it as merely one philosophical concept among many. This “common sense” exerts a
tyranny under which all forms of political life and organisation must correspond to its unquestionable assumptions, and thus constitutes a totalitarian politics. In
accepting international relations as an endless war of securitisation, we are witnessing what Nancy terms ‘the total
completion of the political.’ This dissertation reveals our modern understandings of politics to be reliant, foundationally, on the will to security.
Among myriad and complex reasons for this, the one that I explore as most fundamental is the unstated reliance on liberal, substantive notions of political
community that form seemingly immutable foundations of much of Western political thought, but particularly modern international politics of security. In order to
expose these implicit foundations, I juxtapose radically different notions and discussions of “community” against typical Western liberal understandings which
permeate security discourse. Specifically, I deploy the ideas of “inoperativity” and “immunity” as forwarded by Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito respectively in
order to expose foundational myths and deep-rooted assumptions at the heart of the will to security. Above all, I argue that these assumptions are unfounded and,
ultimately, unnecessary to the extent that international relations scholars, rather than engaging in attempts to “do” security better or to locate ideal forms of
political community, must first explore the motivations and assumptions behind these pursuits. It is undeniable that scholars currently criticise the modern politics
of security permeating international relations thought and practice on a number of levels. There is a burgeoning CSS literature which rightly problematises the
pursuit of national security objectives over the well-being of the majority of a state’s – and indeed the world’s – population. Many question the placement of the
state as the referent object of the theory and practice of security, recognising as they do that all security technologies revolve around changing understandings of
the properties of that referent object. Some debate, for example, centres on replacing state security with individual security. This methodological individualism can
be seen in the work of the Aberystwyth School and the human security discourse, the latter seeing a large degree of success within policy-making circles and having
been adopted by the United Nations. This thesis addresses the impoverished nature of thinking on political community in this literature, highlighting ways of
organising politically that are implicitly accepted as immutable or ideal within logics of securitisation. Despite the partial acceptance within CSS of David Campbell’s
thesis that security politics constitutes a continuous attempt to establish secure political order internally as much as externally, the
ideological project
of much international relations thinking that posit states as harmonious circles of order within an uncertain,
anarchical and dangerous system – as neatly highlighted by Richard Ashley over twenty years ago - continues largely
uncontested. To expose this ideology adequately would, I argue, reveal the will to security to be as much, if not more, about
securing specific types of political community and rendering them common-sense, unchallengeable
solutions, as it is about making life live or of securing individuals. It is the contention of this thesis that though there is very little
intrinsically “human” or “necessary” about security that we will inevitably fall back on it however politics might be conceived, it is a necessary component of liberal
international politics centred on the sovereign state. Security is the generative and immanent principle of formation of liberal political community. I reveal this to be
the case through a refutation liberal ways of seeing and doing, including its ideas on community which are firmly rooted in social contractarian thought. The
disruptions explored to modern security politics in adopting unorthodox notions of community cannot be read as simply asserting an alternative form of “true”
security, if we understand the term in the forms explored from the outset of chapter one of this dissertation. In exploring more heterodox and critical ways of
envisioning political community, using notions derived from the thought of Nancy and Esposito, I further reveal the harmful, ideological and, ultimately, contingent
nature of the pursuit of security. This thesis thus constitutes an attempt to place a critique of modern security politics alongside burgeoning attempts to locate
political community above, below or beyond the sovereign state. A
number of movements within critical international relations
to question and critique orthodox security studies fall back too readily into the logics of sovereign
political community and hierarchical organisation that they profess to challenge. Rather than tweaking or attempting to improve security discourse and
practice, I argue that the “will to security” is fundamentally about securing particular forms of political community which are increasingly redundant and lacking in
foundation. Notwithstanding the risk that a position such as this is, as Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams caution, ‘almost certain to result in continued
disciplinary exclusion,’ it
is necessary to engage in a more fundamental critique of modern thinking on security
than that which is typically broached by CSS scholars, in order to reveal ideological bias of those studying and practising security
towards certain forms of political community, and thus to reveal the contingency of logics of security. Chapter one engages directly with
the notion that ‘[s]ecurity within CSS is open to argumentation and dispute’ and reveals the security discourse as complicit in the securing of modern, liberal
political community. Debates about security could be seen to centre around, on the one hand, an uncertainty as to whether more broadly defined forms of political
community can be realised, and, on the other, the idea that a denial of the possibility seems ‘historically myopic.’ I contend that the latter arguments are not able to
answer important questions regarding the nature of international politics, much of which are increasingly about the management, operation and control of
populations rather than contestation, negotiation or the furthering of emancipatory possibility. In the second chapter I explore ideas about community forwarded
by Nancy and Esposito which set themselves against the hegemony of localised and substantial notions of community as posited by – and recycled since – Plato,
Hegel and Kant. Nancy’s work is fundamentally different in its anti-teleology and the new understanding of freedom which develops from this. Furthermore
community is no longer substantive; it does not have a here or a there, a specific location on a map with its boundaries drawn, and insiders and outsiders neatly
positioned. It exists before all contracts and, in fact, exists to resist all such exclusive, self-legitimating communities. It is, above all, inoperative, and unable to
constitute, or be put to work. Esposito furthers this understanding by considering modern, liberal political community to be, in fact, immunity. Through the
institution of the social contract, we have successfully created the myth that we have interiorised exteriority when, in fact, we have simply suppressed it, along with
relations of being-in-common, thus immunising ourselves against community. This chapter does not constitute a purely exegetical task; I develop, mould and add to
these ideas in order to highlight the instances of immunity and operativity that I see permeating modern discourses and politics of security. The will to security
reduces community to immunity, and renders this an operative tool in a technological, managerial political project which precludes the possibility of thinking
relations of being-with differently. Herein lies the injury done to international politics by thinking within logics of security. Chapter three confronts directly the claim
that it is the job of international relations theories to secure political community against danger, threat and insecurity (however these might be variously
interpreted and whatever they might be deemed to be). I explore the contention forwarded by Jenny Edkins amongst others that, in fact, they should aim at the
reverse; that their task must be ‘to challenge the hegemony of the power relations or symbolic order in whose name security is produced, to render visible its
contingent, provisional nature.’ My method for rendering visible this contingency is to study the onto-theological underpinnings of modern thought on security and
community. The goal here is to make philosophically problematical what has been practically axiomatic in international relations; to bring security into question is to
bring the entire foundation and architecture of this political construction into question. This stems from my contention that it is only through the destruction of
known values that the creation of new values becomes possible. Though it is not my aim to shake the epistemic order of security by simply seeking a new,
hegemonic order, it is also true that ‘a concept does not die simply when one wants it to, but only when new functions in new fields discharge it.’ Disrupting the
terms of security/insecurity should be undertaken as a means to opening new possibilities at the margins and to asserting the hope that politics can be something
other than the possibility or the instrument for keeping life alive. Modern security politics are, of course, diverse and heterogeneous. This thesis will undoubtedly
fall prey to a certain level of essentialism in an effort to make its point about the problematic philosophical underpinnings of security discourse, and the
concomitant assumptions about political community which foster, and are simultaneously created by it. Tackling the notion of politics as management is to expose
wholly unmanageable edges (those of being-together) and to expose the attempt by managerial “anti-politics” to securitise that which is necessarily ontologically
unstable. Thus, although I will undoubtedly be criticised for reifying insecurity, or not taking seriously enough the plight of the global “insecure”, it is for ontological,
not moral, reasons, that a management of security cannot be pursued as politics. Politics are totalised and complete within the framework of “security”, control,
non-negotiation and stability. For too long the powerful and influential idea that those behind modern thinking and practice of security are labouring under the
exigencies of necessity has foreclosed any hope of imagining ways of living and being in common and of conceiving of the full political potentials of community and
life. Chapter 1 Securitisation, the elimination of strangehood and the defence of substantive, liberal political community It is clear to growing numbers of scholars
that modern
security politics do not achieve their purported aims, and increasingly serve to bolster
particular ways of conceiving of and practising politics. Modern ways of warfare and the politics of securitisation are seen in much of
the CSS literature to harm more than protect, insecuritise rather than securitise, and depoliticise instead of forwarding political possibility. However, rather than
exploring in greater depth where the foundations for this “will to security” in modern politics lie, we increasingly see attempts within CSS to broaden the security
agenda whilst incorporating traditionalist, militaristic positions, to criticise specific security practices of surveillance, bordering and control, or to attempt to bring
the security of individuals to the fore. It is more interesting and pertinent, I argue in this thesis, to question
why are our modern
understandings of politics are so reliant, foundationally, on security and to investigate the ways in which
this limits and circumscribes political organisation and possibility. In this first chapter, I situate my work alongside burgeoning
literature which criticises both traditional and CSS literatures for their assumption that security is a neutral and desirable aim of politics. Central to such critiques
have been efforts by Edkins, Michael Dillon, David Campbell and others to expose the mythical foundations of security, its intimate and co-constitutive nature with
insecurity, and the ways in which the promise of security is an impossible and yet crucial foundation of statecraft. Others still, have discussed the militarised and
exceptionalising nature of security discourses, or the promotion of highly specific and contingent forms of life deemed worthy of protection within them. The
arguments forwarded challenge the pursuit of security as the ultimate positive value of politics, and these scholars contend that to make security the “end of
politics” is depoliticising, highlighting the power-effects which issue from the “securing” of security. I am also interested to engage with the work of scholars who, in
the face of problems that are global in scope, and the increasingly unstable ontological foundations of political thought and activity, are critiquing many important
myths surrounding the formation of the surrounding nation state in early modernity, and looking to alternative forms of political organisation and sources of
authority than the sovereign state. I specifically look to the possibilities for expansion of political community beyond the borders of the sovereign state and the
broader critiques of sovereignty contained within contemporary continental political philosophy. With shifting conceptions of security in the post-war period
(motivated by the apprehension of irremediable threats at a global level); the events of September 11th 2001 and the ensuing “war on terror” and its aftermath;
and current attempts to locate sovereignty above and below the sovereign state, this is a fecund and timely period in which to be studying security and community
together. The implications of thinking within logics of security: Statist bias in CSS In this section I provide a brief, critical overview of a range of debates relevant to
this piece which are taking place within the security studies sub-field. In challenging their underlying assumptions, I place this piece more squarely within
movements wishing to engage with modern security practices and discourse in order to fundamentally critique current logics of securitisation. A number of CSS
scholars argue in favour of an objective definition of security insofar as the critical security theorist can determine which security problems are particularly
threatening and a subjective definition insofar as an individual’s own definition of security problems should be taken into account. As a consequence of retaining
the term, and, more importantly, the desire to render subjectivities and politics knowable, controllable and secure, many of the logics that underpin and are
legitimated by traditional conceptions of security remain entrenched within critical work. Most pertinent for the discussion here is the retention of a liberal political
imaginary which views community as an observable and substantive phenomenon which can be harnessed for work within particular political projects. Logics
underpinning the will to security take community to be an absolute end, to such a degree that all other
thinking on and possible meaning of the term is annihilated and rendered redundant. This can be seen most clearly in
orthodox security literature and practice, which pursues the security of the substantive political community that is
the sovereign state above all other political values. However, it is also evident in much of the CSS literature. The Aberystwyth School employs Frankfurt
School critical theory to advocate an emancipatory security which places individuals at the heart of analysis as referent objects in an apparent attempt to sideline
sovereign states’ domination of the security agenda. Though this has raised the question of whether a positive value can be assigned to security and therefore
challenged the primary importance placed on eliminating sources of insecurity (pervasive in more orthodox accounts), proponents
adhere to a
statist logic, engaging in only limited ways with the potential to think community differently. States are
problematically posited as the communities, or agents, deemed most capable and best-placed to provide security, and by extension –it is argued – emancipation.
The pervasive statism within this theory and the failure to look beyond dominant conceptions of political
community threatens the internal logic and consistency of the approach and silences alternative, nondominant, non-substantive approaches to political organisation. The failure to adequately deconstruct and challenge securitiser/securitisee
logics renders the “critical” potential of this school limited. The ways in which community is invoked in much CSS thought is invariably caught within traditional
metaphysical notions of the term, where community is something that can serve as a tool in a specific political project. For Booth, ‘community is the site of security’
implying a priori, empirically observable political organisation pre-existing the power relations which arise as a result of security politics. In their recent introductory
publication on CSS, Nick Vaughan-Williams and Columba Peoples claim that, [r]ather than celebrating ‘difference’ for its own sake, CSS argues that it is
emancipatory community – based around inclusionary and egalitarian notions of identity – that should be promoted over communities that are predicated on
internal relations of domination (such as patriarchy) and chauvinistic forms of identity (such as notions of national superiority). The lengthy and important debate
surrounding the meaning of “emancipation” and “emancipatory” in these contexts aside, it is revealing of the entire discourse of CSS that community is consistently
posited in such empirical, substantive terms. Hence Ken Booth is able to state that, [a]s a political orientation [CSS] is informed by the aim of enhancing world
security through emancipatory politics and networks of community at all levels, including the potential community of all communities – common humanity. Booth’s
invocation of community in this way remains within liberal Western political paradigms, ones which treat and regard community as an end point and as a
substantive goal to move towards. He leaves us in danger of placing community at the heart of a specific political project and precludes a truly radical re-envisioning
of community, which could not be put to technical, managerial use. Above all, Booth’s account betrays a treatment of community as a Rousseauean or Kantian form
of destination and presupposition, a common temporal trope in literature on community which I will expand upon in the following chapter. Mick Dillon challenges
the pursuit of security in politics more fundamentally. In fact, he views engagement with both traditional and CSS literature as a fundamental obstacle to thinking
about new ways of conceiving of the political due to the failure of both to ask questions of security as such. Instead, it invokes security as a ground and seeks largely
to specify what security is, how it might be attained and which are most basic, effective, and cost-effective means of doing so. Dillon, along with Foucault and
Agamben, to whom his thought is indebted, view
security through a biopolitical lens and wholly problematise the
pursuit of security as part of a broader Western, liberal modernist project to control and manage life. As
Foucault contends, the biopolitical apparatus includes ‘forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures[:]...security mechanisms [that] have to be installed
around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.’ The notion that we
have witnessed the
“biopoliticisation” of war and of security, offers an interesting and worthwhile critique of much existing thinking on security. The human
security discourse, for example, defines and enacts the human in biopolitical terms, and actively supports states’ attempts to secure “life” and its properties ahead
of its historical focus on sovereign territoriality. The
target of much modern security practice is to make live the life of the
individual through a complex of strategies initiated at the level of populations. Human security discourse’s frame of
intervention, for example, is the health and welfare of populations, necessarily entrenching hegemonic notions of agency and community, which value liberal and
hierarchical forms of political organisation above all others. To advocate
efforts to secure the individual is to advocate the
exercise of sovereign power (and, often, violence) over subjects. David Chandler argues effectively that human security discourse prioritises
its responses to populations that are threatened in relation to servicing the maintenance of the global liberal order, linking this servicing to a more intimate
connection between sovereign power, biopolitics and the maintenance of post- 9/11 order. In vindicating my argument that the will to security is driven by, and
fosters, a will to secure specific forms of political community, this connection between the human security discourse preparing conceptually a form of life that is at
hand for the mounting of proactive sovereign interventions of pre-emption and prevention, is a significant one. Perhaps the most successful at highlighting this
bureaucratic, managerial type of “anti-politics” of security whilst being accepted by the CSS mainstream, are those scholars working loosely under the banner of the
“Paris School.” Didier Bigo, for example, studies transnational networks and practices of insecurity. Bigo highlights the (in)securitisation process enacted by policies
purporting to secure, highlighting not the exceptionalism of security politics but, rather, the more mundane bureaucratic decision of everyday politics and the
structures of consumerist society. He focuses upon the, Weberian
routines of rationalisation, of management of numbers
instead of persons, of use of technologies, especially the ones which allow for communication and surveillance at a
distance through databases and the speed of exchange of information. The securitisation of societal issues, he contends,
raises the issue of protection by insecuritising the audience the security discourses are addressing. (In)securitisation translates into a social demand for the
intervention of coercive state agencies through reassurance discourses and protection techniques. However, in highlighting the network of heterogeneous and
transversal practices working at the transnational level in order to reveal relational processes of (in)securitisation and (un)freedomisation, the Paris School still falls
into the trap of strengthening and giving credence to the security signifier, of reifying security and demonising insecurity. Though this approach undoubtedly
highlights the ways in which security relates to people or political subjects and provides a different account of the actors involved in managing unease in our
societies far more effectively than other “critical” approaches, it does not go far enough in challenging the pursuit of security as an ontological good, or end, of
politics. Highlighting
the tendency of modern security practices to render us insecure implies that some
level of security is desirable; it is still merely a question of finding different ways of achieving this level of
security. The critique is not extended adequately enough, however, into the ways in which security is inscribed into the very discourses and practices of liberal
modernity. Though Bigo advocates “unmaking the security frame” and replacing the drama of exception for mundane everyday practices in order that we might
envisage alternative forms of political order that govern and shape freedom in less exclusionary and violent ways, there is not notion of what would replace it,
because there is a lack of focus on the implications of questions of political community in liberal modernity, which depend upon, and foster, logics of security.
Within the CSS literature, community either goes unchallenged, or is posited as an empirically observable phenomenon which can be put forward for use within
certain technical political programmes, i.e. that of securing its citizens’ politically unqualified lives. Modern security politics necessarily entail and embody a
particular kind of ordering. Placing the life of subjects or communities at the heart of a political project is an inescapable component of the politics of security, and
this is not adequately problematised in current CSS literature. It is not enough to ask states to step back from providing security or to step down as referent objects
of security in the hope that individuals will fill their place, without an understanding of the work that security is doing to produce and reproduce those subjectivities
and communities it purports to protect, along with the modes of political organisation that it is obscuring and rendering impracticable. It
is necessary to
challenge fundamentally the ontological preoccupation with security and the commitment to politics
of securing the subject or the community. To do so is also to challenge Western political thought as a
project of making things certain, mastered and thus controllable. Security is much more about calculation
and control than it is about concern and care. As Dillon argues, ‘Western political thought has been impelled by
its metaphysical determination to secure the appropriate theoretical grounds and instrumental means
by which security itself could be secured.’ But the politics of organisation must be about bringing new possibilities into being, about bringing
new ways of being-together into being which necessarily entails uncertainty, instability, negotiation and change. Security as the will to power of sovereign presence
...despite the absence of any legitimate meta-yardsticks, governments around the world claim to possess an ultimate yardstick in the name of security, the law,
human integrity and the liberal ideals of the free market...philosophical thinking offers at least some arguments that stand firmly opposed to such a logic. Thanos
Zartaloudis To ask questions of the politics of security is to reveal certain assumptions it necessarily holds about political organisation and community to be
contingent, and to open up broader questions of liberal modernity. It unmasks some of the fundamental assumptions that underpin Western political and
philosophical thought. As Dillon argues, ‘posing the security question necessarily calls into question the way thought itself has been thought.’ In asking philosophical
questions of security, we are able to more fundamentally critique the insistence upon the need to secure security which is rendering politics increasingly
exclusionary and violent. I aim to reveal the will to security as the will to power of sovereign presence. As
well as logics of securitisation
attempting to render knowable, and incorporate all uncertainty within an onto-epistemological
framework predicated on securing, on reassuring, and eliminating enemies, strangers, and strangehood, it is
concomitantly a reassertion of the necessity of hierarchical, vertical sovereign power for maintaining
political order. Sovereignty and security are each seen as conditions of possibility for political life. It is here
that numerous assumptions about ideal forms of community and political organisation within security discourse can be located. This thesis explores the ways in
which modern understandings of the politics and modern practices of politics can be seen to derive the requirement of security from requirements of metaphysical
truth itself. Dillon phrases it thus: Security became the predicate upon which architectonic politics discourses of modernity were constructed; upon which the
vernacular architecture of modern political power, exemplified by the State, was based; and from which the institutions and practices of modern (inter)national
politics, including modern democratic politics, ultimately seek to derive their grounding and foundational legitimacy. It will therefore be necessary to investigate and
explore community’s absent ground (or, rather, the presence of ground as absence) and, in so doing, to unmask Western political thought’s inherited onto-theology
of security, or the a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of security because of the current widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Within this
notion, relations between singularities are regulated, controlled and ultimately destroyed in order that we might remain loyal to vertical, transcendental authority,
which is deemed to keep us “secure” and seen as a prerequisite to engagement in political activity and life. As such, as James Der Derian argues, within the concept
of security lurks the entire history of Western metaphysics – best described by Derrida as a series of substitutions of centre for centre – in a perpetual search for the
‘transcendental signified’. As he notes, [f]rom God to Rational Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People...the security of the centre has been the
shifting site from which the forces of authority, order and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos and difference. The will to
security, and the desire for substantive political community can each be seen as the search for an Archimedean point ‘on which we can safely rest and from which
we can set out without fear.’ A number of scholars questioning notions of political community challenge the view that the sovereign state is the only and ideal type
of political community in international relations as opposed to a convenient ideological fiction, on similar grounds. Discussions on community speak to a wider
range of themes and assumptions running through and underpinning Western political thought and practice. The
system of sovereign states
teaches us that communities cannot operate other than by the exclusion of certain individuals, by the
rhetorical and indeed physical expulsion of non-citizens from within their midst. Sovereign power, as
perceived by Giorgio Agamben, is the power to determine whether individuals belong inside or outside of
community, and, therefore, to grant or deprive them of political rights. Sovereign line-drawing strategies and
a politics of inclusion and exclusion, as Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat contend, condition to some extent the existence of
community and of each and every human being. Such a community, predicated upon exclusion and on
Schmittian contractarian notions, can clearly be seen at work in the discourse of the War on Terror, a
discourse which legitimises a level of oppression against excluded groups. This thesis can thus be seen, in part, as an exploration of ontopolitical underpinnings of modern international politics, in particular that which has the security of
populations as its heart and end goal. The project of politics has moved far away from making way for human being’s freedom as possibility;
this piece aims to challenge this and to suggest that this has much to do with how community is envisaged or, perhaps more importantly, what possibilities are
precluded from being envisaged, within international relations literature. International relations thought
constitutes a citadel of
metaphysical thought on the political and often actively fosters the closure of political thought and a
reliance, instead, upon the technologised instrumentalisation of it as representative-calculative thought.
Western thinking has thus far aimed at an ontology of unconditioned uncertainty. Politics is equated with technology and therefore
also with metaphysics and contemporary world society is equated with technologised totalitarian
politicisation of all life. Thus, to rethink community and reject modern politics of security is to answer to an
unforeseeable event that escapes any instituted order of meaning and constitutes the site where the
question of the very meaning of political existence is reopened. It is the reinstating of a politics seeking to answer to the limit of
the political – a limit, as Nancy terms it, ‘where all politics stops and begins.’ The political is the place where community is brought into play as only a being-incommon can make possible a being-separated. It is therefore important to ask deeper questions of the politics of security and to take us beyond merely political
objections to security (the argument, for example, that the pursuit of security is self-defeating and that security necessarily reduces politics to a “dilemma” among
competing “wills” to security.) It
is a question of challenging the ontological preoccupation with security and its
commitment to politics of securing specific modes and types of political community and organising with
one another. Beyond the study of securitised subjectivity to securitised political organisation Of the investigations into the concept of security that have
preceded this one, some have explored security alongside political subjectivity, and specifically the existence of a “securitised subjectivity”. Rob Walker, for
example, details how modern accounts of security define ‘the conditions under which we have been constructed as subjects subject to subjection. They tell us who
we must be.’ This understanding that our subjectivity is bound up with, written by and disciplined through discourses of security, he argues, ‘make[s] any simple,
cursory rejection [of the term] at best limited, at worst destined to replicate the terms which must be refused.’ These contributions are important to bear in mind
when discussing community and security alongside one another. The constitution of the subject certainly entails and is inextricably linked with the constitution of a
particular social or symbolic order. Neither one is prior to the other; indeed, notions of priority and separation are themselves bound up with particular modern
conceptions of a sovereign subjectivity. Political philosophy tends to think of community as a “wider subjectivity” which has interesting implications but does not
extend far enough to highlight the fact that to think of community is to think within an instance of the political. Here, the political is taken to be the site where what
it means to be in common is open to definition, in opposition to politics which is seen as the play of forces and interests engaged in a conflict over the
representation and governance of social existence. As well as logics of security being keen to posit as known certain notions of political community, they also aim to
secure the position of the subject and the nature and stability of political subjectivity. Far
more important and revealing than
attempting to rehabilitate the “security” signifier for good is to challenge the claim that security is or
must be retained as the only positive value in world politics. Deeply embedded within modern security
politics and discourse and, indeed, within Western modernity itself, is a managerial sort of “anti-politics”, which aims at
routinisation, control, certainty and knowledge – processes which are wholly depoliticising,
exclusionary, and, ultimately, contingent. The will to security is, more often than not, the will to secure a specific
type of substantive, bounded, liberal form of political community rooted in social contractarian thought.
An exploration into alternative notions of community or organising politically reveals this most
effectively, and reveals the Western political thought which is based around securing the lives of
populations or subjects to be totalitarian and based on contingent ontological assumptions posited as
stable and necessary.
Chapter 2 Imagining non-managerial community: Challenges posed to security politics by inoperativity and immunity In this chapter I tackle the concept of community, specifically broaching the notions of inoperativity and
immunity as forwarded in the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito. I look specifically at how these ideas challenge fundamental assumptions of current modes of liberal political thinking on community as well as their potential contributions for re-envisaging the political
and re-orientating away from a politics of security. An understanding of Nancy’s notion of inoperativity underpins a critique of substantive notions of community which form an important part of the techno-economic political project of security. The idea that community cannot be “put to
work” or utilised as a tool in a broader political operation or project is vital for understanding my wholesale critique of the current security politics. Thus, in the first section of this chapter, I discuss the need for a recessed, inoperative domain in order for politics to be properly pursued.
This domain is, I argue, incompatible with ideas and logics of security and securitisation. Second, I explore Nancy’s take on the concept of being-with and argue that a co-existential ontology – an appreciation that we exist only in relation to one another – is vital in order to forward a valid
notion of community, that of a community-of-being. Third, having constructed an ontological framework borrowing from Nancian notions of being-in-common, I am then able to deploy and expand upon Esposito’s immunisation paradigm and to emphasise its potential to provide a strong
critique of the social contractarianism that Western liberal thought and political imagination, organisation and practice, including its politics of security, are reliant upon foundationally. It is argued that substantive, non-relational notions of community underpinning securitisation preclude
multifarious ways of being-together, which are obscured and disregarded in favour of a contractarian “bond”. In revealing Thomas Hobbes’ social contract, in particular, to be a violent suppression of being-together, I see this “bond”, which is central to the functioning of logics of security,
as a violent ir-relation, rather than a being-with. It is impossible, then, to break this cycle or “war of securitisation” without a wholesale critique of operative, substantive and non-relational logics of community. To begin with, I tackle some of the common problems and pitfalls associated
with the use of the concept of “community” and defend my use of the term. Despite the efforts by many to deny the centrality of theorising “being-together” within political philosophy, thinking on political community does not leave us. As numerous and varying critiques of the position,
efficacy and legitimacy of the traditional sovereign nation-state abound, so too does thinking on political community. Efforts to locate political authority, order, sovereignty, legitimacy and organisation beyond the sovereign state can be seen in the work of English School, cosmopolitan
and communitarian thinkers. Additionally, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have attempted to reinstate Spinozan notions of the “multitude” into Anglophone international relations discourse. There is, I argue, much contained within thinking about political organisation, and specifically
about notions of community, that is useful for approaching some of the deadlocks arising from the globalisation of Western liberal international politics. An oft -invoked argument for shunning thinking on political community is the danger that thinking on community leads too easily to a
totalitarian or fascist political appropriation of the idea. The concern that some form of fictional community will become the intractable, problematic heart of a political project is a very real and legitimate one. The closure of the political and concomitant “descent” into totalitarian politics,
which I raised as an important challenge to liberal democracy in the first chapter, is a risk when a foundational, non-fictional and substantive notion of community is propagated and when this is used as a point around which politics can focus its energy on. This thesis is sceptical that
Western liberal democracy signals an end to totalitarian politics; in fact, highlighting the assumptions about community which underpin these politics (especially those which are driven by logics of security) reveals the continuities between liberal modes of “anti-politics” and the
totalitarian closure of politics. Security politics are a contemporary, albeit vastly different, totalitarian style of politics which closes the political to alternative philosophical concepts. So far, much writing on security has either constituted a denial of being-with, a project to actively destroy
the possibility of this, or an unproblematised use of “community” as an operative concept within a wider technical political project. The radical challenge that Nancy and Esposito pose to non-relational, liberal political community and foundational political and philosophical thought, to
which I turn in this chapter, resists the co-optation or re-appropriation for use as totalitarian political practice and eschews thinking politics in terms of certainty and security. Inoperativity and its challenge to the managerial project of security There is simply no “work” that community
could perform for the “end” of such exposure: it cannot be overcome or put operatively to any social or political task. Rather, community is precisely this exposition of finitude, not a sublation producing a certain utility. Benjamin Hutchens It is my contention that traditional metaphysics
and concomitant flawed assumptions about political subjectivity and community haunt Western political thought and have led us to engagement in an endless war of securitisation in which the will to security forms the traumatic core of our (a)political projects. Crucially, this will to
security denies politics a recessed inoperative domain, which, as Nancy asserts, serves as a shared public space providing politics with sense and measure. Logics of security reduce politics to the management of life of populations and, as highlighted successfully in the Paris School of CSS,
reduce political method and practice to control, surveillance and the recording of data. Much contemporary political thought, especially that found in international relations discourse and security studies, reifies techno-economical organisation or the “making operational” of the world.
Even those scholars who attempt to locate political community and possibilities of being-together outside the sovereign state conceive of this as a project, as essentially a matter of work, operation or operativity, which is at the root of flawed thinking on community and politics. History
has long been thought on the basis of a lost community to be regained or reconstituted. The natural family, the Athenian city or the Roman republic are all ways in which this lost, or broken, community is exemplified. Modernity is imbued, as Nancy contends, with thinking about a lost
age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious and infrangible bonds and in which above all it play ed back to itself, through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy and autonomy. Rousseau’s
contract can be seen as an example of this mode of thinking as it does not merely institute a body politic but dissolves community into the general political will and, in so doing, also produces mankind itself. This is because Rousseau substantialises community and proceeds to subordinate
it to a “public” will, which, in fact, constitutes a dissolution of bonds. In creating social arrangements, it generates a determined community in the place of a free flow of relations of being-with. Similar actions and injuries can be seen in efforts of orthodox security thought and practice
which seek to protect the sovereign state as the ideal mode of political organisation to bring order and political life against outside threats to an ideal community that is constantly posited as having existed in the past and/or able to be retrieved in the future. This arises from a failure to
grasp community’s central dynamic: that of being-with others, also central to the notion of inoperativity. In other accounts of community, including those permeating the security discourse, there is an assumption that there is, somewhere, another substantial basis of being that simply
requires a technical programme of realisation in order to unmask it. The assumption in the security literature is that the “s ecurity” of subjects and of communities is a prerequisite to the revelation of this other substantial ontological basis. Without security, qualified political life is
impossible, but we are led to believe that each of these things is lying in wait just around the corner. It is assumed that a certain substance is immanent to the beings that comprise the community and that, while this substance may be obscured or imperfectly revealed, it merely requires a
technical program – one centred on a will to securitise individual subjects or sovereign states - in order to realise its potential. This dynamic, in which a particular concept (or figure) is assumed to represent or comprise the immanent substantial basis of community, is referred to by Nancy
as figuration. Figuration, a quasi-messianic concept which is put beyond contestation in the political arena, constitutes, ultimately, a totalitarian philosophical determination of the political. In much modern Western political thought, this is the will to security. The task at hand, in
“figurative” accounts of community is the realisation of the substance that the figure is assumed to represent. All that fails to correspond to the decreed program of realising this immanent substance is disavowed, elided, obscured and ultimately destroyed. In our times, the task is
predicated on the security of subjects, with anything that diverts our attention from this deemed irrelevant. Despite the obvious failure of many efforts to “secure” in a diverse array of contexts, such figures continue to exercise a grip on politics under the assumption that these failings
are mere empirical imperfections of transcendental substances that can be remedied by better programs of security or the realisation of the lost basis of community. How, then, should we conceive of a contrasting, inoperative community? Contrary to the “lost community” paradigm, in
which community is lying in wait for the revelation of a substantial basis of being, and rather than being historically superseded by society, community constantly appears in the wake of society, as an event. Community is based, or founded, on the lack which derives from the impossibility
of complete immanence and is constituted by an ‘infinite lack of infinite identity.’ Through notions of finitude, we are able to retrace community and to describe the essence of finite being as the sharing of singularities. Here, philosophical understanding of community is stripped bare to
its basic elements: the nature of the clinamen or of the basic social relation, not among individuals, but among singularities. These singularities have nothing in common, but, as Nancy explains, ‘they com-pear [com-paraissent] each time in common in the face of the withdrawal of their
common being.’ And, thus, it is only through the withdrawal of communion, immanence or “work” that community appears. The answer, then, lies in thinking of the finite being as a singular being, which is not the individual. Community is not to be thought as the relations between
sovereign individualities, but rather as relational singularity. The individual in liberal modernity is modelled upon the self-sufficient modern subject which, in its monadic existence, does not rely on other individuals. It does not relate, it does not compear and it does not share.
Singularities, on the other hand, are exposed to the in-between through their relation of sharing. They are constituted by, as Oliver Marchart explains, ‘the sharing that makes them others: other for one another, and other, infinitely other for the Subject of their fusion, which is engulfed in
the sharing, in the ecstasy of sharing.’ One of the central themes and arguments of this chapter is that inoperativity is central to a critique of politics that centres on logics of security and empties politics of contestation, choice, sense and measure. We are caught within the imagination of
an “operative” or managerial type of world community, based on fundamental misconceptions surrounding subjectivity and political ontology which has left little room for contesting claims and concepts. The notion of inoperativity centres on questions of Being, in particular that Being is
the plurality of always singular instances of being and that this plurality is inscribed into the very differential structure of Being. The question of the possibility of the metaphysics of a non-substantial community centres around and is reliant upon a “coexistential analytic”, in which the
question of coexistence is the ontological question par excellence. An understanding of this is central to a thorough critiqu e of the contractarian politics of security, and so it is to the question of Being that I now turn. Community, security & Being: The implications of Nancy’s coexistential
ontology The individual is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community. Jean-Luc Nancy Claims to the pursuit of security presuppose a referent object in need of securing, one which is able to be secured. There are certain assu mptions about the nature of this
person, thing or community, to be secured that underlie this claim or desire. In this section I want to investigate Nancy’s elaboration of ontology as “being singular plural” and to place the question of community directly alongside that of being. In contradistinction to Hobbes, Rousseau
and Kant, Nancy stresses a community-of-being over and above the notion of the being-of-community. Being is necessarily being-with. Even as singularities, for Nancy, we are immediately in a relation of being-with other singularities, thus ‘a singularity is indissociable from a plurality’ and
‘[a]ll experiences of being a self are formed in the context of always already being-with-others.’ The focus, then, is not on how we might establish a bond between us, but rather on how it is that we have come to consider ourselves separate in the first place. This question encourages us
to rethink political organisation and to problematise, perhaps irrevocably and irreparably, a politics of the securing of subjects. It is often noted in both critical and traditional security literature, as briefly discussed in the first chapter, that understanding how we have been written by
security also demands an understanding of how security’s logic is bound up in the promise of existence. We are, for many international relations theorists, unable to live and engage as political subjects without enjoying a certain level of security. Security is posited, Anthony Burke
contends, as ‘an overarching political goal and practice that guarantees existence itself, which makes the possibility of the world possible.’ Western political thought is thus preoccupied with substantial concern for specifying conditions under which rulers can guarantee their subjects a
secure private existence as well as to decide at what price, in terms of obligations and duties, subjects ought to pay for this privilege. Security is necessarily implicated in this. As V. Spike Peterson contends, subjects engage in ‘the exchange of obedience/subordination for (promises of)
security’ She goes on to outline the ways in which, protection systems also reproduce non-participatory dynamics while obscuring accountability of protectees for maintaining boundaries, hierarchies, and identities that are the medium and outcome of protection systems...Identification
of the protected with their protectors (as opposed to other protectees), as well as identification of protectors with each other, further complicates alliance formation directed at transforming the system itself. Protection systems also distort the meaning of “consent” by both mystifying
the violence that backs up the systemic inequality and perpetuating the illusion of equality among parties to “contractual obligations.” The liberal account of the political constitution of the subject, as brought out by Peterson with notions of distorted consent and the “illusion of equality”
within protection discourse, is fundamentally challenged by a Nancian ontology in which being is, in fact, between-beings, one of being-together or being-with. In this respect, Nancy takes his cue from Heidegger, who reinstates Dasein (being-there)as Mitsein (being-with), with Nancy
radicalising this hypothesis to place the “with” at the heart of Being so that the order of ontological exposition in philosophy is reversed and Mitsein, in fact, ontologically precedes Dasein. The between, the with and the together are all irreducible aspects of Being – which therefore can
only be thought of as “being singular plural”. An ontology of singular-plural Being, which starts from the plural singular of origins (from being-with) radically challenges the methodological individualism of accounts of security which presuppose a subject there to be secured prior to any
necessary relation with others. The politics of the securitised, protected subject are founded upon and simultaneously work to create people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the “necessities” of security, a logic which, above all, ensures ‘the security of the sovereign,
rational self and state.’ The flawed presupposition of substantial individuals whose essence and being is ontologically predetermined (beings-as-such) as well as rationally, politically and juridically pre-established is an assumption that is often challenged in post-structuralist international
relations literature. How can this critique be extended to my discussion of the ideological bias surrounding community which forms an immutable foundation of modern security politics? Contra Descartes, Nancy coins ego sum expositus (‘I am first of all exposed to the other, and exposed
to the exposure of the other.’) Within this, lies the proposition that community is not merely ‘the aggregation of individual subjects conceived ontologically as unencumbered and antecedently individuated...[and thus] prior to society’ as it appears within liberal-contractarian traditions. In
fact, it is the linkages of sharing that interrupt such collectivisation and reflect its substantial and operative cohesion that constitute the “sense” of community. The finitude of singular being is always presented communally, and is always exposed to the judgements of community
formative of law. Co-appearing, as these singular beings do, does not mean that there is any “bond” among them, as if something were superimposed upon them. There is merely the material and immaterial spaces of sharing in the “between” and the “with” that singular beings share
among themselves. With this understanding, it perhaps becomes possible to imagine community and freedom existing within mutually habitable, rather than viciously and unsustainably circumscribed limits. Giorgio Agamben , Maurice Blanchot , Françoise Dastur and Alphonso Lingis have
each engaged in a rethinking of Mitsein, exploring the implications of regarding ‘being-with’ as more primordial than ‘being’ and the consequent priority of the question of community to that of being. The emphasis on Mitsein signals a move from a thinking of being as substance to one
which thinks being as act. This is how these accounts of community differ significantly from those which call for a world community, a common humanity, or from liberal cosmopolitan calls for the transformation of political community. The act is motivated by the excessive character of
the relation of the I to the Other, with the excess generating a movement or a dynamic sharing of the world between us. In this understanding, community is not a substance that is shared, but a dynamic movement of sharing. The shift from a substantial to a dynamic conception of
community appears to offer a philosophical questioning of being and community which escapes the strictures of substantivist metaphysics. The will to security and its inextricable link with the spectre of insecurity demands a subordination of affirmative becoming, and fosters, as James
Der Derian asserts, ‘a herd morality which enslaves through its affirmation of life as slavery.’ Writers who (implicitly or explicitly) adopt a co-existential ontology, on the other hand, are able to explore possibilities of finding grounding and foundational legitimacy for modern democratic
politics away from the state, away from the institutions of international politics and away from substantive notions of individual being. For Agamben, for example, the novelty of what he optimistically terms the “coming politics” or the “coming community” is that it will no longer be a
struggle for the conquest or control of the state, but a struggle between the state and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between “whatever” singularity and the state organisation. Whatever singularities, he explains, cannot form a societas because they do not
possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the state can recognise any claim for identity – even that of a state identity within a state. What it cannot tolerate is that the singularities form a community without affirming an
identity, or the idea that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging. These ideas are explored effectively by a number of postcolonial sch olars and others who challenge the reification of sovereignty and the nation-state within international relations and the
unachievable demands that they place on subaltern subjects, for example, indigenous populations. And thus we can link being-with back to inoperativity. In this understanding, community is made by the retreat or subtraction of the fulfilled infinite identity of community – what Nancy
terms its “work.” It is through this lack of a particular substance of being – contra liberal and nationalist conceptions of community – that we are able to realise an unmanageable, “unworking” or “inoperative” community beyond our instrumental control. Political programs imply this
work, either as the product of the working community, or else the community itself as work. But, in fact, it is the work that the community does not do and that it is not that forms it. The community that becomes a single thing (be it a body, a mind, a fatherland, or a leader) necessarily
loses the in of being-in¬-common, losing the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being and hence Being itself comes to be defined as relational, as nonabsoluteness, and as community. According to contractarian notions of sociality, by contrast, communities are groups of pre-existing individuals whose bonds politics works to tie or untie. I now explore the contention that the community which featur es in accounts of modern liberal
politics of security is what Roberto Esposito would term an immunised community or immunity. This would support Nancy’s contention that the violent repression of being-in-common is ‘the permanent rule of Western thought.’ Within the political imaginary of security politics,
communities are rendered “immune”, that is, the “immunisation” project of modernity has been directed against the law of associated coexistence and they have been left bare. Immunity and the violence enacted by liberal social-contractarian thought [T]he Leviathan-State coincides
with the breaking of every communitarian bond, with the squelching of every social relation that’s foreign to the vertical exchange of protection – obedience. It is the bare relation of no relation. Roberto Esposito In revealing liberal community as immunity, Esposito looks to the complex
and combined concept of munus from the Latin communitas. Munus can be seen as the dialectics of community; at once ‘gift and obligation, benefit and service rendered, joining and threat.’ Modern liberal politics and especially, perhaps, those of war and the pursuit of security, attempt
the suppression of the former concepts and the furthering of the latter. The social contract at the heart of the politics of protection and security is, thus, the absence of munus and the concomitant loss of a dialectical understanding of community. Modern “contractarian” individuals, as I
have previously mentioned, are “absolute” individuals, bordered in such a way that they are isolated and protected from one another. However, this isolation, and the contract itself, can only be achieved if they are “freed” in advance from the debt that binds them one to the other. Thus,
an immunised community is one in which individuals are released from, exonerated, or relived of the contact that exposes them to the contagion of the relation with others which could lead to possible conflict. For Esposito, the philosopher who followed this logic to its extreme
theoretical consequence was Hobbes. What men have in common, what makes them more like each other than anything else, is their generalised capacity to be killed. As Agamben consistently asserts ‘[t]he first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed, which is politicised
through its very capacity to be killed.’ Political community is based on the possibility of this punishment. Thus, for Hobbes, communitas (cum with munus or a sharing of munus) is to be feared; it carries with it the gift of death. In order to protect, or securitise, we must “immunise”
ourselves beforehand and, in doing so, negate the very foundations of community. In Hobbes, this expresses itself in his eagerness to understand causes in order facilitate the development of a science that can make us masters and possessors of nature thus enabling us to eliminate the
danger of violent death. Esposito posits that modernity underwent a process of auto-immunisation; immunisation brought modernity into existence, and modernity started when politics was coupled with biology and centred on the survival and reproduction of life. In this way, Hobbes
represents the paradigmatic philosopher of modernity, since with his philosophy the question of an immunitary self-preservation of life came to the centre of political theory and praxis. Nowhere does this manifest itself more clearly than within modern logics of securitisation. Our
existence is dominated by fear and insecurity. Peculiar to our modern life is a constant demand for protection with new, imaginary, and concrete borders emerging everywhere. We feel as if our lives are threatened from all sides and demand, more and more, immunisation from these
threats. The relationship with others seems to involve the threat of contamination and, although Esposito does not deny that immunity is necessary for the survival of an organism, if it grows in excess, it leads to the death of the organism. The modern securitised state does not eliminate
the fear from which it is originally generated; in fact, more worryingly, it is founded precisely on fear as the motor and guarantee of the state’s functioning. In this paradoxical situation, “common ground” is shifted from within to without and, as Esposito contends, [i]t is as if the
victimizing mechanism suitable for maintaining the community were to determine at the same time an absolute exteriorization t hat subtracts community from itself: the “common” now describes in fact the enemy that attacks it and the power that keeps it united against the enemy.
Modern political thought on security and the sovereign state sees an acceptance that the relation
between individuals is destructive and that the only route of escape and hope for salvation from this is
the destruction of the relation itself. Hence, the drastic elimination of every kind of social bond is necessitated. Only by dissociating themselves
absolutely from any relation can individuals avoid lethal contact. Agamben and Alain Badiou have each shown that the state is not
founded on a social bond but, rather, on its dissolution and unbinding. Sovereign subjects are those that
have nothing in common since everything is divided (not shared) between “mine” and “yours”. This dovetails
with Nancian ontology and Nancy’s claim that modern philosophy and politics are constantly engaged in a project to repress the “with” of being-with. As a
consequence of the destruction of relationality, ‘[l]ife is sacrificed to the preservation of life’ and community is the victim of this dialectic. The paradoxical and
irrational nature of the sum of refusals out of which sovereign authorisation is made is revealed. Thus ‘[t]he modern subject who enjoys civil and political rights is
itself an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the possibility of community.’ Similar themes can be seen in the figure of Agamben’s homo sacer who is
at once, and paradoxically, included in the social order by his very exclusion. Exclusion from the protections and official punishments of the political order is the
ultimate punishment, meaning that exclusion from the political order is itself a relationship to the political order. Contractarian thought attempts to demonstrate
the manner in which the linkages between individuals constitute social reality, but, in fact, it eradicates them in the name of political standards of appropriation.
The politics of security are impoverished by its presumption of “the political” in terms of contractually constituted and tacitly bound subjectivity as if there are no
ties prior to the contract for the provision of security. The nihilistic and destructive character of this decision to sacrifice life to the preservation of life, is a theme to
which I will return in the following chapter. Away from security and operation, towards a politics of unworking This chapter has challenged the liberal, substantive
notions of community permeating security discourse and practice which treat of community as simply the result of an empirical gathering of political subjects.
Modern politics of security and the logics underpinning them are founded upon the liberal-contractarian
tradition which takes humans as solitary in nature and attempts to reconcile the conflicts that it
assumes will occur between these individuals in their attempt to share space. This tradition, as Coward asserts,
‘assumes community as an antecedent, contingent aspect of being (almost a nuisance), not essential to it.’ A challenge to this thinking is offered by Nancy’s coexistential analytic which encourages us to question not only how we can be together, but how we ever managed to imagine ourselves as separated from one
another in the first place. Community, rather than constituting a substantial and bordered point on a map, is made by the retreat or subtraction of its work – or of
the infinite lack of infinite identity. It is through this lack of a particular substance of being that we are able to realise an “inoperative” community beyond our
instrumental control. Modern
security practices imply operativity and attempt to put community to work within
a managerial political program, obscuring the fact that it is the work that the community does not do
that forms it. Challenging hegemonic power structures, including that of security theory and practice requires a non- or anti-managerial outlook. The
notion of an “inoperative community” serves as a bulwark both against a totalising globalism dominated
by hegemonic power and against the surrender of politics to the relentless self-interest of individualistic
agents (be these states, corporations or private individuals). All of the work done to realise a substantial basis for being, of which modern politics of security are
a part, is perpetually undone by the existential priority of relationality and without a theory of being which hinges on relationality, we are destined to remain within
the violent logic of securitisation to which we have become accustomed. A non-managerial
politics of unworking is incompatible
with notions of bordered individual sovereign subjects, with social contractarian thought and with the
will to security that stems from these.
Unworking first comprises a return the origins and foundations of Western thinking on security and, above all, to challenging the current dominant ways of approaching philosophically
these origins. It does not merely entail a question of replacing the politics of security with a “politics of community.” Nancy fails in The Inoperative Community to answer the charge that community, as philosophy’s responsibility after nature, is still just one mor e myth in myriad narratives
of nature. In problematising the foundations of Western thinking on security, it is not adequate to posit community as an answer, as merely the story of another coming, ‘the last god’, or a new poiesis of world. Nor is it a case of positioning relationality as a new, revived, desirable ontotheological discourse after numerous attempts to locate meaning and foundation for political thought have manifestly failed. These are the themes which motivate the final chapter of this thesis; the philosophical approaches necessitated in order to avoid reviving onto-theological
discourse perhaps offer the most promising way out of the impasse that logics of securitisation and of “secure” community currently constitute within international relations thought. Chapter 3 Onto-theologies of security and community: Rethinking international relations through notions
of encounter There are many questions, posited as perennial, that the study and practice of security, within broader international relations discourse, claim to address. Many of these are the very same questions that thinking on political community is trying provide answers to. In this
chapter, I explore a number of these, arguing that alongside radically different thinking on community, it is also necessary to approach alternatively the seemingly immutable foundations of international relations thought in order to expose the war of securitisation in which we find
ourselves as ideological and contingent. Logics of securitisation, as well as being necessitated by, and simultaneously fostering liberal, substantive notions of political “immunity,” also work to control and manage the aleatory element of life and death. The same might be said of much
thinking on community. As Nancy asserts, [c]onceiving of singular resistances (such as death) that disrupt the ever-threatening closure of substantial communities under given conventions and that open singular beings to the circulation of sense is both necessary for, and frustrating of,
any contemporary conception of community. For many, security through sovereignty, rather than a political choice, is a necessary reaction to an anarchical condition. Security and order are posited as conditions of possibility for community and, more radically still, the thought of
community and our desire for it is often seen to be little more than a belated invention that tries to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience. In order to respond to such questions, it is necessary to show that both the will to security, and the closely inter-related technologised
and managerial political thinking on community is a component of the broader Western political and philosophical thinking which seeks metaphysical ground, in short, in order that something is thought as opposed to nothing. As Dillon asserts, ‘the fate of metaphysics and the fate of the
politics of security are inextricably intertwined.’ Metaphysically determined communities are a foundational requirement to security. In this, my final chapter, I briefly explore the philosophical and onto-theological foundations of the will to security which will help us to understand the
ways in which logics of securitisation work to advocate bounded, contractarian, operative community within liberal political thought and, more importantly, to foreclose all alternatives. In this chapter, I link both the impulse to know and see absolutely and the fear of the ‘catastrophic
threat-event’ that is the breakdown of order at the heart of modern security politics, to an onto-theological impulse as a desire for pure fulfilment and to liberal political thought grounded in the ideas of fear, finitude and salvation. I argue that we must adopt a radically different approach
to foundations in both philosophy and politics, and further advocate the “unworking” of politics in order to break out of the war of securitisation deadlock in which we find ourselves. Origins and foundations of the will to security From “lost” communities and the origins of the social
contract, to contemporary discourses of protection and risk, the politics of security, and that of Western political and philosophical thought more generally, is the search for foundations and representation when it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is very little from which to
ground our thinking on the political. To think without security politics and rather, with the unworking of politics and community, is also to think alongside the absence of metaphysical yardsticks, think beyond political foundations and at the “end” of politics. This mode of thinking is, as
Nancy claims, ‘a blessing and a defect at the same time – an anomaly never felt more keenly that we feel it today.’ Our task is to work out where this blessing and defect might respectively be leading us. Security politics are predicated on the fear of the vastly misunderstood origins
surrounding the birth of the sovereign state and the return to a Hobbesian state of nature. The origins of the project of modernity, based as it was on fear and possible salvation, seem to determine its outcome. It is therefore to origins that I now turn, in order to argue that we have
inherited an onto-theology of security and that these logics (and the politics which stem from them) start to make less sense if we unpack and critique this. It is possible to adopt a radically different approach to origins which eschew the onto-theological ones that we have inherited, with
an understanding of Louis Althusser’s aleatory materialism and the notion of the “encounter.” Onto-theology, as Coward contends, refers to the manner in which an ontology, or theory of being, is predicated on a transcendent value (a value that is taken to be a universal essence
independent of any particular empirical circumstances). In other words, the philosophical search for the ground of being (a universal truth), and the theological search for that which explains being (God as the creator) are joined into one. The recent theological turn in continental
philosophy, much of which is, for Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, a reaction to the ‘theologisation of philosophy,’ is offering political philosophers new avenues for thinking and, in particular, for challenging the apparent “completion of the political” that I referred to at the
opening of the thesis. The aim of many, including this author, is to attempt to liberate philosophy, along with political thinking, from theological constraints and to challenge the revival of onto-theological discourses that clearly permeate writing on community and security in an attempt
to deconstruct them and thus free thinking on the political. Much Western liberal thinking on community can be seen as an ext ension of Christian eschatology. Global politics are, I have argued, governed by a single, dominant principle; that of attending to a messianic and salvific will to
security. Alongside this, we see the securitisation project justified by the pretensions of enlightenment and secularisation discourses, in which God has apparently been replaced by man’s reason and will. As Dillon argues, ‘[s]ec ularization theses flatten the violent differences that persisted
within the medieval church just as much as they exaggerate the extent to which the modern problematization of politics and rule has been secularized.’ Any new accounts of community within international relations have an important and pervasive onto-theological foundation to
contend with. Similarly, discourses of security which espouse the securing of humankind or “humanity” must search for the assumptions rooting claims, for instance the contention that we all share something essential which sovereign power and liberal political community are able to
“secure”. To fail to do so only revives and strengthens onto-theological discourses and, I argue in this essay, problematic discourses of sovereignty, security and bounded community. Thinking on Western liberal political community, and, indeed, much international relations thought, is
centred on the Hobbesian social contract, which is itself rooted in Christian conceptions of community alongside fear, and the notion that man can and must master nature. As Der Derian contends, Hobbes provides onto-theological foundations of an epistemic realism, in the sense of an
ethico-political imperative embedded in the nature of things. The security of epistemic realism is ontological, theological and teleological: that is, metaphysical. In the modern, Hobbesian perception of community, the love for one’s neighbour is directly proportional to the memory of
common danger that we share. If the community of sin from which we originate is marked by fear, no-one can be secure in this life, as it is literally besieged by death. As Gillespie contends, according to Hobbes, [t]he world for natural man is a dark place ruled by a mysterious and
indefinable force that ultimately produces our death which pushes us ultimately toward an encounter with the reality of the natural world, facilitating the development of a science that would make us masters and possessors of nature and enable us to eliminate the danger of violent
Modern security politics are motivated, I argue, by this Hobbesian fear of violent death, which is inextricably linked
to the fear of a breakdown of order tout court. As Dillon asserts, ‘[t]he catastrophic threat-event of the
dissolution of the temporal order of things is continuously also interrogated to supply the governing
technologies, by which the political order is regulated in peace to be “fit” for war and is regulated so as
to resist the same catastrophic threat-event
death.
.’ Dillon thus terms modern international politics a “katenchontic war of endless securitization.” Arguing that security politics contain a kind of political eschatology
(i.e. we work on the assumption of the coming end of things), he explains the katechon as the desire to secure against this end, in order to avoid, at all costs, the “catastrophe” that would be the dissolution of the normal order of things. Ideas of eschatology, of salvation, and a desire for
belonging to God or to the sovereign, return us to the ideas of a lost oneness that never was that also permeate traditional thinking on community. This is of concern because, along with the promise of an eschaton within modern security politics – determined as they are by their form as
politics thought in the last light of things – is the indispensability of the katechon. This is due to the aporetic faith of political modernity: one of a justice not in this life, but of a justice to come. The katechon is underpinned and maintained by the ever-presence of fear which is reduced by
the social contract but does not recede and is not forgotten. In the second chapter, I mentioned Nancy’s messianic notion of figuration and the way in which, implied within thinking on community is the idea that we are waiting for a figure, person or concept to reveal a hidden,
substantial basis for being that has thus far been obscured. I suggested that in much of Western liberal political thinking, this figure is the will to security. The will to security is the onto-theological gesture that simultaneously attempts to name the ground of being and yet place it beyond
question or to make it an assumption or article of faith. This is based on assumptions of, and in order to safeguard, liberal political community and sovereignty. The parallels between the sovereign and God are well-known to readers of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. Schmitt describes
the social contract thus: ‘the terror of the state of nature drives anguished individuals to come together, their fear rises to an extreme: a spark of reason (ratio) flashes, and suddenly there stands in front of them a new god.’ This powerful narrative acts to bolster the notion, pervasive in
international relations discourses which have typified the Westphalian era, that states exhibit an inner circle of harmony and progress within an outer circle of the eternal recurrence of competition and conflict. As Linklater asserts, ‘[t]he tyranny of the concept of the sovereign nationstate has impoverished the Western political imagination, and left it ill-prepared for the current challenge of rethinking the foundations of modern community.’ Modern security studies and politics s erve only to fuel this and to render Western thought increasingly impoverished and
political possibility foreclosed. The katechontic will to security acts to produce and reproduce certain operative, circumscribed, sovereign forms of political community. Aleatory materialism and a philosophy of the encounter: Challenging the will to power of sovereign presence In order to
understand how this production and reproduction takes place, and, in so doing, to fundamentally challenge the ontology of sec urity and community (as well as other building blocks of IR, such as sovereignty, the state, order, and international anarchy), I consider at this juncture the
potential of Louis Althusser’s aleatory materialist philosophy of the encounter. Althusser thinks about origins in terms of moments of contingent encounter for which a notion of the aleatory is necessitated. He stresses the importance of the encounter i n relation to the emergence of
capitalism in Europe – the existence of which must be thought of as alongside its non-existence in order to emphasise the process of establishing the accomplished fact rather than thinking the accomplished fact itself – but applied this equally usefully when talking about the emergence
of the state. In doing so, he was able to fundamentally challenge idealist and teleological accounts of both the formation of the state and of capitalism. It is through a radically different approach to origins – as encounters – that we might discover a route to challenging fundamentally the
For Agamben, the problem at stake in political thought is the ‘rethinking of...a
presupposed condition of relevance or possibility and more generally the rethinking of the very act of
transmission of traditions as a problem, as an embarrassment even, rather than as a presupposed and unthinkable
dogma.’ It is with aleatory materialism, and its emphasis on encounter, contingency and chance, perhaps, that we see the most fundamental rejection of the
politics of security and liberal notions of immunised, bounded community.
cogent necessity of old models and the site of the greatest opening up of possibilities for thinking differently about security and the state as ideal political
community, along with their respective positions within international relations. Rather
than viewing the world as a fait accompli, the
encounter reveals that which makes the fait accompli, requiring us to look at the way in which the state
(as ideal type of political community, necessitating an endless war of securitisation in order to protect it as such) is produced through an ex nihilo
encounter, rather than as a teleology forming an immutable building block of international relations theory. Thus
we can begin to understand Nancy’s assertion of community as non-necessity or as an escape from teleology. Community is not something that may be produced
and instituted or whose essence could be expressed in a work of any kind, and thus it cannot be the object or telos of a politics. In fact, despite Rousseauean
assertions, there is no absent foundation that could act as the present ground on which community could be built. Continuing to uphold notions of community as
immunity is to fail to escape violent logics of security. What the community sacrifices to its own self-preservation is not other from itself but, rather, it is sacrificed in
the sacrifice not only of the enemy but also of every single member of community, since every member finds in its own being the originary figure of the first enemy.
Sacrifice responds to this origin, to the fear that the origin provokes and infinitely reactivates it in a circle from which we still have not emerged. To challenge this
opens up the possibility of challenging other ideological founding assumptions of international relations, such as sovereignty and the false dichotomy between order
and disorder. It also opens up political possibility surrounding political organisation. It is clear that we have come to privilege the sovereign state as the sole and best
provider of security. Richard Ashley notes that the privileging of certain terms as a “higher reality” casts others in ‘only in a derivative and negative way...as
something that endangers this ideal.’ If security is to be understood in the forms explored throughout this thesis as a logic embedded in tying down, making
knowable and certain, and demanding a totalised and hegemonic subjectivity, then it is not a case of changing provider or referent within this project.
The alternative is key --- rejecting the ontological project of security is the only way to
challenge sovereign violence
Raw 11 (Jessica – M.Sc. from Aberystwyth University, “Exploring Security and Community: Inoperativity,
Immunity and Political Organisation,” MSc(Econ) in the Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University, 9-19-11,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/7811/raw%20jessica%20ipm0060.docx?sequen
ce=1)
Whatever is seen to challenge the project of security, whoever is posited as a possible alternative agent
other than the state and whatever alternative notions of political community to be “secured” are
forwarded, are each going to be seen to endanger the ideal of security. It is with a critique of security
such as the one offered in this thesis that we might challenge sovereign power and the biopolitical
management of life. Thus, the more interesting challenge might not be the resistance to a particular
sovereign order of security, but to the disruption of security as a sovereign order, as a challenge to
sovereignty itself, an idea that has been explored by Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat. Perhaps the loss of the theological sovereign
thus opens the possibility of a new sense of politics, and raises the question of how the sense of beingin-common can make itself ‘sovereign in a new way.’ Efforts on the part of some scholars to move beyond the state in order to try and
locate political life and community often fail because their theories and political projects are predicated on the necessary existence of the state, concomitant logics
of security, and the reality of the these as accomplished facts as the guarantee of their durability. Any notion of an aleatory encounter and the profound
implications of thinking in this way are rendered peripheral. Utopian political projects are pursued in order to try to transcend sovereignty and to locate the political
outside the state. Without breaking free from the liberal, cosmopolitan model, which sees the state as immutable, these projects continue to suffer from the illusion
of representation and do not escape teleology or idealism, serving ultimately to give new life to onto-theological discourses attempting to imbue meaning onto
politics transcendentally where, in fact, none exists. A
philosophy of the encounter, one in which we think in terms of no
determination of the being which issues from the 'taking-hold' of the encounter as being prefigured,
allows us to grasp the political immanently, to think of world-becoming as ‘detheologized’, that is to say without recourse to an image or
representation of the world: the world is simply the accomplished fact. Neither security nor community can serve
as the figures or foundations on which to think and build politics if they are re-thought in these ways.
Conclusion Death is the scandal, the ultimate humiliation of reason. It saps the trust in reason and the security that reason promises. Zygmunt Bauman It is the contention of this thesis that
liberal political immunity and its basis in immunised Hobbesian social contractarian thought is dependent on insecurity and exclusion for its survival as such and that the study of security, by
both orthodox and “critical” scholars, does not fully problematise this dependency. Much of the security literature (explicitly in the case of orthodox studies, and implicitly, I argue, in the case
of CSS) advocates the protection and consolidation of operative, immunised communities which foreclose and preclude multifarious ways in which we might be together. Western politics as a
vast machine that attempt to capture and control life, repress any possibility of being-in-common. Nowhere do we recognise its overreach more keenly than in modern discourse and practice
of security, and it is this problem that this thesis has addressed. Modern politics of security preclude the opening up of politics to negotiation, contestation, and the productive interplay of
competing philosophical claims regarding community. It has been argued that the politics of security, which attempt to limit the aleatory element of life and death, fail abjectly to answer
questions of community as relationality and that the liberal contractarian thought which underpins it actively works to destroy possibilities of being-with one another. It has been my intention
to deconstruct our thinking on community so that we might unmask its contingency and to highlight how the will to security, in its efforts to physically or symbolically secure space, prohibits
any notion of space as continually negotiated. The Hobbesian social contract does not make sense and does not function as such without relation in and of itself being immunised and,
ultimately, destroyed. At the bottom, that which the community wants to exclude is that which does not let itself be identified in it and thus exclusion is an illusion. Exclusionary community
which, I argue, a politics of security is reliant on, is both morally and ontologically untenable as relationality is dependent upon a constant unworking in order to make sense as such.
Communities – as singularities facing each other in death – are necessarily radically unmanageable, unstable and insecure. Rather than an empirical reality or presence, what we share is the
lack of community. Community is an open spacing of others that excludes the possibility of foundation, even the foundation seemingly created from the exclusion of others. It is this sharing,
this being-with or co-appearance to one another as such vulnerable beings that constitute insubstantial community. This sharing serves as the groundlessness that singularises and
differentiates beings as such. The politics of security, however, attempt to “work” something which is “unworkable” and “inoperative.” Logics of security work to silence any alternative
thinking on community and, speaking only within the prevailing paradigm, bolster ideas of hierarchical authority and of sovereignty, refusing the recognition of dependencies upon any open
community, and ultimately eradicating the singularities of the entities that compose it. There is a largely unwritten and unproblematised collective denial within thinking on security of the idea
that, currently, political communities are indebted to insecurity for their existence and that this immunitary logic permeates much of international relations discourse. The roots of security
politics in the Hobbesian state of generalized conflict, and the institution of sovereign power that acts to protect, or better immunize, the community from a threatened return to conflict, links
sovereign power theoretically to communal self-preservation and self-negation. Richard Wyn Jones warned in 1999 that ‘the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security
To challenge the reduction of politics and the closure of the
political at the behest of modern security politics is to challenge the line-drawing depoliticisation and
violence of sovereign power. It is to render problematic and contingent what has been posited as
accomplished and, therefore, necessary. The will to security, and its problematic and contested foundations, shelter us from the unbearable excess
studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent.’
of community, and it is with a radically different approach to the stubborn foundations of international relations thought that we can successfully unmask and
challenge this. A number of the themes motivating a critique of modern security politics also act to expose the problems posed by traditional metaphysics within
modern Western political thought. Hobbes has placed the problem of the conservatio vitae at the centre of political thought, and it
is in exploring
modern thought and practice of security that we can see it constituting by far its most prevalent
dimension and foreclosing any possibility of a constitutive power that is not sovereign power.
Sovereignty is seen to be the common sense solution to managing the aleatory element of death, but is
also revealed as the not-being-in-common of individuals and as the political form of their desocialisation.
Along with reducing international political thought and practice to the katechontic and endless war of securitisation, it has rendered the self-preservation of life as
the modern problem and driving force of international relations. It
is only with a rejection of immunitary logics, a cogent
reassertion of relationality and of the aleatory element of life and death, and an approach which grasps
the necessity of contingency and encounter, that we can hope for politics to be something other than
the possibility or the instrument for keeping life alive.
democracy
Democratic discourse drives biopolitical action by the state
Güven, 08 (Ferit, professor of philosophy at Earlham College. Received MA. and Ph.D. from the
philosophy department, of DePaul University, “Foucault, Bio-disciplinary Power and the Problem of
Democracy” Abstracts: Foucault Circle 2008 http://foucault.siu.edu/pdf/abs08.pdf)//BW
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Foucault’s conception of power developed in Discipline and Punish (disciplinary power) and The
History of Sexuality (bio-power), provides an adequate starting point for understanding the functioning of the ideal of democracy. My paper
aims to demystify our unreflective fascination with democracy today and sets the concept of democracy into a critical context. My argument
has two dimensions: First, I propose that claims
made from within democratic discourse regarding other political
systems are claims of bio-disciplinary power. Second, the specific power relations that exist within democracy can neither be
reduced to struggles for emancipation or freedom, nor to the structures of oppression and repression. This does not mean that
there are no claims for freedom and resistance to oppression within democracies. However, these
claims do not function outside of bio-discipline, indeed these claims are the concretion of bio-disciplinary power. Hence my
claim is not that democracy functions in a totalitarian or oppressive way, but rather the functioning of democracy can be best
explained in terms of bio-disciplinary power. My analysis of democracy relies neither on some kind of conspiratorial “thoughtcontrol” strategy nor on a liberal commitment to the sovereign subject, who cuts through the darkness associated with evil forces in society and
reaches the light through struggle. I do not say that this discursive subject does not exist, but I claim that it functions in an entirely different way
within democratic discourse. Foucault’s notion of bio-disciplinary power also explains the difference between modern democracy and the
ancient Greek conception of democracy without appealing to the classical conception of sovereignty. This conception of sovereignty
presupposes a unity. Consequently, critiques of democratic structures presume the same kind of unity when they criticize the “power elite,”
“agenda setting media” etc.
Democractic discourse does not manufacture consent, but rather produces the
unity of a political subject. The bio-disciplinary power does not function as a unified system, in a comprehensive and exhaustive
fashion. It, therefore, does not rely on a unified theory of sovereignty. Foucault’s conception of bio-disciplinary power, however, has to be
supplemented by what I call cogito-logical power, or cogito-logical effects. By
“cogitological” power, I mean neither the
power of the cogito, nor the power of logic. This power emanates neither from the thinking subject
(cogito), not from the rules of logic, or reason, but rather it is a discursive power that manufactures the
rational, thinking subjects of democracy. Cogitological power functions as a third dimension of the bio-disciplinary axis. In
addition to obedient subjects and populations, cogito-logical power forms political, thinking subjects imagining themselves at the center of the
problem of unity. I claim that the
functioning of democratic discourse as well as its practice can be most
effectively understood in terms of cogito-logical power.
domestic surveillance
The logic of the state of exception ensures that domestic surveillance will be
unfettered
Barnard-Wills 12 (David – Senior Research Analyst at Trilateral Research & Consulting, Ph.D. in Politics
from Manchester University, “Surveillance, Governmentality, Identity and Discourse,” in Surveillance
and Identity: Discourse, Subjectivity and the State, p. 23-24)
However, the state
retains a role in surveillance research, especially at the boundary between surveillance
studies and International Relations. Giorgio Agamben has analysed how by creating states of emergency which
were previously limited to wartime, contemporary states have been able to create ‘states of exception’
which remove prior limits on government action, including the use of surveillance, alongside permanent detention of
‘terrorists’ or ‘enemy combatants’ (Agamben 2005). The logic allowing Guantanamo Bay also allows for increased state
surveillance. Similarly, Bigo has shown the importance of the nation state with the continued existence (and the reinforcement) of the national border, even
in (and because of) a globalised world of supposedly free movement (Bigo 2006b:47). Bigo situates this amongst sovereignty debates in International Relations and
the construction by the United States of a global state of in-security. e suggests that the heavy monitoring of the border (see for example the fortified US-Mexico
border, the so-called security fence built in the Palestinian territories by Israel and the experience of asylum seekers in UK detention centres) and the treatment of
the immigrant should be understood as techniques of government by unease through the normalisation of a state of watchful emergency (Bigo 2006b:63). As
Mathiesen prefigured, in many ways the state itself can be subject to surveillance by other actors. The contemporary example would of course be the
whistleblowing WikiLeaks website, making publicly available internal secret state documents in an attempt to hold states to account for their actions. WikiLeaks
found a way to effectively hijack and redirect the internal military and government surveillance infrastructures, demonstrating the way that information systems
can be put to a variety of political uses. States also exist in an international system which features other states and the interactions between these can also be
understood as having a surveillant dimension. The arguments around the invasion of Iraq essentially focused upon the information produced by differe nt regimes of
inspection and surveillance – UN weapons inspectors or the CIA intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (CNN 2003a, CNN 2003b). It is important not to forget
that the state retains substantial coercive capacity and resources. Despite
discourses of globalisation discussing the weakening
of the nation state in the face of international pressures it should be remembered that this may be a
weakening of specific elements of the nation state. Control over economic and fiscal policy may be
reduced whilst other elements may remain strongly intact or even redoubled in response to these
pressures (security and policing). Surveillance studies must proceed with recognition that there are multiple surveillance actors, with multiple technologies,
resources and motivations underpinning their surveillance activities, yet it must not forget that one of these surveillant actors is the nation
state, and that it is still a significant actor. From a political studies perspective, attempting to address the political effects of surveillance, this is a
highly important consideration.
Domestic surveillance has spread beyond the homeland into a global apparatus of
inclusion and exclusion
Gates 12 (Kelly, Associate Professor of Communication, Science Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at
University of California, San Diego, “The globalization of homeland security” in Routledge Handbook of
Surveillance Studies Edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, p. 293)
How have the priorities of “homeland security” in the post-9/11 era been mobilized to bolster an
expanding global industry, and what are the consequences of this industry expansion on surveillance
practices transnationally? It is the aim of this chapter to consider the globalization of homeland security. It examines the extent to which the US
model of homeland security has been exported to other countries, and what the results have been for the spread of new
surveillance practices across national borders. “Homeland security” is typically understood as a policy program instituted
in the United States as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I argue that it is more adequately understood
as a broader governmental rationality that reconfigures the US Cold War “national security” regime in
ways more amenable to the post-Cold War context, and to the priorities of an emerging global security
industry. In order to be promoted as a form of national identity, the US model of “homeland security” has been and must continue to be defined as uniquely
“American.” However, it
is also being globalized in particular ways in order to serve as a powerful political and
economic strategy in the “war on terror” (see also Hayes, this volume). One focus of this strategy has been the
USA-led effort to create a global surveillance apparatus, a dispersed system of monitoring and
identification that aims to enact a USA-centric politics of inclusion and exclusion on a global scale. Not
only the USA, but much of the world, is engaged in what Giorgio Agamben (2005) has called a permanent “state of
exception.” Here constitutional laws and human rights are suspended indefinitely, and individuals are
continuously called upon to demonstrate their legitimate identity and right to exist. As the USA and its
allies carry out the seemingly endless “war on terror,” a heavily financed “security-industrial complex”
has taken shape. Along with it has come a seemingly endless and increasingly integrated stream of new
surveillance systems and practices.
Curtailing domestic surveillance does not challenge the global logic of American
surveillance hegemony
Keiber 15 (Jason – Ph.D. in International Relations, Lecturer at Ohio State University, “Surveillance
Hegemony,” in Surveillance & Society, Volume 13, Number 2,
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/snowden_hegemony)
Introduction In 2013 Edward Snowden began revealing how busy the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been scooping up information on individuals
worldwide. The
capacity—and, frankly, the boldness—of the NSA makes very clear the seriousness with which
the US conducts surveillance on individuals abroad. In dragnet style the NSA scoops up information and
communications content from large swaths of the world's population. In order to situate the NSA activity within the broader
context of US surveillance abroad, the paper makes two claims. First, the US exercises surveillance hegemony. Hegemony requires
material power (e.g. technological capability) and a normative and institutional framework that supports and
provides legitimacy to that power. Since 9/11 strong anti-terrorism norms have evolved calling on states
to develop domestic capacity to keep track of "bad guys” and share information with other states. There are
institutions that promulgate this norm—such as the United Nations—and many more that facilitate information sharing on suspected terrorists more generally.
Surveillance hegemony is the reason why the US can rely on myriad avenues for surveillance. The
hegemonic triad of material power, legitimizing norms, and supporting international institutions greases
the wheels of US efforts to get information on suspected and known terrorists throughout the world. In
addition to secretive efforts like the NSA’s, hegemony is reflected in surveillance programs with other states conducted more above board. I review two of these
programs in this paper. This leads to the second claim. US
surveillance hegemony fosters an information ecology that
connects secret and public surveillance efforts. Information gains in one part of the ecology has effects for other programs in the system.
NSA activity cannot be fully understood without understanding how the information with which it works interacts within this information ecology. In fleshing out US
surveillance hegemony, the paper brings an International Relations (IR) perspective to Surveillance Studies to emphasize the interaction of states and the role of
international norms and organizations. IR is well suited to note the ways in which states cooperate, clash, and project power abroad to collect information on
individuals living in other sovereign states. In addition, focusing on the
US’s surveillance hegemony acts as a corrective to the
obsession with NSA power. While the NSA disclosures display US technology and willingness to go-italone, much of the US surveillance apparatus is actually a product of cooperation and negotiation with
other states and is fostered by norms and institutions. The paper begins by looking at what we learn from Snowden’s trove of
documents about the US’s international surveillance ambitions. After Snowden, we need to wipe our lenses clean and look again at how the US practices
surveillance abroad. In the next section the paper explains the concept of hegemony and argues that the US is a surveillance hegemon. I then introduce two nonsecret surveillance programs to illustrate other significant ventures that help constitute and are made possible by surveillance hegemony. In the final section of the
paper I illustrate how these programs, along with the NSA, are part of an information ecology. When viewed through the hegemony lens, we see how NSA activity
fits in the broader context of US surveillance activity abroad and international politics more broadly. Surveillance and International Politics As
the interests
and problems of governments have gone global, so too has “the opportunity for surveillance to appear as
one of a range of solutions at that scale” (Murakami Wood 2012: 335). Recently disclosed NSA activity is a perfect example of this. States, it
seems, are increasingly interested in conducting surveillance not only on their own populations but also on individuals living abroad. Global surveillance
reflects and is affected by dynamics of globalization that fundamentally change how individuals interact
in space and time. “Rising geographical mobility, plus the stretching of social relationships enabled by ... new transport and communication technologies,
[means] the general decline of face-to-face relationships” (Lyon 2007: 125). As governments (and the private sector) seek to comprehend
and influence these global social relationships forms of surveillance and information infrastructures
have become globalized (Lyon 2004). Documents provided by Edward Snowden testify to the depth of international surveillance practices.
Security surveillance is no longer a domestic centered practice. Moreover, when powerful states (the US in
particular) conduct international surveillance, they are often gathering information on ordinary individuals.
The
monitoring of millions of telephone calls in Spain (Greenwald and Aranda 2013; Gonzales 2013) and the actual recording of calls in the Bahamas (Devereaux, Greenwald and Poitras 2014) are but two examples. States used to be preoccupied with learning about the behavior of other states. The NSA disclosures powerfully illustrate how the US has dedicated itself to the surveillance of
individuals outside of its borders as well as those within. This paper focuses on international surveillance by states that occurs when one state (working alone or with others) collects, stores, or disseminates information about people (their activity and environments) who live in foreign jurisdictions for the purposes of influence, intervention, or further surveillance. This
conceptualization of surveillance draws our attention to how states interact in the conduct of surveillance. It shifts attention to the international politics of surveillance and opens up questions concerning the strategic interaction of states and the role of norms and international organizations. To better understand this particular dimension of surveillance, it will pay dividends to draw
from International Relations (IR). Surveillance Studies has demonstrated a particular interest in the genealogy of the methods, concepts, and technologies of surveillance in the global context (Mattelart 2010 is a particularly good example) and often draws attention to how global surveillance facilitates neoliberalism (Murakami Wood 2013). My goal in this article is to supplement this
understanding of the international dimension of surveillance with a more explicit focus on international politics—how states interact to achieve surveillance objectives. The intersection of Surveillance Studies and IR has already proven productive (work on the implications for borders is particularly interesting: Bigo 2008; Vaughan-Williams 2009). But more can be done. The state
centrism of IR (which can be problematic for the field) can be leveraged in an analysis of state- led global surveillance practices. Today’s forms of surveillance are often networked and “rhizomatic”— interconnected and rootlike. Today’s surveillance systems act as an “assemblage”—a “multiplicity of heterogeneous” sources and flows of information on individuals that are not
necessarily connected or unified by design, but rather can connect up and function together to powerful effect. There is no concrete surveillant assemblage that one could point to as it were. Rather, “to the extent that the surveillant assemblage exists, it does so as a potentiality, one that resides at the intersections of various media that can be connected for diverse purposes”
(Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 609). Rhizomatic surveillance assemblages tend to be discussed as less central and less hierarchical. As such, the interaction of states (hulking, centralized, hierarchical powers) is often neglected as surveillance scholars instead focus on more diffuse, hidden, capillary forms of surveillance power. But states still matter tremendously in international politics.
International politics is fundamentally different than domestic politics. States enjoy sovereignty and are not legally bound to an overarching authority the same way citizens are bound to their states. This makes it difficult for any one state to conduct surveillance on the citizens of a different state. Secret programs like those run by intelligence services offer one way to mitigate such
difficulties. States can also try to work together. After all, there are incentives for states to cooperate on transnational issues such as terrorism and crime (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006; on the benefits of working through institutions see Keohane 2005). Cooperation on surveillance matters, however, does not come easy. States tend to take their domestic sovereign prerogatives
seriously. We shouldn’t expect any state to wantonly share information about its citizens with other states. One way the US has been able to get other states and institutions to cooperate on surveillance, is through its hegemonic position in world politics. Hegemony Many IR scholars pay close attention to how many “great powers” there are in the world as a parsimonious way to
understand how countries get along. The Cold War era was a bi-polar world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US remained atop in a uni-polar system. Some IR scholars see bi-polarity as very stable because it facilitates a balancing of power (Waltz 1979; for contrast, see Hopf 1991). Today, the expectation of some is that
other states will eventually balance against the US by either forming alliances or shoring up their own power (Waltz 2000; Mearsheimer 1990). Others scholars argue that a single dominant power can provide order to the system through hegemony. Hegemony does not simply mean dominance in material power. It refers also to a dominance in the way things are done. Hegemony is
reflected in a particular constellation of power, ideas and institutions which together produce stability (Cox 1981). A materially powerful actor by itself is not a hegemon. Hegemony also requires a foundation in ideas (e.g. norms and social images) that provide at least a veneer of legitimacy to the dominant actor’s power and influence. Institutions, in turn, provide transmission belts
for the proliferation of ideas and venues for other actors to participate in—and not resist—the social order. Whereas in an imperial system, the dominant power sets the rules for subordinates to follow, in a hegemonic system, the dominant power sets up the rules for all—including itself, though with exceptions—to follow. Hegemony offers a “negotiated” order that benefits (or
purports to benefit) states that don’t go against the grain. Hegemony is still hierarchical. It is, however, hierarchy softened by legitimizing norms and (often merely quasi-) inclusive institutions. The leading power of a hegemonic order is the prime mover in creating and protecting the major rules and institutions of international politics. IR scholar John Ikenberry explains: Compliance
and participation within the order is ultimately ensured by a range of power capabilities available to the hegemon—military power, financial capital, market access, technology and so forth. Direct coercion is always an option in the enforcement of order, but less direct ‘carrots and sticks’ are also mechanisms to maintain hegemonic control. (Ikenberry 2004: 616) Today it is the US
which exercises global hegemony. It runs a “political order built on ‘liberal hegemonic’ bargains [...] public goods provision, and an unprecedented array of intergovernmental institutions and working relationships” (Ikenberry 2004: 611). The seeds of US hegemony were sown after World War II with the creation of the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and GATT/WTO. The
latter three institutions helped underpin an international liberal financial and trading regime. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US with its preponderance of power became the unchallengeable supporter and protector of this liberal order (for more on the military dimension of hegemony see Posen 2003). As a result of this broader hegemonic political order, the US has been able
to establish what I call “surveillance hegemony.” It is useful to make this distinction between surveillance hegemony from hegemony broadly construed for at least two reasons. First, the type of power at play—surveillance—cuts to the core of statehood. Everything that a state does from mere administration to the most lethal acts of coercion relies on surveillance. Second, as will be
discussed further below, the ideas that support the expansion of international surveillance are more specifically reliant on security discourses, rather than the (neo)liberal discourses that underpin the broader US led hegemonic order. This last point is important because in order for the West’s anti-terrorism discourse and its related security practices to spread, there needs to be a
discursive fit between the agenda of the US and the norms held by the security and intelligence elites of other states. Indeed, the anti-terrorism discourse and the related counterterrorism surveillance measures it calls for is readily intelligible because it speaks the security vernacular shared by these elites. More importantly, there is good reason to believe that such a discourse is
also viewed as legitimate, and this is where hegemony achieves a firm grip. (For a great discussion on discursive fit and hegemony see Hopf 2013: 321-323.) Surveillance Hegemony: Power, Norms and Institutions The extraordinary material surveillance capabilities of the US is perhaps most easily “measured” by its exorbitant funding. Nearly a third of the US’s $52.6 billion intelligence
budget is dedicated to fighting terrorism (Gellman and Miller 2013). The NSA in particular gets one fifth of the overall budget. This money sustains a talented workforce and produces cutting edge surveillance techniques. These capabilities are often put to use covertly and unilaterally. The US, however, can also influence others to participate in its broader, strategic surveillance
efforts. One of the more striking examples of secret cooperation is the recently disclosed RAMPART-A program in which over a dozen countries allow the US to install equipment to “congested” cables so that the US can intercept phone and internet traffic (Gallagher 2014). With some caveats, both the US and the host country reportedly get access to the fruits of that surveillance. In
general there are 37 states that are “approved SIGINT partners” (Greenwald 2014). This highlights the fact that other states accept (to varying degrees) core premises of how surveillance should work on an international scale. This acceptance, in turn, rests on a broader set of norms that emphasize the threat of terrorism and the necessity of counterterrorism measures. On the
normative side of the ledger, a modicum of international surveillance in the form of information sharing has become not just tolerated, but held up as a responsibility states owe each other. Finally there is an array of international institutions that support surveillance activities. The US has been able to use its influential position within these institutions—the UN in particular—to
establish an array of information sharing practices, all of which benefit US surveillance goals. Anti-terrorism norms existed prior to 9/11, but the attacks on that day in 2001 vaulted anti-terrorism business to the top of the agenda. Terrorism moved from a threat to the predominant threat. Pre-9/11 norms began emerging as early as the end of the 19th century as a response to
anarchism (Jensen 2013), but developed more thoroughly in the 1970s (see Rapoport 2002 for more on the international dimensions of terrorism over time). The general emphasis was that states should refrain from supporting international terrorism. After 9/11 this changed into a norm urging states to actively intervene to stop international terrorism. This requires shoring up their
own surveillance capacity at home and sharing information with others abroad. For scholars and policy makers accustomed to seeing the world through a geopolitical lens, it might seem unusual (or surprising) that security norms would shift to prioritize terrorism. After all, the actual threat of terrorism to the West is marginal (Mueller and Stewart 2012; Mueller 2009). Normative
change has been facilitated by several factors. First, there is a strong fit between international security discourses obsessed with terrorism and the more parochial security discourses which reference traditional state security concerns. On this score, the portrayal of terrorism as a threat to the security of all states (not just the US) is readily digestible by other governments. Second,
because the targets of anti-terrorism practices are individuals and not states, any security gains by one state is not likely to be viewed as directly threatening to the security of other states. States don’t perceive much of a threat to their security interests by cooperating on an anti-terrorism agenda. In IR parlance, there is no security dilemma in which the gains in security by one state
threatens (inadvertently or not) the security of other states (Herz 1950; Jervis 1978). Finally, the post-9/11 world has been one where states are not preoccupied by the prospect of significant interstate war. There is geopolitical slack that allows states to focus on other issue areas. The normative change is most clearly seen in how the US and the UN speak of counterterrorism (CT).
Clearly, 9/11 had a major impact on how the US views international security. The US views CT as an international responsibility all states share. Among the US objectives in its earliest “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” was to “[e]stablish and maintain an international standard of accountability with regard to combating terrorism” (The White House 2003: 18). It further
argued that “[s]tates that have sovereign rights also have sovereign responsibilities” that revolve around counterterrorism. Even though the Bush administration was known for its go-it-alone attitude, international cooperation was integral to the US’s CT strategy. The initial CT strategy document broke up the world up into four different types of states. Where states are willing and
able, we will reinvigorate old partnerships and forge new ones to combat terrorism and coordinate our actions to ensure that they are mutually reinforcing and cumulative. Where states are weak but willing, we will support them vigorously in their efforts to build the institutions and capabilities needed to exercise authority over all their territory and fight terrorism where it exists.
Where states are reluctant, we will work with our partners to convince them to change course and meet their international obligations. Where states are unwilling, we will act decisively to counter the threat they pose and, ultimately, to compel them to cease supporting terrorism. (The White House 2003: 12) The hegemonic position of the US is evident in its CT strategies. First, the
US offers carrots to “weak” states, promising to “strengthen the capacity of such War on Terror partners to reclaim full control of their territory through effective police, border, and other security forces as well as functioning systems of justice” (The White House 2006: 16). Only a powerful state could offer (and sometimes foist upon other states) such assistance. Second, over time
the US shifts from unilateral bluster (which is implicitly backed by direct coercion) to a more international approach (which relies on US diplomatic strengths and advantages in international fora). In the 2006 CT strategy, the language of “willing and able” states persists, but the stark language from 2003 is absent. Instead, for those states “reluctant to fulfill their sovereign
responsibilities to combat terrorist-related activities within their borders” the US would lean on diplomacy and the rest of “the international community to persuade [these] states to meet their obligations to combat terrorism and deny safe haven under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373” (The White House 2006: 16). This is the approach of a hegemon relying on less coercive
modes of influence. There are two watchwords throughout these documents—capacity and partnership. Both reflect US hegemony, and both find increasing use in the subsequent CT national strategies. State “capacity” is used twice in 2003, nine times in 2006, and 17 times in 2011 (The White House 2011). References to “partnerships” occurred 25, 41, and 59 times in the
respective years. The US sees its CT relationship with other “willing” states as that of a partnership. Partnerships with “able” states are exercised through more joint efforts. In its partnerships with weaker states the US would help build their capacity to fight terrorism—a capacity that includes surveillance. The expectation is that the US approach to surveillance would be dominated
by cooperative efforts with more capable states and assistance for weaker states to shore up their domestic surveillance capability. The United Nations (UN), often through US initiative, has also been instrumental in fostering US surveillance hegemony. Although the UN does not itself conduct surveillance it has passed significant Security Council Resolutions which have shaped
international counterterrorism practices, including surveillance. Resolutions 1267 and 1373, in particular, have effectively mandated that states maintain and monitor a list of sanctioned individuals related to terrorism and that states share information with one another. Accordingly, states might be assessed against certain norms and metrics for how well their counterterrorism
policies match up. The UN itself monitors state compliance with both resolutions. In addition to motivating specific policies, the UN activity has helped reproduce a certain way of doing the business of counterterrorism. The general template has two elements. First, states ought to develop capacity that respects certain liberal norms but cracks down on terrorism. Second states ought
to share relevant information with foreign partners. The later suggests that terrorism is a community problem, as does the very fact that the UN has tasked itself to address terrorism. Resolution 1373 is binding on UN member states because it was passed by the Security Council (under its Chapter 7 authority). Its measures are meant to keep states from supporting terrorism and
ensure that states take steps to suppress and stop terrorism. The mandatory provisions entail adopting domestic policies that criminalize terrorism, and prohibit terrorism financing and travel. This has led some to characterize 1373 as “legislation” signifying an important break in the practice of the UN Security Council. Szasz writes: In the past, [...] the Security Council has often
required states to take certain actions, such as to implement sanctions against a particular state or to cooperate with an ad hoc tribunal, but these requirements always related to a particular situation or dispute and, even though not explicitly limited in time, would naturally expire when the issue in question and all its consequences were resolved. By contrast, as Resolution 1373,
while inspired by the attacks of September 11, 2001, is not specifically related to these (though they are mentioned in the preamble) and lacks any explicit or implicit time limitation, a significant portion of the resolution can be said to establish new binding rules of international law- rather than mere commands relating to a particular situation—and, moreover, even creates a
mechanism for monitoring compliance with them. (Szasz 2002) Of particular interest to surveillance are the mandatory provisions in 1373 relating to sharing of information. The resolution stipulates that states “shall”: Take the necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist acts, including by provision of early warning to other States by exchange of information. Afford one
another the greatest measure of assistance in connection with criminal investigations or criminal proceedings relating to the financing or support of terrorist acts, including assistance in obtaining evidence in their possession necessary for the proceedings. Both provisions require, or at the very least imply, a domestic surveillance capability and an ability to convey that information to
other states thereby effectively expanding surveillance across borders. As a result of Resolution 1373 states have made changes. 1373 created the Counter-Terrorism Committee to monitor states’ compliance with its mandatory provisions, and member states are required to file progress reports to that end. As of 2010 “All 192 U.N. member states filed at least one report with the [.]
body that was created to monitor and enforce compliance with Resolution 1373. [...] By August 2006, 107 countries had filed four reports, and 42 had filed five” (Scheppele 2010: 442). The US has leaned on these UN resolutions to get other states to take CT and related surveillance seriously. According to the 2003 strategy document, the US promised to “use UNSCR 1373 and the
[12] international counterterrorism conventions and protocols to galvanize international cooperation and to rally support for holding accountable those states that do not meet their international responsibilities” (The White House 2003: 19). Here again we see the language of “responsibility.” On the one hand the US regards this international responsibility as derivative from specific
international law. But on the other hand the connection between sovereign rights to CT responsibilities can also be read as something which UNSCR 1373 reflects rather than establishes. For instance, the same document reads, “Together, UNSCR 1373, the international counterterrorism conventions and protocols, and the inherent right under international law of individual and
collective self-defense confirm the legitimacy of the international community’s campaign to eradicate terrorism.” This line suggests that the legitimacy of CT norms— including information sharing between states—pre-exists the international instruments mentioned, as if the norms are justified by the simple fact that terrorism exists. The broader counterterrorism norm is that states
should cooperate in counterterrorism, and effective counterterrorism entails cooperative international surveillance of individuals. Looking at actual international surveillance practice we see two trends—the growth of information sharing and an emphasis on increasing domestic capacity. Both are frequently treated as a responsibility owed to the international community. A more
specific form of the norm, therefore, would be: States ought to (a) to share information with international partners, and (b) have the domestic capacity to accomplish that sharing, and generally keep a cap on one’s own bad guys. The norms are part of a shared representation of what it means to be a good steward of international security and a responsible sovereign state at home.
Other international organizations deserve special mention—INTERPOL, the Financial Action Task Force, and The Global Counterterrorism Forum. The former two organizations are the major institutions that facilitate international law enforcement and anti-money laundering initiatives. The latter is one of the few new institutions (created de novo) with major buy-in from great and
secondary powers, and therefore offers a possible glimpse of future CT global governance. All of the institutions enjoy buy-in from the US. Indeed, it could be argued that without the US they would be impotent. Hegemonic Surveillance Capabilities There are two sides to American surveillance power. One is secret and exemplified by the NSA. This surveillance hides and dissembles.
The other is a more public (though not necessarily publicized) surveillance. Both piggyback on the general hegemonic position of the US and rely on the warp and weft of US interactions with other states and institutions. The public side of surveillance is often semi- consensual. This is not meant to suggest the absence of power (there is always power at play), but rather to highlight
the more negotiated way of approaching surveillance. Without knowing more about the NSA programs, it is hard to know to what extent the US is strong arming states into partnerships. Regardless, both forms of surveillance—the hidden and the public—are part of a broader information ecology. They feed each other. Their synergy works to feed not only the US information, but
partner countries’ information as well. Some surveillance programs play a more central role in this ecology. I discuss two of these below. One involves information sharing between countries. The other involves the distribution hardware to other countries for use in their surveillance activity. Both implicate and benefit from NSA activity. Information Sharing The US has hundreds of
information sharing agreements with foreign countries, many of which are minor, but one set of agreements is of particular importance. In September of 2003 President Bush signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 6. HSPD 6 required the government to consolidate and continue developing a database of information on individuals known or suspected to be involved
in terrorism and to “use that information [...] to support (a) Federal, State, local, territorial, tribal, foreign- government, and private-sector screening processes, and (b) diplomatic, military, intelligence, law enforcement, immigration, visa, and protective processes” (Bush 2003). The eventual result was the Terrorism Screening Database, also called the “Terrorist Watch List”
(hereafter, “watchlist”). HSPD 6 also called for “enhancing cooperation with certain foreign governments [...] to establish appropriate access to terrorism screening information of the participating governments” (Bush 2003). The result has been the proliferation of “HSPD 6 agreements” that deal with the bilateral exchange of “terrorism screening information.” The US ingests the
data provided by other countries adding some of it to the watchlist, and some foreign partners receive a subset of the watchlist data for their own screening purposes. The FBI has referred to the watchlist as “the world’s most comprehensive and widely shared database of terrorist identities” (Healy 2009). The watchlist is a product of hegemony. The US uses its leverage but does not
command by fiat. For instance, the US requires all countries participating in its Visa Waiver Program (which allows foreign citizens to travel to the US for a temporary time without a visa) to sign an HSPD 6 agreement. This is a quid pro quo arrangement, wherein the US gets data and the citizens of participating countries get travel benefits. It should also be noted that the US has good
relationships with these countries, a product broader US hegemony. But the benefits of participation for “partner countries” don’t stop there. The US is in a position to share watchlist data—known as the Foreign Partner Extract—with its partners (some, presumably the core allies like the UK, get more routine access). Importantly, as more countries funnel their datasets of “bad
guys” to the US, the US not only learns about new persons of interest, but can also triangulate across multiple sources to make better inferences about threatening individuals. As of September 2012, the US had signed over 40 of these with partner countries (Ramotowski 2012). This accounts for roughly 20 per cent of states in the world representing nearly 700 million people. All this
data flows to the surveillance hegemon, enabling the US to act as an international terrorism data broker—a global NCTC as it were. This feat of surveillance is described by the FBI as follows: “The screening agencies throughout the world who attempt to ascertain if a person screened is watchlisted constitute a global network, dedicated to identifying, preventing, deterring, and
disrupting potential terrorist activity” (Healy 2009). Providing Information Systems A second example of a public practice supporting US surveillance hegemony is a program known as PISCES. Run by the US Department of State, PISCES is a screening/watch-listing system meant to assist other countries with border security. By providing countries with the necessary hard- and
software, the US intends to bolster the recipients’ surveillance capacity. PISCES also provides the US an opportunity to give datasets to other countries to use on the provided system, thereby effectively outsourcing surveillance. The NSA, as we will see, is also implicated in this program. Surveillance hegemony empowers the US to proliferate and maintain PISCES systems. Through
April 2012, the system was working at 184 ports of entry across 18 states. 53 of these, across 11 states, had biometric capabilities (US Department Of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism 2013).The participating countries are considered by the US as suffering from a higher risk of terrorist transit and lacking the infrastructure to address that problem. States with the twin burdens of
weak domestic capacity and a domestic terrorism problem are likely to be interested in accepting assistance from other states. The US, in turn, has both the technological capability and the security interests to make such an offer. Finally, because it provides training and system maintenance, the US is able to foster a dependency on its wares. It is unclear whether or not the US has
direct access to the data that gets entered into PISCES systems worldwide (or even what “direct access” would amount to). PISCES is deployed in Pakistan, but the country recently considered scrapping the system partially out of fear that US had direct access to the data. However, both Pakistani and US officials denied that this was true. In 2011 a former Pakistani Interior Minister
said that the data “was never available to [the US] and was solely for the FIA’s [Pakistan’s FBI] use” (Imtiaz 2011). A representative from the US embassy in Islamabad echoed that, saying, “[t]here is no one at the Embassy who runs the TIP/PISCES programme. The Department of State provides support from Washington but the programme here is run by the interior ministry” (Imtiaz
2011). After a similar concern was raised in Malta, the US embassy clarified how PISCES is used. PISCES systems are not interconnected. Each is a standalone system in the country where it has been installed to add to that nation’s capacity to protect its national security. Monitoring of PISCES data is carried out by the Government of Malta. None of this data has been shared with the
USG. (Vella 2004) While the US might not have a direct line in or out of these systems, there are at least two ways in which the system serves a surveillance function. First, if the US wants information regarding specific individuals or travel patterns, it can make a request (Imtiaz 2011). Similarly during check-up visits, the US can make inquiries about data collection and analysis
conducted by the host country. Second, the US provides data to the PISCES systems to facilitate checks that would benefit US interests. A 2003 Congressional Research Service report describing US-Pakistani counterterror cooperation states that the PISCES “software is said to make real-time comparisons of photographs and other personal details with the F.B.I. database in order to
track the movements of Islamic militants” (Kronstadt 2003: 10). In addition, according to a 2007 Department of State report, “TIP provided photos and travel history to Pakistan of three of the four July 7, 2005 London Metro bombers and hundreds of travelers have been interdicted in Pakistan on suspicion of using stolen passports” (US Department of State 2007: 63). Depending on
how they are set up, PISCES systems can also pull or duplicate data from other databases. Yet another Department of State report mentions “U.S. and host nation requests for customized interfaces with local and international databases [...] while ensuring that the PISCES system maintains standards in accordance with international norms” (US Department of State 2013: 161). Also,
at least some PISCES systems are mentioned as having INTERPOL and Schengen II interfaces (2013: 216-7). Access to the Schengen system is presumably limited to Schengen members which run PISCES systems. However, there is no reason that installation of INTERPOL interfaces should be limited. For example a Pakistani government website describing PISCES mentions using
INTERPOL data as well as “linking” to other countries’ visa issuance systems. Information Ecology Unpacking US surveillance hegemony reveals an ecology of programs and practices that shuffles information around for analysis and development of future surveillance tasks. To continue with the current examples, the NSA, HSPD 6 agreements, and PISCES systems are all part of the
same surveillance system. The information obtained from each redounds and feeds the others. The axis about which all US surveillance on suspected terrorists revolves is the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and a database known as TIDE. By law, the NCTC is responsible for integrating and analyzing all foreign terrorism information. If the CIA or the NSA comes across new
information on a terrorist suspect, it must get reported to the NCTC. The NCTC, in turn, is required to share terrorism information with other intelligence agencies and parts of the US government. The US shores up “digital power” through databases (Teboho Ansorge 2011), the most important of which for counterterrorism purposes is the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment
(TIDE). TIDE is a centralized master-list containing information on all persons of interest related to terrorism. Run by the NCTC, it supports the entire US government’s counterterrorism efforts. There are currently around 870,000 individuals listed in TIDE. The terrorism watchlist mentioned above is a subset of TIDE. The NSA, like other agencies in the intelligence community, pulls and
pushes information from TIDE. “TIDE includes a great deal of intelligence information obtained through the activities of the Intelligence Community, often implicating the most sensitive sources and methods of intelligence gathering” (Clapper 2013: 5). If the NSA discovers new terrorism information from its bulk collection programs such as PRISM (Greenwald and MacAskill 2013) or
SOMALGET (Devereaux, Greenwald and Poitras 2014), it is required to send this information to the NCTC. Upon review, the NCTC will decide whether the TIDE will be updated. HSPD 6 agreements and the State Department’s PISCES program also relate to TIDE. Any information gained through an HSPD 6 agreement, assuming it is credible, will end up in TIDE. While there is no public
accounting of just how much the US has learned from these agreements, we can infer their importance from the diplomatic weight the US has put behind getting them signed. Not only were the agreements mandated by presidential directive, the US made travel privileges with close allies contingent on signing the agreements. Moreover, according to a 2012 information sharing
report, HSPD 6 “agreements have enhanced current information already contained in the [terrorism watchlist] as well as added new identities to the [TIDE master list] and the information provided downstream to our domestic and international screening partners” (ISE Program Manager 2012: 19). Finally, we also know the watchlist data gets used frequently. In 2009, for example,
the US processed over 55,000 “encounters” with individuals, of which “over 19,000 were a positive match to a watchlisted known or suspected terrorist” (ISE Program Manager 2012: 19). The role of PISCES in the surveillance ecology is less direct. On the one hand, recent reporting suggests that the NSA has a direct line into the systems. According to reporting by the New York Times
based on documents provided by Snowden, “In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries” (Risen and Poitras 2014). It is unclear whether or not countries using PISCES are aware of this. Since 2010, the NSA has been able to cross-reference its
own biometric database, known as Pinwale, with data held by TIDE. Therefore, it is likely that data collected from PISCES systems also serves to update TIDE. Regardless of whether the US gets direct access to data processed by PISCES, the systems play a surveillance role informed by TIDE. The US can urge those states receiving PISCES to populate the system with specific data. Used
as such, travelers moving in and out of recipient states have their identities checked against those data entries. To be clear, the data being used for watchlisting could be anything from most-wanted-terrorists to fraudulent document alerts. In 2012, PISCES “processed an estimated 250,000 travelers every day” (US Department Of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism 2013). This is a
significant achievement for US surveillance. If only one tenth of one per cent of those travelers raise a flag, there would be over 90,000 matches every year. The US has effectively delegated surveillance activity through the PISCES program. In sum, the NSA feeds TIDE and vice versa. TIDE feeds other terrorism-related databases and activity. As other surveillance activity, both secret
and public, gather information, the TIDE gets updated. Moreover, the US can push out data to other states for use in their screening and intelligence activity. This allows the US to use other states for its surveillance agenda. The entire picture reflects a surveillance ecology that circulates information to great effect. Conclusion I have argued that the NSA activity disclosed by Edward
Snowden is but one element of US surveillance hegemony. There is a wide array of surveillance practices that serve to feed US information on individuals around the globe. However, these practices do not rest on brute material power alone. Surveillance hegemony also derives from ideas that normalize surveillance practices and institutions that concretize them. Two examples of
more public surveillance—HSPD 6 agreements and PISCES systems—showed other significant ways the US conducts surveillance on individuals abroad. Moreover, along with the NSA (and other intelligence programs) US surveillance activities form part of an information ecology. They all, in some way, rely on and contribute to data held by the NCTC and TIDE. I want to close with two
takeaways. The first speaks more directly to the relevance of this analysis to today. The second speaks to what seems to be the US’s future surveillance ambitions. Decisions by the NCTC and reflected in TIDE can literally kill people. There is a “kill list” naming individuals who might be targeted by drone strikes. The process by which individuals get “nominated” (an unfortunate term)
starts with the NCTC and TIDE. According to reporting in 2012, the NCTC creates a list for, and using criteria provided by, the White House. That list receives further review by a group at the National Security Council. For those individuals who eventually get targeted, the President signs off on some and the CIA on others. The information ecology revolving around TIDE serves this
undertaking. (For more the nominations process see Becker and Shane 2012; Miller 2012; Brennan 2012; for more on how the NSA has directly contributed to drone strikes see Miller, Tate and Gellman 2013). The potential for enormous consequences is all the more reason to take state-led surveillance practices seriously. The second takeaway concerns the future. US surveillance
Even if the US makes reforms to address these concerns
domestically, the US is unlikely to significantly dial down its foreign surveillance activity. Underpinned as
it is by hegemony, the US has coopted others—particularly the UK (MacAskill et al. 2013)—into playing integral roles in
global surveillance. The goal, it seems, is to make populations everywhere “legible” to the US (Scott 1998). This
“conquest of illegibility” is quintessentially a state making activity. If the present continues on the
trajectory of more surveillance by states over individuals globally, surveillance will be normalized as a
global phenomenon dealt with by international—not domestic—states structures. It could be argued that what we
hegemony suggests—and the recently disclosed NSA activity makes clear—an ambition to insinuate state power into the lives of people across the globe.
are seeing is an instance of international state formation along a particular dimension of state power. There are obvious implications for those concerned with
privacy and the democratic deficit of international state power. While privacy concerns may seem increasingly quaint in the digital age, global publics will surely
clamor for more accountability and transparency. Whether or not enough pressure builds for states to make meaningful changes remains to be seen.
Surveillance reform become band-aid fixes that mask the biopolitical control of the
government
Glennon 14 (Michael J., Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University, “National Security and Double Government”, http://harvardnsj.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf)//BW
Madison, as noted at the outset,543 believed that a constitution must not only set up a government
that can control and protect the people, but, equally importantly, must protect the people from the
government.544 Madison thus anticipated the enduring tradeoff: the lesser the threat from government, the lesser its
capacity to protect against threats; the greater the government’s capacity to protect against threats, the
greater the threat from the government. Recognition of the dystopic implications of double government
focuses the mind, naturally, on possible legalist cures to the threats that double government presents.
Potential remedies fall generally into two categories. First, strengthen systemic checks, either by reviving Madisonian institutions—by
tweaking them about the edges to enhance their vitality— or by establishing restraints directly within the
Trumanite network. Second, cultivate civic virtue within the electorate. A. Strengthening Systemic Checks The first set of potential remedies
aspires to tone up Madisonian muscles one by one with ad hoc legislative and judicial
reforms, by, say, narrowing the scope of
the state secrets privilege; permitting the recipients of national security letters at least to make their receipt public; broadening
standing requirements; improving congressional oversight of covert operations, including drone killings and
cyber operations; or strengthening statutory constraints like FISA545 and the War Powers Resolution.546 Law reviews brim with such
proposals. But their stopgap approach has been tried repeatedly since the Trumanite network’s emergence. Its futility is now glaring. Why such
efforts would be any more fruitful in the future is hard to understand. The Trumanites are committed to the rule of law and their sincerity is not
in doubt, but the rule of law to which they are committed is largely devoid of meaningful constraints.547 Continued
focus on legalist
band-aids merely buttresses the illusion that the Madisonian institutions are alive and well—and with that
illusion, an entire narrative premised on the assumption that it is merely a matter of identifying a solution and looking to the Madisonian
institutions to effect it. That frame deflects attention from the underlying malady. What is needed, if Bagehot’s theory is correct, is a
fundamental change in the very discourse within which U.S. national security policy is made. For the question
is no longer: What should the government do? The questions now are: What should be done about the government? What
can be done about the government? What are the responsibilities not of the government but of the people?
Surveillance reform fails – leads to circumvention and furthers biopower
Glennon 14 (Michael J., Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University, “National Security and Double Government”, http://harvardnsj.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf)//BW
Enough examples exist to persuade the public that the network is subject to judicial, legislative, and
executive constraints. This appearance is important to its operation, for the network derives legitimacy from the ostensible authority of
the public, constitutional branches of the government. The appearance of accountability is, however, largely an illusion
fostered by those institutions’ pedigree, ritual, intelligibility, mystery, and superficial harmony with the
network’s ambitions. The courts, Congress, and even the presidency in reality impose little constraint.
Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight dysfunctional; and presidential control nominal. Past efforts to revive these
institutions have thus fallen flat. Future reform efforts are no more likely to succeed, relying as they must
upon those same institutions to restore power to themselves by exercising the very power that they
lack. External constraints—public opinion and the press—are insufficient to check it. Both are manipulable, and their vitality depends heavily
upon the vigor of constitutionally established institutions, which would not have withered had those external constraints had real force. Nor
is it likely that any such constraints can be restored through governmental efforts to inculcate greater
civic virtue, which would ultimately concentrate power even further. Institutional restoration can come
only from an energized body politic. The prevailing incentive structure, however, encourages the public to become less, not more,
informed and engaged
economic security
The economy produces biopower as a way to control production
Giroux 06 (Henry A., Prof of Cultural Studies @ McMaster University, “Reading Hurricane Katrina:
Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability”,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v033/33.3giroux.html)//BW
Within the last few decades, matters of state sovereignty in the new world order have been retheorized so as to provide a range of theoretical
insights about the relationship between power and politics, the
political nature of social and cultural life, and the
merging of life and politics as a new form of biopolitics. While the notion of biopolitics differs significantly among its most
prominent theorists, including Michel Foucault (1990, 1997), Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2002, 2003), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(2004), what these theorists share is an attempt to think through the
convergence of life and politics, locating matters of
"life and death within our ways of thinking about and imagining politics" (Dean 2004, 17). Within this discourse,
politics is no longer understood exclusively through a disciplinary technology centered on the individual body—a body to be measured,
surveilled, managed, and included in forecasts, surveys, and statistical projections. Biopolitics points to new relations of power that are more
capacious, concerned not only with the body as an object of disciplinary techniques that render it "both useful and docile" but also with a body
that needs to be "regularized," subject to those immaterial means of production that produce ways of life that enlarge the targets of control
and regulation (Foucault 1997, 249). This shift in the workings of both sovereignty and power and the emergence of biopolitics are made clear
by Foucault, for whom biopower replaces the power to dispense fear and death "with that of a power to foster life—or disallow it to the point
of death. . . . [Biopower] is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain
of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism" (Ojakangas 2005, 6). As
Foucault insists, the logic of biopower is dialectical, productive, and positive (1990, 136). Yet he also argues that biopolitics does not remove
itself from "introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die"
(1997, 255). Foucault believes that the
death-function in the economy of biopolitics is justified primarily through a
form of racism in which biopower "is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race,
the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power" (258). Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri have both modified and extended Foucault's notion of biopower, highlighting a mode of biopolitics in which
immaterial labor such as ideas, knowledge, images, cooperation, affective relations, and forms of
communication extend beyond the boundaries of the economic to produce not just material goods as
"the means of social life, but social life itself. Immaterial production is biopolitical (2004b, 146). In this instance,
power is extended to the educational force of the culture and to the various technologies, mechanisms, and social practices through which it
reproduces various forms of social life. What is crucial to grasp in this rather generalized notion of
biopolitics is that power
remains a productive force, provides the grounds for both resistance and domination, and registers
culture, society, and politics as a terrain of multiple and diverse struggles waged by numerous groups in
a wide range of sites. For my purposes, the importance of both Foucault's and Hardt and Negri's work on biopolitics is that they move
matters of culture, especially those aimed at "the production of information, communication, [and] social relations . . . to the center of politics
itself" (Hardt and Negri 2004b, 334). Within these approaches, power expands its reach as a political force beyond the traditional scope and
boundaries of the state and the registers of officially sanctioned modes of domination. Biopolitics now
touches all aspects of
social life and is the primary political and pedagogical force through which the creation and
reproduction of new subjectivities takes place.
Neoliberalism/Capitalism is the driving force of biopower in the modern day
Giroux 06 (Henry A., Prof of Cultural Studies @ McMaster University, “Reading Hurricane Katrina:
Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability”,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v033/33.3giroux.html)//BW
I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become
the dominant biopolitics of the mid-twentieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market
fundamentalism and contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of capital accumulation,
violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush administration, has produced a new and dangerous version of
biopolitics.4 While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the intersection of race and
class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively
different and more dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but also
relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. As William DiFazio points out, "the state
has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it . . . increasingly fails to provide health care,
housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the
social contract has been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under
such circumstances, the
state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and
death. The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged citizens—they are already seen as dead within
a transnational economic and political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in
which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past,
people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, either because of the
persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labour. That is
no longer true. This
new form of biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception
in which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living
dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in the global media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant, pathological, and
dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social
homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of
symbolic and material capital, the
"free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to
those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given the increasing perilous state of the those
who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism
and the simultaneous rise of security states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This
task is made all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Economic securitization reduces humans to bare life and furthers the biopolitical
agenda
Giroux 06 (Henry A., Prof of Cultural Studies @ McMaster University, “Reading Hurricane Katrina:
Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability”,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v033/33.3giroux.html)//BW
Under the logic of modernization, neoliberalism, and militarization, the
category "waste" includes no longer simply
material goods but also human beings, particularly those rendered redundant in the new global
economy, that is, those who are no longer capable of making a living, who are unable to consume
goods, and who depend upon others for the most basic needs (Bauman 2000, 2003, 2004). Defined primarily through
the combined discourses of character, personal responsibility, and cultural homogeneity, entire populations expelled from the benefits of the
marketplace are reified as products without any value to be disposed of as "leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them
invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking (2004, 27). Even when young
black and brown youth try to escape
the biopolitics of disposability by joining the military, the seduction of economic security is quickly
negated by the horror of senseless violence compounded daily in the streets, roads, and battlefields in
Iraq and Afghanistan and made concrete in the form of body bags, mangled bodies, and amputated
limbs—rarely to be seen in the narrow ocular vision of the dominant media. With the social state in
retreat and the rapacious dynamics of neoliberalism, unchecked by government regulations, the public
and private policies of investing in the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the notion of
protecting people from the dire misfortunes of poverty, sickness, or the random blows of fate is viewed
as an act of bad faith. Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion. This is especially true for
those racial groups and immigrant populations who have always been at risk economically and
politically. Increasingly, such groups have become part of an ever-growing army of the impoverished and disenfranchised—removed from
the prospect of a decent job, productive education, adequate health care, acceptable child care services, and satisfactory shelter. As the state is
transformed into the primary agent of terror and corporate concerns displace democratic values, dominant "power is measured by the speed
with which responsibilities can be escaped" (Qtd. in Fearn 2006, 30). With its pathological disdain for social values and public life and its
celebration of an unbridled individualism and acquisitiveness, the Bush administration does more than undermine the nature of social
obligation and civic responsibility; it also sends a message to those populations who are poor and black—society neither wants, cares about, or
needs you (Bauman 1999, 68-69). Katrina revealed with startling and disturbing clarity who these individuals are: African-Americans who
occupy the poorest sections of New Orleans, those
ghettoized frontier-zones created by racism coupled with
economic inequality. Cut out of any long term goals and a decent vision of the future, these are the
populations, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, who have been rendered redundant and disposable in the
age of neoliberal global capitalism.
environment
Environmental policy is used to further biopolitics
Fletcher 10 (Robert, Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, University for Peace,
“Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate”,
http://www.conservationandsociety.org/article.asp?issn=09724923;year=2010;volume=8;issue=3;spage=171;epage=181;aulast=Fletcher)//BW
This distinction between disciplinary and neoliberal forms of governmentality has intriguing implications
for our understanding of conservation practice that have yet to be extensively explored (for preliminary
applications to environmental governance in general see Oels 2005). Efforts to conserve biodiversity, of
course, have been described as an exercise of biopower, in that: 1) interventions are commonly justified
in terms of their role in nurturing and sustaining life, both human and that of other organisms (even the
whole of life) as well (Luke 1999a); and 2) interventions' object is commonly 'populations' (both human
and non-) as a whole, seeking to maximise the total area of protected forest and amount of land under
forest cover minimise, the quantity of extinct species, etc. As Youatt (2008) observes, the United Nations
Environmental Program's (UNEP) Global Biodiversity Assessment can be seen as a paradigmatic
biopolitical approach to conservation, endeavouring to appraise the total health of global life according
to a set of statistical indicators and thereby establish a baseline upon which to intervene in order to
manipulate these indicators (reducing the rate of fish depletion, for instance) so as to augment and
sustain this life-as-a-whole. As with a more conventional, human-centred exercise of biopower,
biopolitical conservation policy, while aimed at populations, is actually applied to individual human
bodies, often through disciplinary techniques intended to alter their natural resource use (Borgerhoff
Mulder & Coppolillo 2005). In this respect, conservation has often been described as a form of 'green'
governmentality intended to inculcate an environmental ethic by means of which people will selfregulate their behaviour in conservation friendly ways (e.g., Luke 1999a, 1999b; Rutherford 1999;
Neumann 2001; Peluso & Watts 2001; Sundar 2001; Agrawal 2005a, 2005b). Agrawal (2005b: 162), for
instance, building upon Luke (1999a, 1999b), describes an 'environmentality' aimed at the creation of
'environmental subjects-people who care about the environment'. Environmental education would
constitute a paradigmatic example of this environmentality in action, whereby, through diverse
decentralised institutions (state schools, NGO trainings, community workshops, ecotourism excursions,
etc.), norms intended to encourage in situ natural resource preservation are advocated. Agrawal's
(2005a, 2005b) environmentality describes a disciplinary form of conservation governmentality.
Neoliberal governmentality, as described above, implies a much different approach to natural resource
policy. Rather than attempting to inculcate ethical norms vis-ΰ-vis the environment, within a neoliberal
framework conservationists would simply endeavour to provide incentives sufficient to motivate
individuals to choose to behave in conservation-friendly ways. In this perspective as well,
'environmental problems cease to be discussed in moral terms and are now addressed as issues that
require cost-benefit-analyses' (Oels 2005: 196). Finally, neoliberal policy would be directed first and
foremost towards encouraging economic growth as the means to include concerns for social justice
within conservation policy. This, of course, is the essence of the approach termed neoliberal
conservation described at the outset. Hence, we might describe neoliberal conservation as the
expression of a novel 'neoliberal environmentality' in natural resource policy, an effort to combat
environmental degradation in the interest of biopower through the creation of incentive structures
intended to influence individuals' use of natural resources by altering the cost-benefit ratio of resource
extraction so as to encourage in situ preservation.
Efforts to reform environmental policy guarantee cooption and enhance biopolitical
control
Fletcher 10 (Robert, Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, University for Peace,
“Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate”,
http://www.conservationandsociety.org/article.asp?issn=09724923;year=2010;volume=8;issue=3;spage=171;epage=181;aulast=Fletcher)//BW
It is this contest among incommensurate governmentalities, indeed, that Foucault sees as constituting
the terrain of political debate. Just as Foucault describes four distinct governmentalities operating
within politics in general, we might observe a similar situation within contemporary conservation policy
as well, viewing the conservation debate described above as embodying a variety of distinct
environmentalities. First, we have the commodifying, market-based neoliberal environmentality
outlined earlier. Second, we have the disciplinary environmentality described by Agrawal (2005a) and
others, which is an effort to create 'environmental subjects' through diffusion of ethical norms. In
addition to these, we might observe a third, sovereign environmentality in the 'fortress conservation'
approach, wherein resource preservation is enacted through the creation and patrol of so-called
protected areas (the 'fences and fines' strategy), usually on the part of nation-state regimes for the
recreational use of societal (or international) elites (Igoe 2004). Finally, one might add to all of this a
fourth environmentality, corresponding with Foucault's 'art of government according to truth'. This
'truth environmentality' might be observed, for instance, in the perspective advocated by deep
ecologists, who often argue for a particular approach to resource preservation based on claims
concerning humans' essential interconnection with nature, an interconnection commonly understood as
evolutionarily derived (Roszak et al. 1995; Fletcher 2009b). Alternative resource use regimes, such as
those practiced by many indigenous peoples drawing on so-called traditional ecological knowledge
(TEK), might be seen as variants of truth environmentality as well (Berkes 2008). These various
environmentalities may be mixed and matched in particular positions within the conservation debate.
Community-based conservation might be seen to embody alternate strands of disciplinarity and
neoliberalism, depending upon whether a programme emphasises ethics or incentives (or a combination
of the two) in its efforts to motivate local participation. A disciplinary environmentality might be
observed in some of the recent critiques of neoliberal conservation. McCauley, for instance, contends
that 'market-based mechanisms for conservation are not a panacea for our current conservation ills. If
we mean to make significant and long-lasting gains in conservation, we must strongly assert the primacy
of ethics and aesthetics in conservation' (2006: 27). Elements of a sovereign environmentality might be
identified in the recent backlash to the CBC approach, calling for a return to a protectionist, fortress
conservation model in which rules will be enforced and borders patrolled irrespective of the desires of
local residents altogether (Wilshusen et al. 2002). While in Foucault's (2003) original formulation
biopower was described as arising in opposition to sovereign authority, within contemporary
conservation discourse a sovereign governmentality may be harnessed to biopower itself, with statecentred protectionism justified as the defense of non-human life. At the same time, in the
neoprotectionist backlash sovereign governmentality may be decoupled from the state through the
process that Ferguson (2006) calls the 'privatization of sovereignty'. We can observe this, for instance, in
the creation of private protected areas (Langholz 2003) or those operated by NGOs, who may at times
employ coercive means to secure these areas' preservation (e.g., Clynes 2003). As I intimate elsewhere,
the use of ecotourism as a conservation tool may combine disciplinary and neoliberal
environmentalities, involving not only the promotion of economic incentives but also the use of various
disciplinary techniques intended to condition local participants to an 'ecotourism discourse' (Fletcher
2009a). Neoliberal and truth environmentalities may come together in the charismatic authority
exercised by 'conservation celebrities' who champion environmental causes on behalf of BINGOs and
their corporate partners (Brockington 2006, 2009). Likewise, truth and sovereign environmentalities
might be combined in certain strands of a fortress conservation approach. For instance, early advocates
of fortress protected areas such as Muir and Thoreau self-consciously framed their advocacy in terms of
an essential human need for connection with the sacred in nature (Igoe 2004). Similarly, Edward Abbey,
one of the main sources of inspiration for the deep ecology group EarthFirst!, famously asserted "The
wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life... Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge... Soon
there will be no place to go... Then the madness becomes universal... And the universe goes mad" (2000:
63). In such views, truth may be harnessed to biopower as well (EarthFirst!'s central slogan, for instance,
is 'No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth'). In the framework proposed here then,
governmentality, biopower, discipline, sovereignty, neoliberalism, and truth would all be viewed as
distinct yet interrelated concepts that may alternately merge, divide, compete, conflict, or coexist within
any given context [Table 1]. Contemporary trends and debates within conservation policy might thus be
understood as instances of the 'interplay' (Foucault 2008) among incommensurate though not
incompatible environmentalities in which these various elements intersect.
hegemony
War and the pursuit of hegemony are used by the sovereign to further biopower
– leads to reproduction of patriarchy, racism and neoliberalism
Corva, 09 (Dominic, University of Washington, “Biopower and the Militarization of the Police
Function”, ACME, http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/828/685)//BW
Hardt and Negri’s central claim with respect to this task is that “war
has become a regime of biopower, a form of rule
aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life”
(2004, 13). It is well beyond the scope of this review to examine Foucault’s theorization of biopower, 2 but it is important to point out that
Hardt and Negri’s inclusion of “controlling the population” in their definition is consistent with an often-overlooked aspect of governmentality,
the mode of governance in which strategies of sovereign power are subsumed by biopower. This aspect
is the inclusion of sovereign power, rather than its total eclipse, in strategies associated with liberal
governmentality (see Foucault in Burchell et al, 1991, 102). In this article, I use the term “sovereign power” to denote the use of statesanctioned force (what Foucault calls negative or repressive power) to control domestic and/or foreign territories. And “biopower,”
though it is articulated with strategies of sovereign power, positively produces subjects of governance
through techniques of normalization. Biopolitical strategies of governance secure the reproduction of
hegemonic social orders (capitalist, patriarchal, masculinist, sexist, racist and so forth). For Foucault, both
strategies are articulated and dispersed through the territorial state, to address the problem of governing a national population. The state, with
its attendant sovereign functions, is an effect of hegemonic orders, while at the same time a necessary nexus for the dispersal of hegemonyfriendly, mostly biopolitical but also sovereign, strategies of governance. Sovereign
power, in the last instance, takes life or
lets live (Foucault, 1984, 261). Biopower, on the other hand, which functions through the proliferation of acceptable freedoms, fosters life or
disallows it to the point of death. It fosters life through the production of knowledge about the (legitimate) self, especially in relation to a given
population. This is what is meant by normalization, which refers to the construction of what behavior, and therefore who, is “normal” in the
population. While Foucault’s work examines the relationship between the liberal, European nation-state and its subjects, Hardt and Negri’s
Empire theorizes a (sort of) global
governmentality that produces the neoliberal, capitalist world subject whose
national citizenship is increasingly secondary to global economic citizenship. If Empire’s biopower is truly
hegemonic, then the exercise of sovereign power should be articulated with and disciplined by the biopolitical practices of what Hardt and
Negri refer to as the global aristocracy: transnational corporations (TNCs), the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
so forth. Empire’s imperialism should reproduce the neoliberal order, in the long run, rather than disrupt or de-legitimate it.
Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy --- the strategy of omnipotence sees threats to
empire everywhere, which necessitates constant violence
McClintock 9 (Anne – Chaired Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, M.Phil. from Cambridge University, Ph.D. from Columbia University, “Paranoid
Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” in Small Axe, March 2009, Issue 28, p. 50-74,
http://smallaxe.net/repository/file/sx%2028/5-SA28%2520McClintock%2520%2850-74%29.pdf)
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated
by two grand and dangerous hallucinations: the
promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on terror.” I have come to feel that
we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself
after 9/11—two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured—unless we
grasp a defining feature of our moment, that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to
power. Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil)
coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia:
dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form
both deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish
quality of the “war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US administration
to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for “terror” is not an identifiable
enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere “ a consensual hallucination,” 4 and the
US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of
catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently
need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial
violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those
circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes—the modern “slave-ships on the middle passage to
nowhere”—that have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of
national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire, does the
terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also extend beyond
that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the
phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders
extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible,
casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not
something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to
reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the
people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and
the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state attempts to render
invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture)
obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held
US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United States as the
uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of
originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence
without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak
with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt
the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. —Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully
understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence—the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny,
phantasmagoric cast—without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite
violently, to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I
mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent
contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat,
a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11),
can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and
peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity.
Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi
calls a national “terror dream.” 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have
“psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant
powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that
oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here,
then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of
seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence
that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between
psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple,
cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in
such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains:
does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most
intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we
need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down,
then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training camps— not to
mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate media—instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of
omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that
animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these flashpoints of
imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantánamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture
itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and
gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the “Barbarians” Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people
arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people
were a kind of solution. —C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” The barbarians have declared war. —President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote
“Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu. To what dilemma are the
“barbarians” a kind of solution? Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis
of legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who
imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of
the barbarians. It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s
borders in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of
impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And
without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those people
were a kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and
have not consented to that power. Cavafy’s insight is that an
the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration
vanished. Where
were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus?
“And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?” By rights, the thawing of the cold war should
have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11,
General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: “It’s no use having an army that did nothing but train,” he said. “There’s got to
be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for.” Dick Cheney likewise complained: “The
threats have become so remote. So
remote that they are difficult to ascertain.” Colin Powell agreed: “Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats—North Korea,
Iran, Iraq, something like that—the real threat is the unknown, the uncertain.” Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the post–cold
war dearth of a visible enemy: “We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there.” It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had
been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the
Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require “a
catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a political
casus belli and the military unimaginable
license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: “There is a huge silver
lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our
homeland, which gives it some oomph.” In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, “Now we can perhaps attack Osama
Bin Laden.” After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a
kind we could not have dreamed of before.” Charles Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. “We no longer have to search for a name for
the post-Cold War era,” he declared. “It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism.” 13
Unipolar power precludes an effective long-term solution to nuclear deterrence and
encourages proliferation --- only a return to previous balance of power can solve
van Munster and Sylvest 13 (Rens – Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies,
Casper – Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark, paper prepared for the ISA Annual
convention, March 2013, p. 5-13,
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites/classicalrealism/vanMunster&Sylvest_Nuclear
Realism_ISA2013.pdf)
The existence of nuclear
weapons could thus not be downplayed as ‘an unintended consequence of the
scientific enlightenment’ (Walker, 2007: 431). To the contrary, the thermonuclear revolution was made possible by
science, technology and rationality. In that sense, nuclear realists would have strongly agreed with Adorno’s (1966: 320) famous remark that
‘there is no universal history leading from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’. At any rate, a blind
faith in the principles of science and rationality was unwarranted in light of the horrors of the twentieth
century. It could even be outright dangerous, as Herz realized after having witnessed, at close range in Geneva, the breakdown of the
reformed international order with the League of Nations at its center – an order he as an ardent liberal had politically supported (Herz, 1939; Herz, 1942; Herz,
1951). Mumford underwent a similar conversion. Having visited Germany in the early 1930s during a time when the national socialist movement was growing
rapidly and making its political presence felt, he had failed to note both the movement’s presence and the intensity of its anti-liberal ideals. When Mumford
belatedly realized what was at stake, his atonement took the form of a fight against what he termed “pragmatic liberalism” and its isolationist implications for
American foreign policy. As he argued, such a liberalism was ‘too noble to surrender, too sick to fight’, plagued by ‘a total incapacity to face the worst’ and thereby
risking the ultimate perversion: being ‘too virtuous to live’.3 Nuclear
realists therefore argued for a more sober and humble
calibration of liberalism and its optimistic belief in progress. What was needed was a language and
understanding of politics in the face of dark realities that no rational theory could provide a bulwark
against.4 Such a language had to be formulated between the optimist belief in universal values of a rational science and progress on the one hand and a
pessimistic retreat from emancipation and liberty on the other. Given the absolute materiality of nuclear weapons and the
political context in which they existed at the height of the Cold War, liberalism required a healthy dose
of ‘realism without illusions’ (Philp, 2012) that should not begin from an idea of how people ought to act
ideally or rationally, but from an appreciation of the context within which politicians and policy-makers
have to make choices as well a critical examination of their actual conduct. This realist form of liberalism has strong
affinities with Foucault’s later injunction that: We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are
historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible;
and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the “essential kernel of rationality” that can be found in the Enlightenment and would have to be
preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the “contemporary limits of the necessary,” that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the
constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects (Foucault, 1986: 42, 43) For nuclear realists, the ‘contemporary limit of the necessary’ was nothing less that the
question of survival of the species. In
their view a state-dominated configuration of international politics was bound
to produce a politically suicidal and morally unacceptable great power nuclear war (or a great power conventional
war that risked escalating into a nuclear war), something that classical realists familiar to IR scholars, even if somewhat belatedly, also came to accept (Craig, 2003).
This appreciation of the limits of science and means-ends rationality guides for political action also informed their critique of deterrence and the dangerous illusion
amongst government officials that the H -bomb was a usable, if not a winning, weapon rather than a technique of extermination. The central element in the nuclear
realist critique of deterrence was an appreciation of how the politics of deterrence coalesced with the changing knowledge economy of the emerging militaryindustrial complex. Although civilians managed to break the military monopoly on strategy in these years, they did so from positions of intellectual authority
established by funds from within this ever-expanding complex; whether in think tanks like RAND or in the several centers dealing in nuclear strategy that were
established at major universities during this period (Kuklick, 2006; Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2000). To nuclear realists this reconfiguration of knowledge production failed to
adequately face the challenge of these new weapons; indeed, it merely signaled how the scientific method that had spurred (and been spurred by) modern
civilization was incapable of confronting the moral and existential dimensions of military force after the thermonuclear revolution. Clearly, science and technology
had brought wonders to the modern world, but when dictated and pursued by power-intoxicated agents the prospects for civilization were dim (see also Sylvest,
2013a). Nuclear
realists kept stressing that the focus on short-term order and stability amounted to moral
failure: it produced a false sense of security, a host of negative side-effects and precluded a sustainable
long term solution. The moral critique of deterrence was strongly rooted in epistemological concerns and nuclear realists maintained that the
majority of politicians and strategists relied on an overtly thin or too rationalist concept of deterrence
that in their realist conception of politics was untenable. While both Herz and Russell conceded in the late 1950s that deterrence
had been paradoxically successful, they also argued that it was based on rather optimistic assumptions. When Herz made these points he also offered a
knowledgeable and in some respects sympathetic discussion of nuclear strategy. He began by noting that security
through nuclear weapons
meant complete insecurity and that the most potent weapon was shot through with paradoxes and
ambivalences. In making these points, Herz clearly grasped that credibility was the crucial issue (Herz, 1959: 198, 202, 215). But then a host of
problems remained, none of them negligible: lunatics, application of rationality in a context of uncertainty, risks of
misinterpretation, different kinds of “trigger-happiness” in officials running so-called fool proof systems
and, not least, the endless second-guessing of intentions (Herz, 1959: 183f.; Herz, 1962: 131-133). With respect to the latter Herz
sarcastically remarked that ‘[i]t may be doubted that even the theory of games as applied to international relations can cope with this one’ (Herz, 1959: 207n.).
Against the background of the elevation of deterrence to ‘dogma’ (Herz, 1959: 184) Herz examined both ‘unilateral’ and ‘mutual’ deterrence. The
former – mainly based on the concept of massive retaliation was found wanting: it was
plagued by confusion and lack of precision (a
common refrain among critics of Eisenhower administration’s policies in the 1950s). The notion of mutual deterrence was not
straightforward either and Herz argued that only a strict concept of mutual deterrence, only threatening retaliation against nuclear attacks, could work
(Herz, 1959: 189).5 Everything else would be illogical, since it would presume an adversary (or deteree) to be
deterred by something that would not deter the deterrer. Unfortunately, Western policy was founded on such
shaky foundations. A policy of retaliation that was not precise and determinate, i.e. based on a proclamation of no-first
use, might ‘provoke’ rather than prevent war and especially coupled with a defense policy
underemphasizing conventional military force it could mean ‘an involuntary rush into the very conflict
we want to avoid’ (Herz, 1959: 194-5). Russell made many similar points (Russell, 1959: 30-31, 39, 70-1), but he was more outspoken about the
motivation behind his dissection of nuclear strategy and simulation; namely to counter the widespread belief that the H-bomb constituted a ‘winning weapon’ and
to unmask the long-term instability of the concept of deterrence (or what Dulles called “brinkmanship”). Russell did this by invoking an analogy to the ‘game’ of
chicken made popular in a Hollywood movie a few years previously. For Russell, the
game – played by running two cars against each
other, testing the resolve of both drivers before being decided by a crash or the first turn away from it –
symbolized the inherent instability of deterrence. Russell was at pains to refute the argument that there was no alternative to continue
playing a suicidal game or surrendering to the Soviet adversary (Russell, 1959: 30-1). The chicken analogy was Russell’s most insightful contribution to contemporary
nuclear strategy and secured for him a supporting role in the development of strategic thought: the following year RAND theorist Herman Kahn used Russell’s
analogy in his notorious treatise On Thermonuclear War (1960). The virtue of Russell’s analogy was its perceptiveness in relation to the crucial issue of credibility.6
In Kahn’s hands, however, chicken became an argument for blind, automated resolve along the lines of the infamous doomsday machine that later made it into
Western folklore through its appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Although Russell
engaged in the kind of simulation that
characterized Kahn’s strategizing, he did so in order to expose the absurdity and futility of considering the
use of military force after the thermonuclear revolution. His purpose was completely contrary to that of Kahn, who thought it
important to think the unthinkable and contemplate the possibility of nuclear war. Indeed, when it came to American policy, Russell pointed out ‘I can find almost
nothing that seems to me compatible with rationality’ in Kahn’s adoption of deterrence (Russell, 1961: 17). The fact that Kahn thought thermonuclear war in some
instances rational and that he underestimated, according to Russell, the
effects of this phenomenon landed Kahn in a paradox
not unlike that presented by the weapons he strategized about: the notion that thermonuclear war
could be fought led to ‘a bleak and cheerless outlook, but it is the best that Mr. Kahn can offer us even by stretching optimism to the
very limits of credibility’ (Russell, 1961: 17). In an environment populated by fallible, pugnacious and occasionally mad
human beings, a concept based on how decision-makers rationally ought to act was not just unrealistic,
but also extremely dangerous.7 The political rationality underlying the traditional conduct of international
politics, whatever its severe shortcomings in the pre-nuclear era, reached an absolute limit in the mid-twentieth century. The horrifying nature of
World War II – both its increasingly total, unstrained character, the German extermination policy
towards the Jews and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that(virtually) brought the war to a
close – obviously contributed to this increasing realization, but it was the advent of thermonuclear weapons that finally undermined time-honored practices of
international society. Three interrelated institutions are of particular importance: the balance of power,
diplomacy and war. Herz, who had much in common with other classical realists of his time, had argued that the traditional European
balance of power policy was a safeguard against imperial ambitions that, with Britain strategically placed
at the center as the holder of the balance, had achieved near-perfection in the eighteenth century. In
contrast to a more mechanical system – where order was achieved at random – Herz stressed that ‘[b]alance of power politics is an applied art, not an applied
science’ (Herz, 1951: 216).8 Two
challenges to this (idealized) construction of the balance of power presented
themselves in the post-war era. First, the power shifts of the international system made it doubtful whether a balance of power (policy) could
function in a more rigid configuration with only two major players and no holder of the balance. After the arrival of the thermonuclear
bomb, furthermore, combating ‘Kremlin’s false ideology’ required an altogether different strategy of
genuinely appealing to the people in the communist world. Emphasis should not be put on a fabricated,
hollow fantasy of the American dream but on ‘the actual pluralistic system which allows the greatest
variety and play to whatever economic forces and institutions, private or public, will efficiently further
the common good’ (Mumford, 1954a: 8). Second, the classical balance of power had, when it worked best,
depended on the existence of a system of diplomacy that allowed for frank exchanges of view and, in
case diplomacy failed, war as a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Again, however, injecting
thermonuclear weapons into this already fragile and dangerous organization of international politics
exposed the limits of traditional political rationality and diplomacy. Drawing on George F. Kennan, Herz (1959: 180) pointed
out how the nature of new weapon made it unsuitable for being used as a threat in diplomatic relations.
Russell repeatedly stressed this same point during the 1950s. With the existence of the thermonuclear bomb, he argued, [d]iplomats ... are deprived
of their traditional weapon. They are in fact reduced to a game of bluff and blackmail. If it is thought that the other
side would rather exterminate the human race than yield, it is rational to give way to the lunacy of opponents. There is thus a premium on madness, and onesided rationality entails defeat for the less irrational.9 War, or the threat of war, similarly lost its meaning in
the modern Clausewitzian sense. Although the dictum that war is a continuation of policy ‘has been true hitherto, it is true no longer’ (Russell,
1954b: 251), since ‘[i]n a war using the H-bomb, there can be no victor’.10 Of the nuclear realists treated here, Russell was the most
outspoken in stressing the novelty of situation that the thermonuclear revolution had brought about. The Bikini tests, his early grasp of the physics and scale of the
H-bomb, as well as his attention to those few facts and judgments about the new weapon made available by politicians and military officials at the time, led him to
stress ‘the wholly new fact’ (Russell, 1954d: 51) that the
ends of war can no longer be achieved with the most advanced
weapons. As he starkly put it, ‘[w]e can all live or all die, but it is no longer possible to think that only our enemies will die’.11 Towards the end of the 1950s,
when John Herz published International Politics in the Atomic Age (1959), he entirely agreed with Russell’s point: ‘Unlimited war ... can no longer
bestow on any power waging it in the form of nuclear war that which used to be the fruit of
“superiority” and thus of “victory”: the attainment of war aims, whether security or any others’ (Herz, 1959:
21). This situation was brought about by guided, intercontinental missiles and the revolutionary force of
fusion bombs that achieved ‘an uncanny absoluteness of effect’ (Herz, 1957: 488). Consequently, security
meant insecurity, while victory was a mere word. This state of affairs was particularly dangerous, in Herz’s
analysis, in a situation where war was increasingly “bureaucratized” or reified (Herz, 1959: 274) and where the
dynamics of the security dilemma played itself out in a context of ideological conflict and mutual
suspicion. Oppenheimer’s metaphor of two scorpions in a bottle was highly appropriate (Herz, 1959: 13). Lewis Mumford was in complete agreement with
Herz and Russell about the fundamental point: ‘There will be no victor in World War III’, Mumford argued, since ‘a genuine war of extermination would bring about
our own downfall’ (Mumford, 1954b: 88 [italics in original], 77). In re-publishing and developing ideas published as a reaction to the atomic bomb, Mumford
warned that modern war ‘pursued to its logical end’ would mean ‘not the defeat of the enemy but his
total extermination: not the resolution of conflict but the liquidation of the opposition’ (Mumford, 1954b: 170).
Anders concurred and drove home the point with characteristic simplicity: because nuclear weapons overwhelm their targets, their
almightiness is their defect [‘Ihre Allmacht ist ihr Defekt’] (Anders, 1956: 258). The H-bomb flouts the conventional
understanding of “a means” by entailing the destruction of the end. Or simply: the bomb is too big. In Anders’
words, ‘the end discovered its own end in the effect of the means’, which signaled nothing less than the degeneration of the
conceptual distinction between means and end. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the context of arms racing, where
‘[t]he production of means has become the end of our existence [Dasein]’ (Anders, 1956: 251). For these reasons, nuclear
realists were also sceptical about the possibility of fighting a limited nuclear war. After it was clear that the Soviet Union had obtained a thermonuclear device, the
combination of a nuclear standoff and a doctrine of massive retaliation that – despite several attempts
at qualification (e.g. Dulles, 1954) – was still seen as risking a major nuclear exchange over a minor conflict led
to an attempt to make war fighting possible and plausible again. It was feared that the credibility of the
nuclear threat was compromised by touting it in the context of minor conflicts or any kind of aggression.
Lodged in such moves was a tacit recognition that the H-bomb (a strategic weapon) transgressed the category of a military
weapon that could be used for political purposes and a conviction that tactical nuclear weapons were a
weapon like any other. As Henry Kissinger phrased it in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), ‘[t]he prerequisite for a policy of limited war is to
reintroduce the political element into our concept of warfare and to discard the notion that policy ends where war begins or that war can have goals distinct from
those of national policy’ (Kissinger quoted in Freedman, 2003: 97). Although nuclear realists had some sympathy with the argument that the superpower conflict
needed a safety valve,12 they ultimately were unconvinced by the argument for limited nuclear war. The main problem they foresaw here concerned escalation, a
problem which advocates of limited nuclear war has never convincingly cracked (Freedman, 2003: xiv). As Herz put this point in 1959: None
of the
various suggested distinctions as to “graduated deterrence, targets, “tactical” as opposed to “strategic” atomic weapons, and so
forth, seems to offer a sufficient guarantee against eventual (or even immediate) outbreak of all-out nuclear war;
only avoidance of the first use of any and all “atomic” and “nuclear” weapons (in the sense of fission and fusion
weapons) might guarantee this (Herz, 1959: 200). This was an argument that Herz shared with Russell (as well as with more conventional strategic
thinkers opposed to limited nuclear war). Indeed, this discussion of limited nuclear war led straight back to the overriding theme in the nuclear realist analysis of
how military force was reconfigured in the wake of the thermonuclear revolution. By falsely considering the H-bomb a weapon let alone a winning weapon – in
effect by even entertaining the notion that they were usable – military
strategists and defenders of deterrence failed to
appreciate the reorganization of basic truths that followed in the wake of technological “progress”.
nuclear
Nuclear rhetoric justifies biopolitical control over a population and leads to
permanent war and genocide over indigenous cultures
Bussolini 08 (Jeffrey, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, College of Staten Island
“Nuclear State of Exception: Reading and Extension of Foucault's Concepts of Biopower and Biopolitics in
Agamben and the Nuclear Age” Abstracts: Foucault Circle 2008)//BW
Near the beginning of Stato de eccezione, Giorgio Agamben includes a very telling quotation from
Rossiter: “Nell’era atomica in cui il mondo sta ora entrando, è probabile che l’uso dei poteri di
emergenza costituzionale divenga la regola e non l’eccezione. (In the atomic era into which the world is
now entering, it is likely that the use of constitutional emergency powers will become the rule rather
than the exception).” Studying the atomic age along these lines, as well as those of the earlier
considerations on biopolitics in Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Michel Foucault’s lecture courses at the
College de France from 1976-1979 (including the crucial concepts of permanent war and the importance
of conquest and colonization in contemporary state structures), bears out Rossiter’s quotation—the
advent of nuclear technology has indeed coincided with an augmentation of biopolitics and continued
hostility both between and within states. By any reckoning nuclear weapons are major artifacts of
geopolitics and biopolitics. They are inherently geopolitical tools that emerged from a history of intense
inter-state conflict, and their scope and effects make any use a geopolitical event (despite repeated
attempts to fashion smaller ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nukes and come up with scenarios for their
employment). The nuclear age is characterized by distrust and hostility between states as well as
suspicion of a state’s own citizens and populations (as foreign agents, active threats, or as insufficiently
disciplined to handle the secrets and necessary actions of security). Lending credence to the notion that
the atomic age is closely linked to a state of exception as nationalist norm, all countries that have
developed nuclear arms have substantial secret institutions devoted to developing them and devising
plans for their possible use. Nuclear secrets are among the most closely guarded of national security
matters. In the United States, all information about nuclear arms is ‘born classified’ and automatically
subject to strict controls, the only such category in U.S. classification. The 1947 Smyth Report on the
Manhattan Project and U.S. nuclear science says that the secrets of the weapons “must remain secret
now and for all time.” Clearly these are regarded as central pillars of geopolitics. The very real threat of
Armageddon from these weapons easily gives way to thinking of expediency and triage which
instrumentalizes certain populations The fate of those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the
continuing collection of data about them by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, has been described
in Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life. Thousands of soldiers and scientists from different nations have been
exposed in tests and research. Indigenous people from the American southwest to the Pacific Islands,
Kazakhstan, and Algeria have been forcefully relocated to make room for atomic tests, exposed to
radiation, or both. Groups such as prisoners and mental patients have been subjected to radiation
experiments against their will or knowledge, supposedly for the purpose of building up crucial
knowledge about nuclear effects, as documented in Eileen Welsome’s Plutonium Files and Department
of Energy reports on Human Radiation Experiments. These weapons, then, are intimately tied to power
over life and death and the management of subject populations. As such, it seems that the exigency
related to nuclear thinking justifies (or is the expression of) significant sovereign power over bare life.
In the histories mentioned here, survival and protection of the population at large was seen to validate
causing death or illness among smaller subsets of that population. One can note that, given their scale,
nuclear weapons force consideration of population-level dynamics, as whole populations are placed at
risk. In this respect, these arms follow on and accentuate the massive strategic bombing of World War II
in which enemy populations were targeted as vital biopolitical resources. In developing his thoughts on
states of exception and bare life, Agamben draws explicitly on the work of Michel Foucault. In addition
to being of interest in terms of the intellectual history of geopolitics, I believe that the aspects of
Foucault upon which he draws also help us to notice some important aspects of the nuclear age and its
attendant shifts in government. Agamben draws especially on Foucault’s lecture courses from 19761979 at the College de France (Il faut défendre la societé; Sécurité, territoire, population; and Naissance
de la biopolitique). I have been undertaking study of those courses, along with Agamben’s Stato di
eccezione and Homo Sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, in order to investigate the Nuclear State of
Exception under which the acquisition and production of nuclear arms justifies permanent emergency
powers, intense secrecy, and harm or sacrifice of portions of state population. In Il faut defendre la
societé, Foucault begins to elucidate his concept of permanent war (la guerre perpétuelle) as a model
for modern society. According to him this state of permanent war is the backdrop (or the foreground)
for thinking about sovereignty, and it has to do with the fact of invasion, conquest, and colonization.
Through considering the examples of the Norman conquest of England, the Franc conquest of Gaulle,
and, briefly, the example of the European colonization of Native Americans, he describes a situation of
invasion in which permanent antagonism between conqueror and conquered is inevitable, hence a
permanent war. Seen from this point of view, it is not surprising that major nuclear powers including the
United States, France, and the Soviet Union all carried out dangerous nuclear experiments in colonized
territories populated by indigenous peoples—these tests were an active symbol and a continuation of
the conquest. State sovereignty is a mechanism used to legitimize and increase the power of the
conqueror, preventing the outbreak of the dreaded ‘war of all against all’ that Hobbes feared. But, in
another sense, this situation is the war of all against all. According to this line of thinking, the Nuclear
State of Exception is also a special kind of class warfare in which the power of the sovereign state is
increased to maddening levels while the state population is increasingly seen as a conquered group
upon whom the sovereignty must be secured. Certainly, communists in the United States bore an
especially intense brunt of the Nuclear State of Exception.
The atomic age and nuclear threats have been constructed in order to enhance the
biopower of the state and create a state of exception
Bussolini 08 (Jeffrey, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, College of Staten Island
“Nuclear State of Exception: Reading and Extension of Foucault's Concepts of Biopower and Biopolitics in
Agamben and the Nuclear Age” Abstracts: Foucault Circle 2008)//BW
Near the end of this volume Foucault makes the explicit linkage between the nuclear age and biopolitics
as, he says, placing the population under an absolute risk of death was a necessary precursor and
transition to biopolitical management of life. In Securité, territoire, population, Foucault further
elucidates his thinking on sovereignty by considering the way that it focuses on the need for
demonstrable securing of territory and population. The emphasis on protection of territory in the
nuclear age, through extensive radar, satellites, strategic bombers, missiles, undersea sonar nets,
submarines, and the like, is well known. Especially, Foucault focuses on the need for regulation and
guidance of populations to ensure national vitality (in ascending liberalism). As a result public health
campaigns and human government (governmentality) come to have new importance. He relates this to
the augmentation of state sovereignty through the increasing development of a liberal, laissez-faire
system in which subjects and workers must be fit, self-guiding, and motivated. It is interesting to note
that the atomic age/Cold War discourse of the United States was heavily oriented in this direction in
which the integrity of populations and the motivation of individual citizens was seen as crucial to the
overall vitality of the nation—and thus intimately tied to chances of winning or losing the geopolitical
contest. Recall the insane General Ripper from Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove and his maniacal
obsession with ‘Purity of Essence’ on the part of the American population. In Naissance de la
biopolitique Foucault continues his treatment of liberalism and neoliberalism as modern forms of
government, calling liberalism ‘the general frame of biopolitics’ (‘le cadre general de la biopolitique’).
One important aspect of this is the pairing of ‘laissez-faire’ liberal emphasis on rights with strong
sovereign states of overwhelming power. Flowing from this is a bifurcation (or multiple segmentation) of
populations into more and less desirable groups. The agents and workers of neoliberalism versus those
who do not fit within, or who oppose, the liberal model. It is precisely this aspect of biopolitics that
Agamben picks up on in Homo Sacer and the section on ‘la vita indigna di essere vessuta’ (‘life that is not
worth living’). As we have already seen, the Nuclear State of Exception bears this out as some parts of
the population were selected as vital/productive, while other parts of the population, especially the
colonized and undesirables, were classed as expendable and subjected to various harms of nuclear
technology
prisons
The prison has moved from a disciplinary apparatus to one of exceptional measures
that have become routine
Lyon 6 (David, Queen’s Research Chair in the Sociology Department and Director of the Surveillance
Project at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Theorizing Surveillance: The panopticon and
beyond, edited by David Lyon, p.11-12)
Agamben’s work, like Bauman’s and Arendt’s, also speaks to surveillance theories. The
panopticon was a distinct and bounded area;
now, he says, zones of indistinction are crucial, and in fact, are the locus of power. Where (as he argues) Arendt or Foucault
failed to connect their analyses of the world of power with those of everyday life, Agamben now proposes that sovereign power and
bare life converge in the camp. As Didier Bigo argues, however, one way this happens is through mechanisms of
surveillance power that create and perpetuate the ‘ban’. And as some of these ‘mechanisms’ are
technological, we also must examine the virtualizing of the ‘ban’. Does carrying a national ID card or a
Permanent Resident Card also express the ‘zone of indistinction’ and the ‘ban’ each time it is swiped or
scanned? The ongoing quest for surveillance theory It seems clear that some constructive contributions to surveillance theory are needed. Surveillance theory
cannot ignore the panopticon but it can surely move beyond it. Quite which directions will be taken ‘beyond’ is a matter of ongoing debate. First the ground has to
be cleared. Kevin Haggerty makes no bones about his project: ‘Tear down the walls’! He comments effectively on ‘demolishing the panopticon’, a project that has
several significant rationales. His key point is that what might be called panopticism
as an all-embracing model or paradigm should
be abandoned. And rather than contribute any single such explanatory model in place of the panopticon,
Haggerty hints that another Foucaldian theme, governmentality, should be seen as a source of useful insights that serve
to frame a range of activities under the surveillance studies rubric. Didier Bigo picks up this theme by proposing some quite
specific forms of analysis that relate ‘security’ with surveillance studies in the context of early twenty-first century global developments. For this time, Bigo insists,
the inclusive panopticon simply will not work as a heuristic. In its place, he explores the implications of his alternative
exclusion-stressing formulation, deriving partly from Agamben, the ‘banopticon’. The governmentality of uncertainty, fear and
unease, argues Bigo, is characterized above all by ‘exceptional’ practices, extraordinary measures, that
paradoxically are now routine. These involve profiling and containing foreigners at the same time as
promoting the ‘normative imperative of mobility’. Increasingly, he demonstrates, the idea is advanced of the
formation of a ‘world empire’ to protect us all from ‘fanatics’. But while this may be seen in various agreements, legal
developments and new institutions, these should not deflect attention from the routine technologies of control that
surveillance studies attempts to illuminate. Bigo pleads for further analysis of security and surveillance that is attuned to our times and
prepared to confront current political trends driven by what might be called the ‘security-informational complex’.
Reforms to the prison systems fail and guarantee circumvension
Lacombe 96 (Dany, Professor of Sociology, received her BA from Universite de Sherbrooke, and her
MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, “Reforming Foucault: A Critique of the Social Control
Thesis”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/591730.pdf?acceptTC=true)//BW
In Discipline and Punish (1979) Foucault demonstrates this productive aspect of power through an
analysis of the relationship between punishment, a technology of power, and the development of the
social sciences. He demonstrates that out of the modern practices of punishment (observation,
examination, measurement, classification, surveillance, record keeping, etc.) emerged a systematic
knowledge of individuals that provided the seed for the development of the human sciences
(psychology, criminology, sociology, etc.), a knowledge that allowed for the exercise of power and
control over those individuals. Foucault's analysis, therefore, reveals how knowledge, as forms of
thought and action, is intricately connected to the operation of power. Indeed, power and knowledge
are intimately linked by a process of mutual constitution; one implies the other. Hence Foucault coined
the expression 'powerknowledge' and set out to investigate the relationship that linked the two
practices: 'there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor
any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations'. (Foucault
1979: 27) 'Powerknowledge' implies that there can be no assertion without a field of power, or stated
differently, that there is no truth without a politics of truth. This concept has methodological
implications for the way we approach the study of power. Rather than trying to determine why power
exists, which would lead us to define it in terms of an essence, the concept 'powerknowledge' invites us
to inquire about how power operates, that is about the strategies and procedures through which power
is exercised. As Ewald (1975) indicates in his review of Discipline and Punish, Foucault approaches the
truth claims of the prison reform movements and the discourses they emanate from in a descriptive
fashion: Which strategy of production do they come from? Which relations of power do you proceed
from? What kinds of subjection or liberation do you produce? (Ewald 1975: 1 230)
security
The 1AC’s attempts to securitize itself from the impacts reinforce biopolitical control
by the sovereign
Stockdale, 10 (Liam P.D., Ph.D. in International Relations, Department of Political Science, McMaster
University, “Securitizing the Future? A Critical Interrogation of the Pre-emptive Turn in the Theory and
Practice of Contemporary Security”, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Stockdale.pdf)//BW
As mentioned above, an explicitly temporal element has underwritten the
development of security practices in the post9/11 era, and this trend is particularly evident in the activities of what are popularly termed “liberal” or
“Western” states. 2 Indeed, empirically speaking, the majority of the pre-emptive practices with which I am here
concerned take place either within the context of the WOT—such as the indefinite detention of terror suspects without
charge (Mutimer 2007)—or vis-à-vis the purported threat of large inflows of migrants—exemplified by the myriad
detention centres on the periphery of the EU and by Australia’s so-called “pacific solution” of mandatory pre-emptive detention (Isin & Rygiel
2007, L. Weber 2007). These
issues represent top security concerns for states that are conventionally
identified as liberal democratic polities, and therefore the pre-emptive practices upon which I focus
most often originate from the sovereign decisions undertaken by the governments and security agents
of such states. This is important in theoretical terms because the fact that it is precisely states which are “avowedly liberal democratic
states, openly committed to the rule of law” (Mutimer 2007) that are behind the types of pre-emptive practices I seek to
problematize renders the logic underlying such acts—and perhaps even the concept of the liberal polity
itself in the current security moment—quite problematic. This latter point will be central to the second half of the paper—
and will be discussed in greater depth below in relation to Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity—and thus a more detailed discussion of preemption as it is practiced by contemporary liberal polities is warranted at this juncture. While the
idea of pre-emption with regard
to discourses of security is perhaps most often associated with the so-called Bush Doctrine in US foreign
policymaking—most clearly exemplified, of course, by the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Ehrenberg et al. 2010, C. Weber 2007)—it must also be
stressed that the notion of taking
explicit action in the present to preempt potential irruptions of “danger” in
the future—what might be termed the logic of preemption—is far from limited in its deployment to the
realm of interstate security relations alone. Indeed, as criminologist Richard Ericson asserts, the logic of pre-emption
can be seen to permeate all aspects of the exercise of sovereign power in the current moment, to the point
where the contemporary security environment might be best termed a “state of pre-emption” (Ericson 2008:
58). Under such conditions, “security” is conceived in terms of safeguarding the future from what may occur by undertaking precautionary
measures in the present that are conceived in relation to an imagined future. Security is thus pursued by attempting to “police the future by
anticipation,” with the ultimate goal being the realization of an imagined “future perfect” where the “risks” against which these present
exceptional practices are deployed will no longer be of concern (Bigo 2007: 31). Accordingly, the
logic of pre-emption is innately
concerned with exerting control over the temporal dimension of human existence. Sovereign power
deployed in pursuit of the logic of pre-emption is thus active in both the spatial and temporal realms, as
it attempts to manipulate and control the relationship between present and future through “calculations about
probable futures in the present [the temporal element], followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future [the
spatial element]” (Aradau et al. 2008: 149). The crucial point is that a security climate premised upon the logic of pre-emption is concerned
primarily with safeguarding the future, while the present is constructed in instrumental terms as a site of intervention through which this
ultimate aim might be realized. As such, to use the terminology of the Copenhagen School, under
the logic of pre-emption, the
future is securitized (Buzan et al. 1998). The result is that the proverbial door is opened for the deployment of exceptional practices
“beyond the realm of normal politics” in the present, since the logic of pre-emption holds that it is through
proactive/preemptive/precautionary measures enacted in the present that the security of the future can be ensured
Biometrics are used to marginalize subjects and leads to a state of exception – Dooms
us to error replication – Only the aff can solve
Stockdale, 10 (Liam P.D., Ph.D. in International Relations, Department of Political Science, McMaster
University, “Securitizing the Future? A Critical Interrogation of the Pre-emptive Turn in the Theory and
Practice of Contemporary Security”, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Stockdale.pdf)//BW
It is this last point, as stressed by Amoore, that is most important to note for present purposes, in that, although
many of the governmental technologies employed by sovereign power under the pre-emptive security logic
are explicitly directed at arbitrarily marginalized subjectivities such as migrants or particular racial or
religious groups, it is crucial to note that no individuals are a priori absolved under the logic of pre-emption.
Indeed, the immanent uncertainty of the future necessitates that as wide an logic of the Agambenian “state of exception,” as
the contravention of civil liberties and human rights norms that are an explicit consequence of preemptive acts can only be legitimated within the juridical framework of the liberal states enacting them if
this framework is deemed not to apply under the present “exceptional” circumstances (Agamben 2005). The
securitization of the future and the logic of pre-emption that is its corollary thus necessarily produce a
discourse of the exception, as the practices necessary to uphold that logic require the presence of such a state to be justifiably
enacted (Muller 2008: 208). Yet, as will be seen in the following sections, the very nature of the move of securitizing the
future ensures that this present state of exception can never be transcended so long as the logic of preemption continues to hold, as the latter is concerned only with securing a future that has yet to come to pass through exceptional
interventions in the present. In this sense, we might conceive of this condition as a state in which the present is, in some ways, taken hostage in
the name of the future.
Modern day biometrics are being used to further “biometric warfare”
Shapiro 11 (Michael J., professor of political science at the University of Hawai‘I, “Every Move You
Make: Bodies, Surveillance, and Media”, Surveillance,
http://eprints.cscsarchive.org/136/1/_xeNZR9zc.pdf)//BW
Along with the territorial ambiguities that the new warfare-as-crime- fighting entails, a new biopolitics is
emerging. The criminalization of military adversaries has been accompanied by a biometric approach to
intelligence and surveillance. The significance of this change becomes evident if one contrasts Giddens’s treatment of the
surveillance technologies that paralleled the modern state’s monopolization of violence with the current
ones. Throughout his discussion Giddens refers primarily to the use of paper trails. He begins with a treatment of the state’s use of writing,
proceeds to the state’s “coding of information,” and concludes with some observations about cultural governance, the sponsoring of printed
materials, not only for surveillance but also for enlarging the scope of the public sphere.20 Certainly, the paper trail and its electronic
realization in the form of computer files remain significant, but the new
modes of warfare-as-crime-fighting involve the
development of a biological rather than merely a paper trail, as new genetic tracing discoveries are being
recruited into intelligence gathering. Is the biometric, designer weapon far behind? Anticipating the role of
biometric coding in futuristic forms of warfare, the science fiction writer William Gibson began his novel Count Zero with this passage: “They set
a SLAMHOUND on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called
Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of
recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.”21 Thanks to advanced cloning technology in Gibson’s futuristic war world, “Turner” is reassembled
from some of his own parts and some others (eyes and genitals bought on the open market). He lives on as the novel’s main character, a
commando, operating in a war over research and development products. Whether or
not the military logistics of biometric
warfare is now underway, the surveillance dimension is being rapidly developed. And the use of pheromones in
the Gibson account is technologically anachronistic. The technology of DNA tracing, now well developed, is complementing the photograph and
paper trial to surveil and intercept dangerous bodies.22 Shortly
after the destruction of the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, then–U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sought changes in federal law “to allow the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to maintain a DNA databank of profiles taken from al-Qaeda and Taliban
fighters detained in Afghanistan and Cuba.”23 Subsequently, “forensic experts” were dispatched to Afghanistan to test the
human tissue found in one battlefield to see if any of the dead included bin Laden or his senior associates. Of course, policy makers face
legitimation issues when introducing new modes of surveillance and criminalization. When those operating the “reasons of state” are involved
in implementing a historically unorthodox “governmentality”—in this case an
extraordinary mode of surveillance, and
management of the global order and the domestic population—they have to produce warrants for the
new policy initiatives. Accordingly, after the 9/11 episode, the Bush administration began operating on two fronts to solicit
acquiescence to its simultaneous intensification of domestic surveillance and preparation for global military
incursions (a strategy of “preemptive defense”).24 On the one hand, there was a feverish search for legal precedents, hence the
designation of an American citizen as an “enemy combatant” to apply a law of war that was earlier
applied only to foreign nationals; on the other hand, the administration approached fi lm and television producers to encourage
them to create patriotic feature films and TV dramas designed to elicit public support for the new policies. For example, in early November
2002, the media carried a story about a meeting between White House adviser Karl Rove and several dozen top television and film executives.
Aware of the film industry’s role in World War II, the Bush administration wanted to encourage “patriotic war movies that characterized the
early years of that war.”25 After that meeting, “nearly a dozen” patriotic war movies were under production and television dramas followed
suit. Among the most notable of the TV genre was an episode of JAG (a CBS drama about military lawyers). The 30 April 2002 episode, produced
with the Pentagon’s help, featured a trial of a defiant al-Qaeda terrorist (undoubtedly modeled after Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth
9/11 hijacker) by a military tribunal at which he received a “fair trial” (a promise by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the media after the
tribunal plan was floated). As one commentary notes: “The strategy behind the ‘Tribunal’ episode is more transparent than ever: the show
creates the wish-fulfillment fantasy of capturing a terrorist responsible for the attacks, depicts an idealized military, yet ends with an ominous
threat of more terror
vigilant.”26
in the works, affirming the government’s real-life message that America must remain
state
Government is the reason biopower exists
Nadesan, 08 (Majia Holmer, professor of communication in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the
New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, “Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life”,
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QEqTAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22economic+security%22
+and+biopower+and+agamben&ots=iSmmUdVRPC&sig=c0GAKJJxPEdjnZJV7BjudTumxH4#v=snippet&q=biopower
%20and%20government&f=false)//BW
Foucault contended that the emergence of the early modern liberal state depended upon the institution
of more diffuse, but ultimately more pervasive, forms of government that slowly replaced the
authoritarian and repressive power of the feudal sovereign. In the premodern era—prior to the
development of the modern state—power was largely localized in the corporeal body of the sovereign
monarch, who exercised his or her will absolutely on those within his or her scope of execution, or
territory, in the form of the power of life and death (Foucault, 2003b). Foucault observed: “it is at the
moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life” (Z003b, p. 240), However,
sovereign power was subtly transformed across time with the development of the modern state
through three important developments. First, state and sectional interests motivated by security and
wealth extended “governable spaces," beginning in the sixteenth century but particularly in the late
eighteenth century. Second, the development of new ways of thinking about government—principally in
relation to juridical administration, the state‘s appropriation of pastoral power over the administration
of population, and curtailment of sovereignty over political economy—altered the nature and
operations of societal control and power leading ultimately to more diffuse, but simultaneously
permeating, technologies of government. Third, these changes realigned sovereignty around the power
and the right “to make live and let die" (2003h, p. 241) as sovereignty became entwined with biopower,
Foucault’s genealogy of the transformation from sovereignty to government began by exploring how
sovereignty and political rule started to he theorized in political philosophy. In particular, Foucault was
interested in the development of rationalities of government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
that articulated the responsibilities and modes of conduct appropriate for sovereign and patriarchal
authorities in the context of the evolution of the early modern state. Foucault specifically focused on
how seventeenth century texts on the art of government created lines of continuity between the
government of the family and the government of the state, These lines of continuity addressed the twin
problem of maximizing “population-wealth,” a dilemma seen as vital for securitizing the territorially
delimited nation and central to the administrative practices of police. Accordingly, Foucault described
how the rationalities of government developed during the seventeenth century included (a) “the art of
self- government, connected with morality“; (h) “the art of properly governing a family,“ which belongs
to “oeconomy”; and (c) “the science of ruling the state" (1979b, p. 9). Foucault read these seventeenthcentury texts as articulating a continuum linking the diverse forms of government. Foucault used the
term police to describe “the downwards line, which transmits to individual behavior and the running of
the family the sample principles as the government of the state” {1979b, pp. 9-10). In contrast, the
proper training of the sovereign—his pedagogy—ensures the upward continuity of the arts of
government.
Governmental action fails to solve for the biopower of the sovereign
Lemke 13, (Thomas, sociologist and social theorist, “Foucault, Politics, and Failure A Critical Review of
Studies of Governmentality”, Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality, http://www.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:615362/FULLTEXT03.pdf)//BW
Studies of governmentality distance themselves from realist sociology and from “sociologies of rule”
that study the ways in which rule is actually accomplished. By contrast, work on governmentality focuses on the projects
and programs of government, on rationalities and technologies rather than on their outcomes and effects.28 This self-understanding parallels
Foucault’s explicit interest in the lectures on governmentality in investigating “the art of governing, that is to say, the reasoned way of
governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing’ or ‘government’s consciousness of itself.”29 Taking up
this line of investigation, studies of governmentality have analyzed “mentalities of rule.”30 This does not mean that the research has focused
on ideal types and normative interpellations. Rather, studies of governmentality have examined governmental programs as empirical facts,
insofar as they shape and transform the real by providing specific forms of representing and intervening in it. While it has rarely been disputed
that studies of governmentality focus on programs, it is the way such programs
have been analyzed that has given rise to a
number of problems. First, some authors have tended to treat programs as closed and coherent entities, as achievements and
accomplishments rather than as projects and endeavors. They have often explicated in what ways programs have successfully obscured political
alternatives, obstructing resistance and opposition. Governmental programs
were often depicted as totalizing and
powerful, while contestation remains residual and marginal. However, opposition and struggles do not only take place in
an interval “between” programs and their “realization”; they are not limited to some kind of negative energy or obstructive capacity. Rather
than “distorting” the “original” plans, they are instead always-already part of them, actively contributing to “compromises,” “fissures” and
“incoherencies” constitutive of such programs. Thus, an analytics of government must take into account the “breaks” or “gaps” interior to
programs—viewing them not as signs of their failure but as the very condition of their existence.31 There is a second tendency in the
governmentality literature that contrasts and complements the first. Many authors have stressed the importance of “failure,” regarding
government as a permanently failing operation.32 Failure stands here for the collision between program
and reality. While this reading rightly subverts the idea of a closed and coherent program or idealized scheme—in the stress that it places
on the fragility and the dynamic aspect of government—the focus on failure is nonetheless somewhat ambivalent. As Pat O’Malley remarks,
failure is “not an intrinsic property of an event so much as it is a property of a program. To think in terms of failure puts the emphasis on the
status of the collision from the programmer’s viewpoint, and consequently reduces resistance to a negative externality.”33 While
“failure”
points to the incompleteness and contingencies of governmental programs, it inadvertently reduces the
role of opposition, struggle and conflict to that of obstruction and refusal. For many studies of governmentality
contestation is not part of the programs— and its role remains purely negative and limited to resistance. As a consequence, the constructive
(and not only obstructive) role of struggles, and the ways in which opposition and rule interact, tend not to be analyzed.34 Thus it seems the
focus on failure is insufficient. To contrast rationalities and technologies of government does not trace any clash between program and reality,
the confrontation of the world of discourse and a field of practices. The relations between rationalities and technologies, programs and
institutions, are much more complex than a simple application or transfer. The difference between the envisioned aims of a program and its
actual effects does not refer to the distance between the purity of the program and the messy reality, but, rather, to different layers of reality.
To capture this dynamic relationship, it might be useful to take into account Foucault’s insistence on the strategic character of government. In
contrast to many studies of governmentality, Foucault not only shows that government “fails” or how it
gives rise to unintended effects. Moreover he takes into account that actors respond to changing
outcomes, calculating and capitalizing upon them and integrating them into their future conduct.35 Let me
illustrate this through an example Foucault provides in Discipline and Punish, namely the “failure” of the prison system, which produced
delinquency as an unintended effect. In his genealogy of the prison Foucault does not confront program and reality, nor does he frame the
problem in terms of functionality. The institutionalization of the prison in the nineteenth century produced an entirely unforeseen effect which
had nothing to do with any kind of strategic ruse on the part of some meta- or trans-historic subject conceiving and willing it. This effect was
the constitution of a delinquent milieu [...]. The prison operated as a process of filtering, concentrating, professionalizing and circumscribing a
criminal milieu. From about the 1830s onward, one finds an immediate re-utilization of this unintended, negative effect within a new strategy
which came in some sense to occupy this empty space, or transform the negative into a positive. The delinquent milieu came to be re-utilized
for diverse political and economic ends, such as the extraction of profit from pleasure through the organization of prostitution. This is what I
call the strategic completion (remplissement) of the apparatus.36 Emphasizing
the strategic dimension of government
allows the focus to be placed on the conflicts and contestations advanced against the very technologies
and rationalities constituting governmental practices. Political struggles cannot be confined to the expression of a
contradictory logic or an antagonistic relation; they have their own dynamics, temporalities and techniques.37 With due focus on the “parasitic
relationship”38 of governments—honing
in specifically upon their “failures” and “shortcomings”— what
becomes possible is the, circumventing of any functionalist bias. If contestation is limited to the refusal of programs,
then the following question arises: what exactly does “failure” mean? Since the criteria of judging both failure and success are an integral part
of rationalities, they cannot be regarded as external yardsticks. In fact, the “success” of a program is no guarantee of its continuation, since
success might eventually abolish the material foundations or preconditions for a given program, making it redundant thereby. Conversely, the
putative “failure” of a program could mean its “success,” since it might give rise to “strategic reinvestment.” Put differently: a program might
work “well” because it does not work at all or only works “badly,” for example, by creating the very problems it is supposedly there to react to.
Therefore, the “failure” of the prison as a means to combat criminality might possibly help to account for its “raison d'être.”39
The government’s neoliberal structure uses biopower to manipulate the people into
following artificial policies – guarantees cooption
Fletcher 10 (Robert, Department of Environment, Peace, and Security, University for Peace,
“Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate”,
http://www.conservationandsociety.org/article.asp?issn=09724923;year=2010;volume=8;issue=3;spage=171;epage=181;aulast=Fletcher)//BW
The distinction among Foucaultian concepts such as governmentality, biopower, discipline, and
neoliberalism outlined above may help to clarify previous analyses of environmental governance within
a Foucaultian frame, in which various of these concepts are commonly conflated. For instance, in the
introduction to their edited volume Violent environments, a political ecology critique of environmental
security scholarship, Peluso and Watts (2001) describe governmentality and disciplinary power as
interchangeable concepts (indeed, their index lists the terms interchangeably as well) (see also
Neumann 2001; Sundar 2001 in that volume). Conversely, Li (2007: 5) distinguishes discipline and
governmentality yet conflates the latter with biopower, writing that "the concern of government is the
well-being of populations at large". Others describe governmentality and biopower interchangeably as
well (Luke 1999a, 1999b; Rutherford 1999). Li also conflates disciplinarity and neoliberalism in her
discussion of biopower, observing that "government operates by educating desires and configuring
habits" while quoting Bentham to describe governmentality as "artificially arranging things so that
people, following their own self-interest, will do as they ought" (2007: 5). Still others, by contrast,
distinguish disciplinary and neoliberal governmentalities yet conflate the former with biopower,
describing biopower as the opposite of neoliberal forms of influence (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand 2005; Oels
2005). These conflations are understandable, given that much of Foucault's discussion of these various
terms occurs only in his most recently-released work. The larger context surrounding his famous
Governmentality lecture only became available to Anglophone readers in 2007. Similarly, 2003 first saw
the English-language publication of Foucault's earlier (1976-1967) lecture series Society must be
defended (2003), in which he clearly distinguishes among sovereign power, disciplinary power, and
biopower. In addition, in that work, Foucault suggests the possibility of articulating sovereignty and
biopower. In his Biopower lectures, first available in English in 2008 (although commentary on the
original audio recordings of these lectures dates back to at least 2001; see Lemke 2001), Foucault clearly
describes neoliberalism as a possible vehicle for the exercise of biopower as well. In addition to
disciplinary and neoliberal governmentalities, Foucault (2008) also introduces two additional arts of
government into his equation in the Biopolitics lectures. One involves the direct exercise of sovereign
power through the construction and enforcement of codified rules. While in his lecture series of the
previous year, Foucault (2007) seemed to describe governmentality as opposed to sovereign rule, as
noted above, in his Biopolitics talks Foucault describes sovereign power as a form of governmentality in
its own right, aimed at the rational governance of a territory through compelling subjects' obedience to
sovereign will by direct threat of punishment (2008: 312). While these first three governmentalities are
all seen to operate on principles of calculation and rationality, Foucault's fourth governmentality is
different, what he calls the 'art of government according to truth', that is, 'the truth of religious texts, of
revelation, and of the order of the world' (2008: 311). In this approach, authority and prescriptions for
appropriate behaviour derive not from rules, norms, or even incentives but rather from the claim that
such prescriptions accord with the fundamental nature of life and the universe (Foucault's main
contemporary example of this approach is Marxism). Foucault, of course, recognises that these different
governmentalities, while distinct, are not mutually exclusive, but may coexist in any given context,
alternately conflicting or acting in concert. For instance, neoliberal governmentality could be seen as
reliant upon certain disciplinary techniques to facilitate its operation. That is, disciplinary
governmentality would be necessary to construct the rational actors upon which neoliberal
governmentality would then operate by inculcating subjects' self-perceptions as self-interested,
competitive individuals through such mechanisms as schools and sports leagues encouraging these
types of behaviours. The various techniques that Martin (1994) describes as serving to encourage
workers to embrace the uncertainties of a 'flexible' neoliberal global economy (e.g., adventure ropes
courses) can be seen as examples of disciplinary governmentality in service of neoliberalism as well.
Similar complimentarity could be found among other governmentalities. On the other hand, different
governmentalities may conflict as well, leading to debate concerning the proper approach to
governance within a given situation. In short, Foucault (2008: 313) suggests that In the world we have
known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other,
challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of
government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the
rationality of economic agents, and more generally according to the rationality of the governed
themselves.
terror
Monsterization of terrorists is a biopolitical tool used to control the populations –
Creates terrorists
Rai, 04 (Amit S., Senior Lecturer in New Media and Communications, “OF MONSTERS: Biopower,
terrorism and excess in genealogies of monstrosity”
http://dferagi.webs.ull.es/d/politicas2/docs/Biopolitica.2.pdf)//BW
Terrorism, in this abstract machine, is a symptom for the deviant psyche, the psyche gone awry, or the
failed psyche; the terrorist enters the stage as an absolute violation. Not surprisingly, then, coming out of this
discourse, we find another very common way of trying to psychologize the monster-terrorist is by positing
a kind of failed heterosexuality, or, as in the quote above, a crypto-homosexuality. Therefore, we hear often the
idea that sexually frustrated Muslim men are promised the heavenly reward of 60, 67 or sometimes even 70 virgins if they are martyred in
jihad. But as As‘ad Abu Khalil (2001) has argued, ‘In reality, political / not sexual / frustration constitutes the most important factor in
motivating young men, or women, to engage in suicidal violence. The tendency to dwell on the sexual motives of the suicide bombers belittles
these sociopolitical causes’. Now, of course, that is precisely what terrorism studies intends to do: to reduce complex social, historical and
political dynamics to various psychic causes rooted in childhood family dynamics. As if the Palestinian intifada or the long, brutal war in
Afghanistan can be simply boiled down to bad mothering or sexual frustration! Finally, all of these explanatory models and frameworks function
to: (1) reduce complex histories of struggle, intervention, and (non)development to Western psychic models rooted in the bourgeois
heterosexual family and its dynamics; (2) exclude systematically questions of political economy and the problems of cultural translation; (3)
master the fear, anxiety and uncertainty of a form of violent political dissent by resorting to the banality of a taxonomy; and (4) consolidate the
practical solidarity between abstract methods of psychological enquiry and modern apparatuses of power. On this last point, we
should
recall Deleuze’s warning of the new role of psychoanalysis as a strategy of biopower. There is no state which
does not need an image of thought which will serve as its axiomatic system or abstract machine, and to which it gives in return the strength to
function: hence the inadequacy of the concept of ideology, which in no way takes into account this relationship. This was the unhappy role of
classical philosophy ... / that of supplying ... the apparatuses of power, Church and State, with the knowledge which suited them. Could we say
that the human sciences have assumed this same role, that of providing by their own methods and abstract machine for modern apparatuses of
power / receiving from them valuable endorsement in term? So psychoanlysis has submitted its tender, to become a major official language
and knowledge in place of philosophy; to provide an axiomatic system of man in place of mathematics; to invoke the Honestas and a mass
function. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p. 88) We will return to the ‘mass function’ of counter-terrorism discourses in our
conclusion, but we must pursue another line first: What are the specific racial and sexual genealogies of this taxonomizing ‘abstract machine’ of
counter-terror? One answer: a specifically colonial genealogy, an aspect of which could be named ‘Oriental despotism’. Since at least the
eighteenth century, the despots of the ‘East’ have been constructed as the quintessential enemies of (Western) civilization. Indeed British
colonial justice, having secured order where previously only the ‘riot of the imagination’ (James Mill’s phrase) had reigned, was predicated on
its radical difference from that recurring example of otherized oppression, Oriental despotism. Let us recall some of the key points in the
construction of Oriental despotism as it appeared in hegemonic discourses in the nineteenth century. Developed in the wake of the
Enlightenment (and later codified in the Utilitarian) critique of the ancien re´gime, the divine right of kings and aristocratic privilege, the
discourse of Oriental despotism posited an essentially Western order as a civilizational corrective to Eastern irrationality. The
representatives of this moderate and reasonable West would confront (and eventually dominate) their
supposed opposite in the colonial mirror of nineteenth century discourse.11 It was almost as if these inherent
differences logically and naturally gave rise to two radically different traditions of political and economic organization. For Europe, a
constitutional monarchy or republic would be the characteristic form of polity, while the capitalist mode of production its characteristic
economic institution (Inden 2001, p. 53). For the East, despotism / the
arbitrary or capricious rule by fear of an allpowerful autocrat over docile and servile masses – would be the normal and distinctive form of
government; these peasant masses – distributed over innumerable, self-sufficient villages, engaging in a mixture of low-grade agriculture
and handicrafts / make over to the despot the surplus of what it produces in the form of a tax, and subsist on the remainder – a mode of
production that Marx termed ‘Asiatic’ (see Habib 1990).12
US counter-terrorist discourse is a form of biopower
Rai, 04 (Amit S., Senior Lecturer in New Media and Communications, “OF MONSTERS: Biopower,
terrorism and excess in genealogies of monstrosity”
http://dferagi.webs.ull.es/d/politicas2/docs/Biopolitica.2.pdf)//BW
Such responses oblige us to recognize that in a moment of what is termed an ongoing ‘national crisis’ even platitudinous dissent in beyond the
pale of the proper. How does a drug charge disallow a subject from speaking from a space that is morally legitimate / how does any kind of
impropriety disqualify a subject who would dissent from such norms of citizenship? But what this reviewer’s diatribe points to are the subtle
and not-so-subtle forms of normalization that the new patriotism demands of all us. Of course, this demand is never represented as such:
Indeed, biopower, as it invests life, and as bodies come to being through its very modes, takes on the
form and substance of ever more ‘democratic’ rule, and through which diffuse relations of power are
rendered ‘ever more immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of citizens’.
But what we see in discourses of American counter-terrorism is the very production of the citizen through
strategies demanding cultural and national belonging, and sexual and gender normality / perhaps their greatest
achievement is the construction of a common sense understanding of this historically contingent experience of normalization as ‘democracy’ in
a time of monsters. Consider, then, the doubled TV frame of this special ‘Terrorist
Episode’ as itself a kind of abstract
machinery of biopower that relays images and narratives, producing subject-effects as part of ‘network imagination’. On the one hand,
it would seem these TV relays arrest the attention of the viewer in ways that would be appropriate to a pluralistic America inviting us to repeat
a certain pledge of allegiance. On the other, specific images seem to give themselves to undecideable lines of flight whose aporias draw us to
another future.19 Keep in mind: we see a double-framed reality. On the one side, brightly lit and close to the hearth (invoking the home and
the family) is the ‘Presidential’ classroom, a racially and gender plural space, where the President as Father enters and says what we need right
now are not suicidemartyrs but life-affirming heroes; where the First Lady as Mother tells the precocious, and sometimes troublesome,
youngsters a kind of bedtime story of two once and future brothers, Isaac (the Jews) and Ishmael (the Arabs); where
male experts
regale them with fantastic facts concerning the first acts of terrorism committed back in the tenth century by drug
frenzied Muslims; where one woman staff member (C.J. Cregg, played by Allison Janney) declares, ‘We need spies. Human spies ... It’s time to
give the intelligence agencies the money and the man power they need’; and where Josh finally advises the students to ‘remember pluralism.
You want to get these people? I mean, you really want to reach in and kill them where they live? Keep accepting more than one idea. It makes
them absolutely crazy’.
US Counter-terrorism is used to justify biopower and extend the sovereign control
Hannah 06 (Matthew, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor, “Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on
Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge”, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers Volume 96, Issue 3, 2006, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.14678306.2006.00709.x#.VaZ7LxNVikp)//BW
Administration policy since 11 September 2001 (hereinafter 9/11) and the American public's continued
willingness to live with it can be explained to a significant degree by a particular discursive construction:
the ticking-bomb scenario. To the extent that this scenario frames official and public understandings of the threat of terrorism, it tends to make
torture appear more reasonable as a response. The ticking-bomb scenario prompts a reimagining of the landscapes of everyday life as suffused
with an unacceptably high level of risk. If unacceptable risk is extrapolated to cover the entire national territory, the imperative to eliminate
such risk is intensified. The imagined imperative to eliminate this risk at all costs constitutes an opening for the contemplation of torture. This
argument is circumstantial in nature and is probably stronger as an explanation of relative public complacency than as an explanation of the
Bush administration's actual motives. Even on the latter point, however, it is a plausible account of a stance many commentators find difficult
to explain fully in other ways. The
threat of terrorism and the response of torture are fruitfully understood in
terms of power/knowledge, particularly by means of the concepts of biopower and governmentality.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004, 19) are correct to claim that, “when individualized in its extreme form, biopower
becomes torture.” But they do not fully explain why this is so. Like Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), Giorgio Agamben (1998,;2005) and
Judith Butler (2004) have also drawn on these Foucaultian concepts to explain the complex of extraterritorial prisons within which torture has
occurred. But together these authors have only partly explained the response to terrorism, and little of the perceived threat. Once the threat of
terrorism is understood as a threat to forms of power/knowledge, it becomes possible to supplement, to sort out more clearly, and then to tie
together the still somewhat loose and incomplete biopolitical analysis found in the writings of Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Butler. No
account of torture in the current geopolitical context can be complete if it is not linked to an analysis of the
threat of terrorism that
serves as its justification. If forms of power that involve life, knowledge, and the body are indeed as
central to the maintenance of modern social order as Foucault and many others believe them to be, it is necessary to
attempt to relate torture, which represents an extreme example of the political articulation of life, knowledge, and the body, to wider
questions of social order. In his recent review of geographical approaches to such issues, Colin Flint cautions social scientists against
succumbing to the temptation to characterize the present geopolitical conjuncture as one of “chaos” or unfathomable disorder: geographers
and other scholars “need to offer parsimonious theories that help uncover the multiple roots of all contemporary geopolitical acts” (Flint 2003,
100). Viewing torture as a geopolitical act of apparently renewed importance, this article is one response to Flint's call. The argument presented
here does not attempt to answer once and for all the question of whether any particular interrogation practice actually constitutes torture. As
the now copious documentary evidence makes clear (Danner 2004; Greenberg and Dratel 2005), legal debates over the definition of torture can
themselves become quite tortured. And as the public discourse has made abundantly clear, the credibility of the Bush administration does not
hang on whether what is happening at Guantánamo Bay or in Iraqi prisons technically constitutes torture. What is important for the argument
presented here is simply the question of how
anything like torture could be seen as a potentially legitimate tool in
the attempt to counter terrorism. Therefore all that is needed is a fairly basic functional definition of torture (in this article, I use
the terms “torture,” “abuse,” and “brutal interrogation practices” interchangeably): torture is the infliction of unwanted physical and/or
psychological suffering on an individual in order to induce him or her to surrender information. Whether the suffering crosses any particular
threshold of “acuteness” or “severity,” whether it produces lasting damage, whether the individual actually possesses the information sought,
or the extent to which the act of inflicting suffering
all immaterial for the purposes of the present argument.
represents a symbolic ritual of domination, these issues are
AFF
2ac – law good
We should retrieve the descriptive force of Agamben’s criticism of law without
neglecting the strategic benefits reform provides for the oppressed
*4pt font for long passages with no
relevance
Deranty 4 (Jean-Philippe – Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, “Agamben’s challenge to
normative theories of modern rights,” in borderlands, Volume 3, Number 1, 2004,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)
7. The question, though, is whether Agamben’s counter-theory that results from this critical inspiration is itself valid. This paper aims to assess some of Agamben’s
key arguments against normative theories of rights, to show that his own proposal is itself caught up in major conceptual and political difficulties. This leads to the
conclusion - which can only be programmatically sketched within the scope of this short paper - that there
is still a need to attempt to
retrieve the force of Agamben’s critical arguments, but without abandoning the resource that modern
rights, in their normative dimensions, can provide for an alternative political theory and practice.
Agamben’s
Essentialism 8. Agamben’s conception of the task of thinking is deeply Heideggerian. It can be summarized in this way: the thinker isolates ontological essences in which the common ground of apparently different, or even opposite, empirical and historical phenomena is revealed. The
constantly reoccurring conceptual gesture in Agamben’s writings is that of indistinction. Political power is the instigation of an indistinction between the state of exception and the normal legal order, between fact and law, nature and norm, animality and humanity, inside and outside,
inclusion and exclusion. It must be noted that, paradoxically, this recurrent movement of indistinction that effaces conceptual and empirical differences runs counter to the Foucauldian distinctions and discontinuities. 9. Consistent with this foundationalist essentialism, Agamb en does not
restrict indistinction to the conceptual or structural level, but extends it to empirical, historical phenomena. The archaic State is not substantially different from the modern one. There is no essential difference between democracy before Auschwitz, the totalitarian States themselves, and
democracy after Auschwitz between liberal democracies and dictatorships (Agamben 1998:10). In Auschwitz, there is no differen ce between victim and executioner (Agamben 1999a: 21). No distinction between the sacred priest, the criminal banned from the archaic community and the
modern citizen; no distinction between the bodies in Auschwitz and the bodies of victims of car accidents in modern Europe (1998: 114); no distinction between the Muselmann in the extermination camp and the immigrant locked up by police in a hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport (1998:
174), or between the Muselmann and the overcomatose person (1999a: 156); no distinction between the Nazi extermination camps and the camps established in the former Yugoslavia. 10. On a general, philosophical level, the essentialist method that leads to general indistinguishability
would be questioned by other traditions of thought. The strongest critique would probably come from the Hegelian tradition, f or which the essence is to be found nowhere but in its modes of appearance, identity in differences. The conceptual imperative that ensues is the task of
thinking precisely what appears as different, and not look for a transcendent "thing-in-itself" in which all differences are swallowed. If indeed there are historiographical differences between democracy and fascism (1998: 10), then perhaps it should bear more weight in the theory, and
not be blurred into indistinction. From a Hegelian perspective, Agamben’s conceptuality looks very much like a Schellingian night where all cows are black. This in itself is obviously not a ground for rejecti on, as all theory starts from a theoretical decision which is itself ungrounded and the
matter of pure freedom, as Fichte demonstrated. Thought, like politics, is all about the decision and its implications. 11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment.
From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive to claim that there is no substantial
difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided with the language of rights,
between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising
the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernity’s moral superiority, that does not simply
equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight
the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony,
then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the
establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneth’s reminder
that struggles for social and political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any
other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly
gesture in understanding past political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious
strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human
rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory
would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it purports to speak for, and of
depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.
The Critique of Human Rights 12. In order to argue against fundamental rights as the
normative grounding of modern politics, Agamben presents the biopolitical thesis: the actual subject of the law is not the citizen, understood as a person vested with fundamental rights, but the human being as living creature. The actual subject of power is bare life. 13. I want to consider
this rejection of the principle of human rights from the angle of the emergence of biopolitics at the time of the declarations of human rights. Agamben accepts the well-established distinction between ancient natural law, natural law under absolutism, and modern natural law (Strauss
1953). His narrative, however, runs counter to the usual one: It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a
tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives with the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves (Agamben 1998: 121). 14 . This is a kind of dialectic of Enlightenment: the more
individuals liberate themselves legally from the shackles of authority, the more they subject themselves to power biopolitically. This dialectic enables Agamben to postulate a continuous line running from the first formulation of the Habeas Corpus, through the Bill of Rights, to the 1933
Nuremberg eugenic laws: along this line we find the body of the individual directly exposed to the state of exception. In the different Declarations of Human Rights that signal the historical birth of modernity, the subject becomes citizen that is bearer of sovereignty, solely on account of
his birth, his natio, or nationality. Behind the citizen, man as bare life is hidden. This bare life exposed to sovereign power is precisely the pure substance that the Nazi regime attempted to produce, which justifies the perception of continuity between modern democracy and the
totalitarian State. 15. This reading of the French Revolution and of the Declarations of Human Rights used as preambles to the different constitutions of the République is problematic. First of all, in the American Revolution, which in many senses was the model for the French, it would be
difficult to find the figure of homo sacer. The American declaration of independence, influenced by Locke’s theory of natural law, places the origin of the rights of men in divine laws. Political power does not apply to individuals considered from the point of view of their birth, their natio or
nationality, but to individuals fully endowed with natural rights, as creatures of God (Kervégan 1995: 660). 16. Agamben is greatly inspired by Hannah Arendt. She is the one that explicitly makes the "internment camp" a central figure of modern times (Arendt 1966: 276). In her, he finds a
strong counter-objection to the remark above. In both the "American formula" that relies on the authority of God, and the "French formula" that relies on philosophical justifications of natural law, the fiction of a universal essence of man is denounce d by the factual helplessness of all the
refugees and stateless people created by the turmoils of the 20th century. 17. Agamben quotes Arendt’s critical conclusion: ‘the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to
believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human’ (Arendt 1966: 299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he fails to quote the very next line, which makes all the difference: "The world
found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299). 18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political "commonwealth" do human rights have any meaning. They are an abstraction otherwise. More important than the right to
freedom or the right to justice is "the right to have rights", that is, to be the member of a political community. Arendt therefore asserts the opposite of what Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he considers to be a fiction, na mely the citizen. Her
point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise that man never really existed as a subject of rights. This is the exact opposite of Agamben for whom the citizen is just a travesty. 19. Despite this opposition, Agamben borrows Arendt’s critical interpretation of the French
revolution and modernity in general, even though this interpretation itself is not beyond doubt. The French declaration makes it clear that human rights lose all significance if they are not reinscribed within a political community that transforms them into constitutional principles, and the
American constitution also defines a clear link between individual freedom and a political order whose goal is freedom’s prot ection. Yet, Agamben reads the first article of the Declaration of 1789, "all men are born and remain free and equal in rights" as proof that modern sovereign
power applies to bare life, here in the form of birth (Agamben 1995: 128). But this seems disingenuous. Birth here refers not to nationality, but simply to the fundamental fact of the equality of all human beings in right. The term effectuates the radical break with ancie nt and absolutist
natural law, a break that is synonymous with legal modernity. In ancient natural law, rights were associated with the social position or the notion of a perfect cosmic order underpinned by God. 20. This emphasis on the rupture that the declarations consummate leads to the question of
historical continuity. The Habeas Corpus is not necessarily a precursor of modern declarations as it uses a non-egalitarian definition of freedom, reserved for the elite. It lacks the fundamental notion that is the mark of modernity, the universal equality of all. 21. Agamben does not
emphasise equality, but it could be argued that, above all others, even above the notion of right, it is this category that gives modernity its actual normative content. Modern man is therefore not first and foremost the national, but a universal being liberated from the particularisms of
traditional society. This amounts only to an empty universalism if no political project realises freedom and equality, but this is precisely a mistake that the American and French revolutions, for all their ambiguities, did not commit. Agamben refuses to consider basic l egal equality as the
true content of declarations of human rights and instead focuses on the national aspect. In this he is faithful to Schmitt who rejects the republican conception of popular sovereignty. Schmitt, Benjamin and the Violence of the Law 22. One of the most impressive aspects in Agamben’s
oeuvre is the extent to which it has developed to such a high level of conceptual sophistication, and how it delves to such a degree into philological, historical and conceptual detail, whilst remaining ever faithful to the letter and spirit of Walter Benjamin’s writings. This is true of his
meditations on language, literature, and the "end of experience". This especially true, however, of Agamben’s political writings. They can be read as the results of a systematic research undertaken with the goal of developing and giving substance to the insights put forward by Benjamin in
his long forgotten and now famous 1921 article, "Critique of Violence", as well as the 1940 "Theses on the Philosophy of History".
It is important to approach Agamben’s theses on political
sovereignty from this perspective because their radical nature risks blocking access to their meaning and
critical potential
. 23. The second of the three volumes to be dedicated to the figure of homo sacer (Homo Sacer II, 1) studies afresh many of the key theses, concepts and references that were present in the first instalment (Homo Sacer: sovereign power and
bare life). The new genealogical and ontological analyses in this second volume make both the negative, critical, and the positive, programmatic, aspects of Agamben’s politics very clear. 24. By focusing on the paradox of constituting power, the extra-juridical nature of the decision that
founds the juridical field, the paradox of political sovereignty, which, in its normality and normativity, logically relies on the power to decree the state of exception, Carl Schmitt has isolated the violent, anomic core of all juridical and political systems. In this sense, Schmitt tells the truth
about the political, the truth about Western politics. For example, empirically, the world in which we live is a Schmittian world, where the state of exception becomes the rule of even supposedly "democratic" governments. 25. But, to use Heidegger’s turn of phrase, that is only the
guiding question, not the founding one. More importantly, in their very accuracy, the Schmittian theses point to all that is wrong in Western politics, and thus, negatively, to another form of politics. With Schmitt, Agamben believes one can cut to the very essence of Western politics,
beyond illusory rationalistic and normative frameworks. Only after having reached that point, once the essence of all politics has been identified, can one hope to find the correct alternative. Any solution that would not confront the Schmittian challenge would remain caught up in
unending conundrums. The embracing of Schmitt is thus only a negative, propaedeutic step towards a positive political theory. 26. So what is wrong with Schmitt, according to Agamben, and what political field opens up once we have crossed this ultimate threshold? In the central chapter
of Homo Sacer II, 1, Agamben reconstructs the different stages of Schmitt’s theory of sovereign exception as a series of responses to Benjamin’s fundamental challenge, the idea expressed in the 1921 "Critique of violence", and reiterated in the 1940 eighth thesis on history, of a "pure"
revolutionary "violence" beyond all forms of law, which therefore would not be violent, of a "real state of exception", the revolutionary one, that would replace the absolute violence of the state of exception "in which we live" (Benjamin 1991: 291[292]). 27. For Agamben, Schmitt’s
theory of sovereignty is the attempt to conjure up the threat of (Benjaminian) revolution, by tying up the anomy at the core of human action to the juridical order via the theory of exception. This gesture of tying up anomic violenc e to a normative order is exactly isonomic to the
metaphysical gesture that attempts to capture Being in the net of logos. This is why Schmitt, as the one who identified the pure elements of all legal orders, the anomic core of normal legality, but continued to tie the two together, represents the true acme, both conceptually and for
what he stood for historically, of Western politics. And this is why Benjamin, who had learnt from Schmitt about the exceptionality forming the core of legal normality and nor mative legality, but perverted the Schmittian lesson by cutting the link between exception and law, shows the
right way out of the political impasse of the West. The effective theory of revolution is the messianic utopianism of Benjamin. 28. All this explains why Agamben chooses to focus on the decisionistic tradition (Hobbes, Heidegger, Schmitt). With it, he wants to isolate the pure essences of
all juridical orders and thus highlight the essential violence structuring traditional politics. Since the law essentially appears as a production and capture of bare life, the political order that enunciates and maintains the law is essentially violent, always threatening the bare life it has
The problem with this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that
it does not do justice to the complex relationship that these authors establish between violence and
normativity, that is, in the end the very normative nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying that all law is violent, in
essence or in its core, rather that law is dependent upon a form of violence for its foundation. Violence can
found the law, without the law itself being violent.
produced with total annihilation. Auschwitz is the real outcome of all normative orders. 29.
In Hobbes, the social contract, despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it creates, also enables individual rights to flourish on the basis of the
inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel 2003: 86). 30. In Schmitt, the decision over the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only because it makes the regular case possible. The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end
(Schmitt 1985: 13). What Schmitt has in mind is not the indistinction between fact and law, or their intimate cohesion, to wit, their secrete indistinguishability, but the origin of the law, in the name of the law. This explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the decision is accompanied
by the recognition of popular sovereignty, since the decision is only the expression of an organic community. Decisionism for Schmitt is only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous whole, against liberal parliamentarianism. Also, the evolution of Schmitt’s
thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic element, in favour of a strong form of institutionalism. This is becaus e, if indeed the juridical order is totally dependent on the sovereign decision, then the latter can revoke it at any moment. Decisionism, as a theory about the origin of
the law, leads to its own contradiction unless it is reintegrated in a theory of institutions (Kervégan 1992). 31. In other words, Agamben sees these authors as establishing a circularity of law and violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin of the law, for the law’s sake.
Equally, Savigny’s polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his philosophical ally Hegel, does not amount to a recognition of the capture of life by the law, but aims at grounding the legal order in the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27). For Agamben, it seems,
the origin and the essence of the law are synonymous, whereas the authors he relies on thought rather that the two were fundamentally different. 32. Agamben obviously knows all this. He argues that it is precisely this inability of the decisionists to hold on to their key insight, the anomic
core of norms, which gives them the sad distinction of accurately describing an evil order. But this reading does not meet the objection to his problematic use of that tradition. 33. If the authors of the decisionistic (Hobbes-Schmitt) and ethnonationalistic (Savigny-Schmitt) traditions do
not want to emphasize the extra-juridical core of the law, but rather polemically establish the non-rationalistic and non-positivistic grounding of an otherwise fully acknowledged normative order, then it seems as though Agamben makes them prove too much. If Hobbes, Savigny and
Schmitt are intent, as much as their theoretical opponents, on shoring up the normative order, then they cannot be used as proponents of an anti-normative essence of normativity. Conversely, a more serious engagement with the opposing traditions (mainly, natural law, positivism and
rationalism) is required, since it is not the case that the nationalistic-decisionistic one would be situated at a deeper level of analysis than its opponents. 34. This is illustrated in the passage in Homo Sacer II, 1 where Agamben analyses the justification-application dichotomy. The passages
on Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception show explicitly the hermeneutic slide in the reading of this key author. Indeed, "the state of exception separates the norm from its application in order to make the latter possible". But Schmitt’s point is not what Agamben makes of it in the
next paragraph, namely that, as a consequence, "it (the state of exception) introduces into the law a zone of anomy", in which "the two elements of the law" (the norm and its application) "show their intimate cohesion" (Agamben 2003: 64). Instead, for Schmitt, the distinction between
justification and application simply shows the political grounding of the legal moment. 35. But this grounding in the political is just the result of a theoretical decision, and the alternatives should be confronted more explicitly. This lack of a substantial engagement with other legal
alternatives becomes obvious a few pages later, when Agamben analyses once more the specific problem of the application of the law. When he writes that "in the case of the juridical norm, the reference to the concrete case supposes a "process" that always implies a plurality of
subjects, and that culminates in the last instance in the enunciation of a sentence, that is to say, a statement whose operative r eference to reality is guaranteed by institutional powers" (Agamben 2003: 69), he simply formulates a classical distinction that can receive an entirely different
treatment with no less plausibility. A recent philosophical solution to the gap between justification and application has been famously given by Habermas (1990 and 1996). Chapters 5 and 6 of Between facts and norms in particular provide an excellent overview of plausible alternatives to
Schmitt’s decisionistic theory of adjudication, from Kelsen to Critical Legal Studies. 36. But then Agamben cannot simply use the fact that "the application of a norm is not contained in it" as leading directly to the theory of the state of exception, since from the very same premise another
form of political grounding of the legal could be advanced, one, for instance, that focuses on intersubjectivity and the institutionalisation of dissensus. The "violence" that realizes the statement is not necessarily "without logos". For Schmitt, it draws its authority from the political, that is,
the logos of the polis as ethnos; for another tradition, it would do so from the logos of intersubjectively constituted and essentially contested institutions. 37. Here, as in many other aspects of his thought, Agamben draws on Benjamin for whom there is "something rotten in law"
(Benjamin 1991b: 188 [286]), a fateful violence, "the destruction of which becomes obligatory" (199 [297]). There is undeniably a continuity in Benjamin, from the "Critique of Violence" to the theses on the philosophy of history, that has to do with his fundamental vision of history as a
series of catastrophes, a series of orders recurrently establishing themselves as forms of fate that unleash their violence, rephrased in the language of the law, over the oppressed. But the other continuity in Benjamin’s writings is underplayed by Agamben. For Benjamin and his readers of
1921, the divine violence that is "law-destroying", and therefore - as negation of the violent negation of law - no longer violent, is obviously the violence of the proletarian revolution, and there is no need, in 1921, to ask about its "logos", the normative source of its justification. This
source is the "total condition that is ‘man’" (Benjamin 1991b: 201 [299]), the "wholly transformed work" (1991b: 294 [292]), in other words, in a Marx-inspired vision of global revolution, however vague or heretic the reception of Marx. Again, in 1940, the theses on history use historical
materialism as their obvious background, though Agamben acknowledges this only in passing in Homo Sacer II (108), and appropriates Benjamin without reference to the background securing his revolutionary messianism in Homo Sacer 1. Agamben acknowledges this only in passing in
Homo Sacer II, 1 (2003: 108). Homo sacer I strikingly appropriated Benjamin without reference to the background securing his revolutionary messianism. This means, however, that the new law beyond the law that no longer has the form of law is a lot more substantive than simply the
"study" of, or "play with", the old law (Agamben 2003: 108-9). It is the immanent law of the liberated community, whose book had already been written in extenso by another great German Jew. In other words, Benjamin indeed demonstrates the violent anomic core of law, but only to
point to a new, normative law, the new law of a community that has defeated fate. With this reference to Marx as the immanent normativity of Benjamin’s messianism, the notion of a politics of "pure means" becomes far more intuitively evident. Ontology of Politics, Politics of Ontology
38. With the "Critique of Violence", Benjamin pursued the goal of a "politics of pure means" which would undercut the violence implicit in all articulation of morality and justice in (justified) means for (just) ends. "The violenc e of an action can be assessed no more from its effects than
from its ends, but only from the law of its means" (Benjamin 1991b: 195 [292]). Since the law of the legal order’s means is the establishment of a violent fate that captures bare life and produces guilt and punishment as forms of that capture (Benjamin 1991a: 175 [308]), the destruction
of all forms of legality is "obligatory" before the advent of a just society. 39. Agamben takes up Benjamin’s indication and engages in systematic research into the ontology of means and ends in order to show its absolute violent isonomy with the logic of sovereignty. To do this, Agamben
borrows from Schmitt the definition of sovereign power as the decisionary power over the state of exception, which he interprets as the paradoxical power to exclude and thereby include, or alternatively to include by excluding. 40. This formal model, he t hen shows, following Heidegger,
exactly corresponds in structural terms to the classical Aristotelian articulation of potentiality to actuality. Aristotle identifies two senses of potentiality. Potentiality is potentiality to be, and in that first sense, it is directly related to actuality: potentiality as potentiality of actuality.
Potentiality is therefore more truly itself in a second sense, as potentiality not to be. In this second sense, however, it also remains related to actuality. Indeed the potential not to be, if reflectively turned onto itself, is again actuality. Not to be the power not to be is both being true to the
nature of not being, and also to be in the most actual form of actuality. Impotentiality taken seriously is both pure potentiality and as the impotentiality of the potential not-to-be, pure actuality. In other words, "pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable" (Agamben 1998:
47). 41. This conceptual indistinction, whereby the potential is also the most actual form of actuality, is perfectly isomorphic with the sovereign structure if sovereignty is also defined as a power to suspend itself (potential not-to be) which is at the same time the source of itself and, as
normative power, the source of legal reality (actuality). 42. The conclusion is clear: if we want to move beyond biopolitics, beyond the violent politics of sovereignty, we have to develop an alternative ontology where the potential is not always already recaptured by its own potentiality
and thus forced to relate to its opposite, actuality. We have to think potentiality as pure or absolute potentiality, "beyond every figure of relation" (1998: 47). 43. Agamben thus connects Benjamin’s "politics of pure means" with the alternative ontology articulated by Heidegger on the
basis of his reading of Aristotle’s metaphysics. In his 1931 lectures on the Metaphysics (Heidegger, 1981: 114), in his Nietzsche lectures (1980: 64-65), and in the Letter on humanism (1977: 220), Heidegger had tied the imperative of a "recovery of the question of Being" to a radical
rethinking of the categories of modality in which Being is freed from the productivist paradigm of actualitas. Only through a questioning of the modal logic operating within the onto-theological tradition could a free "ethos" be prepared as a genuine dwelling. Agamben’s thought owes just
as much to this fundamental inspiration as he does to Benjamin. How much Heidegger’s ontology of potentiality has exerted a fundamental influence on him is especially clear in the lectures at the Collège international de Philosophie published under the title L’ombre de l’amour (1988:
44-46). 44. The description of the radical politics that emerges from the ontology of pure potentiality can be found in The Coming Community, and it is here that the full consequences of Agamben’s problematic interpretation and reappropriation of Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt and
Arendt become apparent. 45. In the notes that Benjamin was writing in preparation for his Theses on the philosophy of history, one reads: "The messianic world is the world of overall and integral actuality" (Benjamin 1991e: 1235). The last expression is a self-reference to the 1929 essay
on surrealism (1991d: 309, [1929]). Against Benjamin’s explicit equation of the "real state of exception" (the state of liberated humanity), with actuality, Agamben’s coming community is a community of subjects that exist only as negative potentialities (actualities that are the possibility of
not-being, actualisations of potentiality), the "whatever singularities". Because he has severed the concept of the community from all normative ties, and has rejected all conceptual and normative distinctions (between state of nature and civil state, law and violence, nomos and physis,
normal state and exception, etc.), this community-to-come can only be ever described negatively, as beyond all forms of community, and accessed only in the flight from all present and all immanence. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the assumed messianism of this radical politics is
How can we
heed Agamben’s warning about the necessity to continue to question the normativity of modernity after
Auschwitz without dissolving politics into onto-theology? This seems to be one of the most pressing demands for political thought
today. 47. If, with Rancière, we define politics not through the institution of sovereignty, but as a continual
struggle for the recognition of basic equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police
order viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancière 1999), then it is possible to
acknowledge the normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age without
falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation. What should be stressed
about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but
the equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment
that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does
not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather it points to a tension inherent in modern communities,
between the political demands of equality and the systemic tendencies that structurally produce
stigmatisation and exclusion. 48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower
hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault’s late hypothesis is
only a form of negative theology. Difficult not to think, also, that politics constructed as the "gigantomachy" (Agamben 2003: chapter 4) of an onto-theology of power does not lead to the evanescence of politics. Rights, Politics, Contingency 46.
more about power than it is about politics (Rancière 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is
that of "biopower". As Rancière suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes
problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes
socially can also empower politically simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by
excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of
freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The
hierarchical,
exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit
recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can
sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion. 49. This proposal rests on a logic that
challenges Agamben’s reduction of the overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead
of collapsing or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegel’s modal logic a
way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the
potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an
ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real
vindicates Hegel’s claim that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the
possible and the impossible are only
reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute
necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if
true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus
where political intervention could have changed things, where politics can happen. Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his theory about the place and
relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman
1989). 50. In the social and historical fields, politics
is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of
systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition
of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is
ambiguous because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible
systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources. 51. This ontology
enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to
consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are
recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in
modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political struggles,
as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of
the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know that their rights are granted only contingently, that the
possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this
does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as
contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for
constant political vigilance. 52. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one
accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State,
then it might be the case that the politics
that define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles
against injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic
counterparts.
Law is transformative and positive --- Agamben oversimplifies
Brännström 08 (Leila, Assistant Professor (subst), Lund University Faculty of Law, “How I learned to
stop worrying and use the legal argument A critique of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of law”,
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2370100&fileOId=4001240)//BW
In Agamben’s writings law is represented as a uniplanar surface, even if a sophistication is present as the surface is
twisted to the form of a Möbius strip (cf. Agamben 1998, 15, 37). Despite the twist, law is still represented as a homogeneous entity with a
single border. The twist in the surface represents that, in Agamben’s wording, ‘law is outside itself’ (Agamben 1998, 15). A state
of affairs
he claims instantiates itself in paradoxes like the im/possibility of legal creation ex nihilo and the
im/possibility of the legal regulation of legally banned situations – for example legal codification of self-defense or the
right of resistance against unlawful law. The
paradoxical structure of law is, in turn, claimed to explain how life,
violence, and sovereignty are simultaneously inside and outside the legal order. The paradoxes that Agamben
enumerates are however engendered in the first place by his understanding of law as a mystic, monolithic, unilaterally productive, and
ahistorical entity. As Agamben’s reasoning suppresses temporality and depopulates the legal field, paradoxes arise
as a result of treating law as an object rather than a practice that is performed. Behind the fear of law that Agamben shows when he says that
an ‘unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe’ is awaiting us if we do not break with the current politico-legal rationality, is a representation of
law as an object – as a machine – standing outside history and affecting the course of events. Foucault has argued that if the state is abstracted
and hypostatized – as a cold-blooded monster or the instrument of class repression – it appears to be the driving force behind all sorts of
effects, which leads to the overvaluation of the ‘state-problem’ and causes inflationary effects such as statophobia. He reminds us that the
state is nothing more than a flexible bundle of juxtaposed practices (Foucault 2006, 112–115). Similarly, law is not all too powerful or all too
powerless; it is a protean combination of law-producing and reproducing practices and does not have an existence outside of that.
Agamben’s way of treating law as a point of departure rather than as a the result of complicated social
processes and as the origin of historical power relations rather than their effects is somewhat ironic
since the crux of his argument seems to be that law does not have an independent life. His point, after all, is
that the hold that law has over life can be broken and what is ultimately at stake in the state of exception, in legal production and decisionmaking and in biopolitical matters, is extrajudicial (cf. Agamben 2005, 11, 87–88). 41 Another example of such overestimation
of the
legal point of view in Agamben’s work would be the overstatement of the differences between
incarcerated aliens and incarcerated citizens. Agamben’s black and white image of law has its counterpart in his notion of biopower as the controlling of the (increasingly blurred) borderline between life and death. Bio-power is here reduced to a question of either/or,
eradicating all differentiation in the administration and management of life.
It is all the more problematic as the control of
the borderline is construed as a legal matter which is particularly troubling as law is equaled to
repression and the state is the sole legal agent mentioned. The transposition of law and repression
obscure the fact that some legal norms, rather than immediately directing and appraising behavior,
distribute competences or legal powers which allow legal subjects to introduce changes in legal status
through contract or other arrangements. Think for instance of the biopolitical effects of patenting human genome or the
markets for surrogacy motherhood or for human organs. Neither is bio-power necessarily exercised by the state or even through legal action.
As Lemke appropriately points out, it is ‘more and more the scientific consultants, economic interest groups, and civil societal mediators that
define the beginning, the end and the value of life, in consensus conferences, expert commissions, and ethical counsels’ (Lemke 2005, 11). Since
Agamben seems to equate power and repression it comes as no surprise that he cannot see that biopower can be exercised in ways radically different from those of the Nazi-regime. It is not wholly accidental that
the biopolitical decisions of market actors scenting investment opportunities and those of us who quit smoking because we are acting in a
biopolitically responsible way, go unnoticed in Agamben’s story. Agamben
overestimates here, as elsewhere, the role of
law in a story where the (narrow and distorted) legal point of view tends to substitute reality.
2ac - agamben wrong
Agamben’s conception of law are incredibly essentialist and provides no remedy
Schotel 09 (Bas, assistant professor (Ph.D., LLM) at University of Amsterdam, “DEFENDING OUR LEGAL
PRACTICES: A LEGAL CRITIQUE OF GIORGIO AGAMBEN’S STATE OF EXCEPTION”,
http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/viewArticle/68/124)//BW
VI. Critique Let us return to
Agamben’s provocative questions directed at lawyers. According to Agamben we are
silent about the killing machine, which concerns us because it is inherently tied to law: the state of exception. Our legal culture is in radical
decline, because we have not come up with an adequate theory of the state of exception. We have been incapable of addressing the two forces at work: law and
life. We have not been able to create an open space where we can play with the elements and create new meaning of life and law. These accusations do not hold.
In earlier reviews it has been correctly pointed out that lawyers are not silent and that especially in court
lawyers have raised their voice, which Agamben totally omits in his thesis. Reference to those excellent reviews should
suffice, if they would not have conceded already too much to Agamben’s thesis.10 These misrepresentations (or outright omissions) of what lawyers are doing are
not harmless or innocent omissions. They constitute a dangerous move away from a contextual understanding of law as practice of practical reasoning. Instead
Agamben moves us to a kind of ontological and even metaphysical notion of law. To appreciate my concern one may simply ask one question: what is left – in
concrete and practical terms -of the law if we adopt Agamben’s thesis? What are lawyers doing when Agamben will have it his way ?
In spite of all his
good intentions and legitimate concerns, Agamben covertly advocates a ‘selling out’ of our legal
practice. So rather than giving Agamben a charitable reading, and tolerate the ‘often alien tenor’11 of
his work, I will show its fundamental inadequacy to provide a plausible account of the current legal
practice and law in general. Both his methods to describe law as the descriptions of it are deeply
flawed. VI.1 Law Has Normative Force At the outset of his thesis Agamben runs into fundamental difficulties. His concern is the impunity of violations of
international law by governments that nevertheless still claim to be applying law. If we take Agamben’s diagnosis and his solution
seriously, there is actually no way we can tell whether there are violations of international law in the
first place. The only thing Agamben can claim is that killings, incarcerations, infliction of hardship, in
short violence acts are taking place. But under his theory there is no legal standard available to qualify
these acts as violations. This is probably the greatest danger of his theory. It cannot identify outright abuse of the law and bad faith, while this is clearly
what was going on with the Bush government.12 By giving too much credit to the discourse of these governments and taking this discourse as his starting point,
there is no concern for him to deal with. The simple fact that violence is used could not concern him as such. It may only worry him if there is a normative standard
according to which this violence is wrong, unjust illegitimate, or illegal. In other words ,
Agamben is in blatant contradiction. The simple
fact that he believes that governments are violating current international and domestic law means that
they have normative force. It means that they are supposed to be obeyed and that as such they constitute reasons for action. If so, then already this
simple but fundamental point makes Agamben’s enterprise practically obsolete. It seems that he realises this contradiction, since he
hardly ever speaks of violations, abuses and misuses of the law. VI.2 Lawyers Are Not Silent Agamben’s failure to
recognise his own need to rely on the normative force of existing law explains why he cannot or does
not want to hear the lawyers. Yet lawyers are far from silent. For sure, they may not engage in philosophical inquiry into the genealogy and
etymology (!) of obscure phenomena of Roman law, they have been raising their voice in the context of a particular practice, i.e. legal practice. Just to take the
example of the treatment of Guantanamo detainees: lawyers of all ranks, affiliation and function have been fighting the violations of international and domestic
law. From
the justices of US Supreme Court and professional human rights defence lawyers,13 law clinic
students14, to Pentagon officials, and former military defence lawyers.15 The lawyers are equally
talkative when it comes to theorising the state of exception. As Kanwar nicely shows, constitutionalist produced “a great deal of
legal writing” on the issue, they may not have reached “any consensus on these issues, but that is not the same as remaining silent”16 In short, as long as the legal
practice can assert that violations of law are taking place, the law has normative force. In other words, Agamben’s philosophical concern seems to vanish and his
first accusation has been proven false. VI.3 The Law Is Being Applied A gamben
may object to my previous points that all those
lawyers that are raising their voice are only referring to a law that is formally in force but not applied:
“force-oflaw”. Again, he is wrong from an empirical perspective. The Supreme Court cases cited earlier show that gradually but progressively the Guantanamo
practices are invalidated.17 But let us, for argument’s sake, concede that gross violations are taking place with impunity to the effect that the law is actually notapplied. This empirical claim raises important methodological and normative issues. What is the level of compliance needed for a law to be qualified as ‘applied’?
What do we measure: the quantity or the quality of the compliance? Or do we only measure the violations? What
Agamben needs are
standards to evaluate whether or not a law, a set of laws or even the law itself, is bankrupt. But this
means that he has to provide us with an account of the functions and capabilities of law. Obviously, he
fails to do so. This alone should already dismiss his claims. For it shows a categorical refusal to account for even the most minimal
features of a phenomenon he seeks to criticise, even revolutionise. Let me briefly illustrate how one’s definition of the functions of law matters to determining law’s
effectiveness.18 If the focus is on guiding behaviour, then failure to comply with the law will sooner amount to its ineffectiveness. By contrast, if the function of the
law is more a matter of restorative justice then violations do not really affect its effectiveness. What matters is whether sooner or later the norms are – ex post –
enforced on the violators. Of course, law is more complex and may have a variety of functions. But this goes just to show that one should distinguish between
different branches of law, because often the functions change accordingly. Also, we must consider the experience of the law with applying particular norms. For
example, some human rights are quite old while others very recent. One cannot expect the new right to be as effective as the older one.19 VI.4 Law Cannot Be
Understood through a Paradigm and Genealogical Inquiry Maybe I have overstated my fears for Agamben’s work. By the mere fact of using the instrument of the
‘paradigm’ and the method of genealogical inquiry he gives up any pretension of offering us a far reaching insight into the law.20 So he is harmless after all. But just
to be sure let me briefly indicate why Agamben’s methodology can tell us so little about the law (qua law). First, since his
enterprise is not at all
sociological he has no regard for the actual practice and contexts in which certain legal concepts were
used. As a result he cannot actually say whether a certain legal arrangement was actually seriously
practiced at all, let alone found relevant. For a genealogy this does not pose any problem. This also explains why Agamben can bring to the
stage without any embarrassment extremely obscure legal arrangements such as the iustitium in combination with the senatus consultum ultimum. In fact,
Roman law seems to Agamben just as relevant as US constitutional law. In fact, as Kanwar pointed out, US constitutional
does not seem at all relevant to Agamben. Similarly, the disregard for practice explains why he can omit one of the greatest practices of modern legal systems:
judicial review. The reason is simple: because social facts do not matter only the aspects are withhold that fit the paradigm. The
same happens with
all the authorities that do not fit Agamben’s paradigm. Rather than questioning his paradigm he rejects
the authority.21 However, the grounds for the rejections are unclear or rather absent. Often he cannot do better than etymology. In any event, the
rejections cannot be based on a more plausible, complex and contextualised understanding of the particular practice in which the legal concept was used. For
practice does not matter to Agamben. This maybe a well accepted methodology in the art of aesthetics, it
is not acceptable for understanding
practices of collective action and discourse such as politics and law. His contempt of practice, and the
necessary singular focus of the paradigm, drive Agamben into a dangerous ontological, and at the same
time metaphysical, exercise. This paves the way for an essentialist and – indeed – singular understanding of law. Ultimately everything can be traced
back to the state of exception. And since the law is defined as the state of exception and social facts are not to be accounted for, it is impossible to refute this
account of the law. As
he deprived the law of all its complexities, diversity, openness and at the same time
constraints (and thus normativity), no wonder why Agamben wants to get rid of the law. Agamben has ‘put up a
straw man’. First he erects up the straw man of an outdated legal formalism, as if lawyers still believed that the application of the norm could be derived exclusively
from the norm. Hardly any legal positivist will hold this view. Of course there is a decision in both law making and law applying. Big deal! You do not need Schmitt
anymore to make this point. And you certainly need not jump from the ‘decision’ to an omnipresence of the state of exception.22 What matters is to see that even or precisely -the decision is must be subjected to legal constraints. The second straw man is a law confined to a simplistic struggle between law and life. Obviously,
when presented with such an arid and binary view of law, we need metaphysical constructs such as ‘pure law’ and ‘open space of human praxis’. Instead, if we put
aside this straw man, and abandon a foundationalist and essentialist view of law, a myriad of actual legal concepts surfaces.23 And each of these concepts can
create constraints for governmental legal actions. Of course ,
none of these concepts can rule out governments abusing the
law and acting in bad faith. But they make it difficult for them. And today our current legal practices can
actually hold the individual officials accountable.24 For sure, this takes time. But the law must hesitate and take its time, for the law
needs to make a multitude of connections. In fact, without the necessary hesitations the law may even become suspect of coinciding with self-evidence and
common sense.25
The jargon of ‘exception’ is depoliticizing and ignores social reforms
Huysmans 8 (Jef – Professor of Security Studies at the Open University, “The Jargon of Exception—On
Schmitt, Agamben and the Absence of Political Society,” in International Political Sociology, Volume 2,
Issue 2, June 2008, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00042.x/abstract)
Deploying the jargon of exception and especially Agamben’s
conception of the exception-being-the-rule for reconfiguring
conceptions of politics in a biopolitical age comes at a serious cost, though. It inserts both a diagnosis of our time and a
conceptual apparatus for rethinking politics that has no place for the category that has been central to
the modern democratic tradition: the political significance of people as a multiplicity of social relations that condition politics and that
are constituted by the mediations of various objectified forms and processes (for example, scientific knowledge, technologies, property relations, legal
institutions...). Even
if one would argue that Agamben’s framing of the current political conditions are valuable
for understanding important changes that have taken place in the twentieth century and that are continuing in the twenty first, they also are to
a considerable extent depoliticizing. Agamben’s work tends to guide the analysis to unmediated, factual life. For example,
some draw on Agamben to highlight the importance of bodily strategies of resistance. One of the key examples is individual refugees protesting against their
detention by sewing up lips and eyes. They exemplify how individualized naked life resists by deploying their bodily, biological condition against sovereign
biopolitical powers (for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004:15–17). I follow Adorno and others, however, that such
a conception of bodily, naked
life is not political. It ignores how this life only exists and takes on political form through various
socioeconomic, technological, scientific, legal, and other mediations. For example, the images of the sewed-up eye- lids and lips of the
individualized and biologized refugees have no political significance without being mediated by public media, intense mobilizations on refugee and asylum
questions, contestations of human rights in the courts, etc. It is these mediations that are the object and structuring devices of political struggle. Reading
the
politics of exception as the central lens onto modern con- ceptions of politics, as both Agamben and Schmitt do, erases from the
concept of politics a rich and constitutive history of sociopolitical struggles, traditions of thought linked to this history, and key
sites and temporalities of politics as well as the central processes through which individualized bodily
resistances gain their sociopolitical significance.
2ac – action over theory
Our strategic engagement within the law is the only way to end biopolitical control
Edkins 7 (Jenny – Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, “Whatever Politics,” in
Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Ed. Calarco and DeCaroli, 2007, p. 84)
What is crucial here is whether the
alternative Agamben proposes is radical enough. Does it entail a refusal of the machine, or merely a
reinstatement of it with a different "definition" of what it means to be human? In The Open, Agamben does seem to reject Heidegger's problematic
separation of Dasein, as a being that can see the open, from the animal, poor in world, that cannot.45 Ultimately,
Agamben appears to be arguing that any negation of the machine cannot be accomplished on a
philosophical plane, but only in terms of practice. In the end, practice or human action, not philosophy, is what counts.
Ontology and philosophy are to be considered only to the extent that they are political operators and,
specifically, biopolitical weapons in the service of the anthropological machine of sovereignty. In order to try to stop the
biopolitical machine that produces bare life, what is needed is human action, "which once claimed for itself
the name of 'politics'" (SE, 88). It is because there is no necessary articulation "between violence and law,
between life and norm," that it is possible to attempt to interrupt or halt the machine, to "loosen what has been
artificially and violently linked" (SE, 87). This opens a space for a return not to some "lost original state" but to
human praxis and political action (SE, 88).
2ac – state internal link turn
A politics of dissent from the state beginining from our appeal to hope in the face of
the security state and ‘War on Terror’ allows us to create political communities
around dissensus and inspire ethical resistance
Critchley 7 (Simon – Professor of Philosophy at the New School, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of
Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Verso, 2007, p. 111-114)
Keeping these examples of the political function of rights in mind, I would like to move on to the question of the state. We inhabit states. The
state – whether
national like Britain or France, a supranational quasi-state like the EU, or imperial like the USA – is the framework within which
conventional politics takes place. Now, it is arguable that the state is a limitation on human existence and we would be better off without it. It is
arguable that without state systems of government, bureaucracy, the police and the military, human beings would be able to cooperate with each other on the
basis of free agreement and not merely through obedience to law. It is arguable that interwoven networks of such cooperative associations might begin to cover all
fields of human activity so as to substitute themselves for the state. It is arguable that the vertical hierarchy of the state structure could be replaced with
horizontally allied associations of free, self-determining human beings. Such is, of course, the eternal temptation of the anarchist tradition, particularly for someone
like Kropotkin, and I will come back to anarchism in more detail below. However – to put it at its most understated – it seems to me that we
cannot hope,
at this point in history, to attain a complete withering away of the state, either through concerted anarchosyndicalist or
anarcho-communist action or through revolutionary proletarian praxis with the agency of the party. Within classical Marxism, state, revolution and class form a
coherent set: there is a revolutionary class, the universal or classless class of the proletariat whose communist politics entails the overthrow of the bourgeois state.
The locus classicus for this position is Lenin's State and Revolution, a text that is, in my view, fatally sundered by conflicting authoritarian and anarchist tendencies.
On the one hand, in the name of the 'authentic' Marx, Lenin claims that the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced by a democratically centralist workers'
state – the dictatorship of the proletariat – but, on the other hand, he claims that this is only a pre-condition for the eventual withering away of the state in
communism or what he calls the 'fullest democracy'. 29 The condition of possibility for the Leninist withering away of the state is the emergence of a revolutionary
class, the proletariat, whom Hardt and Negri seek to update into the multitude. 30 Now, if class positions are not simplifying, but on the contrary becoming more
complex through the processes of social dislocation described in this chapter, if the revolution is no longer conceivable in a Marxist-Leninist manner, then that
means that, for good or ill – let's say for ill – we
are stuck with the state. The question then becomes: what should our
political strategy be with regard to the state, to the state and states that we're in? In a period when the
revolutionary proletarian subject has decidedly broken down, and along with it the political project of a withering away of the state, I think that politics
should be conceived at a distance from the state .31 Or, better, politics is the praxis of taking up distance
with regard to the state, working independently of the state, working in a situation. Politics is praxis in a
situation and the labour of politics is the construction of new political subjectivities, new political
aggregations in specific localities , a new dissensual habitus rooted in common sense and the
consent of those who dissent. In addition to the examples of the politics of indigenous rights discussed above, this is arguably a description of the
sort of direct democratic action that has provided the cutting edge and momentum to radical politics since the days of action against the meeting of the WTO in
Seattle in 1999 and subsequently at Prague, Nice, Genoa, Quito, Cancun and elsewhere. 32 In the face of the massive re-territorialization of state power in the West
after 9/11, this movement has continued in the huge mobilizations against US and UK intervention in Iraq, and in numerous other protests, such as the opposition
to the Republican National Convention in New York in late summer 2004. Despite
obvious electoral failures, it is the experience of
such mobilizations that provides, in my view, the ethical energy for a remotivation of politics and future
democratic organization. However, to forestall a possible misunderstanding, this distance from the state is within the
state, that is, within and upon the state's territory . It is , we might say, an interstitial distance , an internal
distance that has to be opened from the inside. What I mean, seemingly paradoxically , is that there is no
distance within the state. In the time of the purported 'war on terror', and in the name of 'security',
state sovereignty is attempting to saturate the entirety of social life. The constant ideological
mobilization of the threat of external attack has permitted the curtailments of traditional civil liberties in
the name of internal political order, so-called 'homeland security', where order and security have
become identified. Such is the politics of fear, where the political might be defined with Carl Schmitt as that activity which assures the internal order of a
political unit like a state through the more or less fantastic threat of the enemy. 33 Against this, the task of radical political articulations is
the creation of interstitial distance within the state territory. The Mexican example of indigenous
identity discussed above is a powerful instance of the creation of such a distance, an act of political
leverage where the invocation of an international legal convention created the space for the
emergence of a new political subject. Similarly, political activism around the so-called illegal immigrants in Paris, the sans-papiers, is the
attempt to create an interstitial distance whose political demand – 'if one works in France, one is French' – invokes the principle of equality at the basis of the
French republic. One
works within the state against the state in a political articulation that attempts to open
a space of opposition. Perhaps it is at this intensely situational, indeed local level that the atomizing,
expropriating force of neo-liberal globalization is to be met, contested and resisted. That is, resistance
begins by occupying and controlling the terrain upon which one stands, where one lives, works, acts
and thinks. This needn't involve millions of people. It needn't even involve thousands. It could involve
just a few at first. Resistance can be intimate and can begin in small affinity groups. The art of politics
consists in weaving such cells of resistance together into a common front, a shared political
subjectivity. What is going to allow for the formation of such a political subjectivity – the hegemonic glue, if you
will – is an appeal to universality, whether the demand for political representation, equality of treatment
or whatever. It is the hope, indeed the wager, of this book that the ethical demand described above – the
infinite responsibility that both constitutes and divides my subjectivity – might allow that hegemonic
glue to set into the compact, self-aware, fighting force that motivates the subject into the political
action spoken of in the epigraph to this chapter.
2ac – alternative fails
Alternative Fails – current methods of surveillance doom all movements – only the aff
can solve
Glennon 14 (Michael J., Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University, “National Security and Double Government”, http://harvardnsj.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf)//BW
The government itself, meanwhile, could not be counted upon to remain passive in the face of growing
public obduracy in response to its efforts to do what it thinks essential to safeguard national security.
Here we do have historical precedents, and none is comfortably revisited. The Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s;537 the Palmer Raids of
1919 and 1920;538 the round-up of Japanese-American citizens in the 1940s;539 governmental
spying on and disruption of
civil rights, draft protesters, and anti-war activists in the 1960s and 1970s;540 and the incommunicado
incarceration without charges, counsel, or trial of “unlawful combatants” only a few short years
ago541—all are examples of what can happen when government sees limited options in confronting
nerve-center security threats. No one can be certain, but the ultimate danger posed if the system were to fall to earth in the
aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack could be intensely divisive and potentially destabilizing—not unlike what was envisioned by
conservative Republicans in Congress who opposed Truman’s national security programs when the managerial network was established.542 It
is therefore appropriate to move beyond explanation and to turn to possibilities for reform—to consider
steps that might be taken to prevent the entire structure from falling to earth.
2ac - no impact
No biopolitics impact --- democracy checks
Dickinson 4 (Edward R. – Professor of History at UC Davis, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some
Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity”,” in Central European History, Volume 37, Issue 1,
March 2004,
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2758180&fileId=S0008938
900002776)
And it is, of course, embedded in a broader discursive complex (institutions, professions, fields of social, medical, and psychological expertise) that pursues these
same aims in often even more effective and inescapable ways.89 In short, the continuities
between early twentieth-century
biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are
instances of the “disciplinary society” and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states,
including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And
it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very
broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates
the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the
democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism.
Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National
Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the
potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce “health,” such a
system can —and historically does— create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there
are political and policy potentials and
constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist
Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and
participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this
pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have
imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a “logic” or imperative of
increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable
message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is
an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for
sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be
analyzed as a condition of “liberty,” just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism
cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic
of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory.
Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century
totalitarian states; these systems are not “opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are
two very different ways of organizing it. The concept “power” should not be read as a universal stifling
night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are
essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and
effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in
different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure,
but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create “multiple modernities,” modern societies with quite radically differing
potentials.91
Biopolitics is good --- it supports life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
Ojakangas 5 (Mika – Professor of Political Thought at the University of Jyvaskyla, “Impossible Dialogue
on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault,” in Foucault Studies, Number 2, p. 26-27,
http://dferagi.webs.ull.es/d/social2/docs/Foucault.3.pdf)
In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form of power which refrains
from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of bio-power can be seen lying precisely in that it refrains and
withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would derive from the demand of justice. In bio-political societies, according to
Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: “One had
the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.”112 However, given that the “right to kill” is precisely a sovereign right, it can be
argued that the bio-political societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely bio-political. Perhaps, there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely
bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present-day
European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them,
there are no longer exceptions. It is the very “right to kill” that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question because of enlightened
moral sentiments, but rather because
of the deployment of bio-political thinking and practice. For all these reasons,
Agamben’s thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental bio-political
paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.113 The bio-political paradigm of the West is not the
concentration camp, but, rather, the present-day welfare society and, instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the
bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. Although this figure is an object – and a product – of the huge biopolitical machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his
greatest “crime” against the machinery. (In bio-political societies, death is not only “something to be hidden away,” but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most
“shameful thing of all”.114) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact, the
bio-political machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material
spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily – even when, in biological terms, he “should have
been dead long ago”.115 This is because bio-power is not bloody power over bare life for its own sake but
pure power over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the condition of all life –
individual as well as collective – that is the measure of the success of bio-power.