The 1AC’s instance of state reform is the invocation of the legal regulation of violence – their existential threats are spectacularized to normalize the state of exception. The 1AC was not objective – political discourse is militarized and distorted to justify a state of exception – the resulting global civil war causes unending warfare and extinction
McLoughlin 12 [Daniel McLoughlin is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of
New South Wales, working on the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. “Giorgio Agamben on
Security, Government and the Crisis of Law”, Griffith Law Review, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2012, msm]
One of the decisive effects of total war, according to Junger, was the
¶
tendency to demolish the difference between war and peace – or, in ¶ Agamben’s terms, between the emergency and normal conditions. Similarly, ¶ Agamben argues that we are currently faced with the seemingly
¶
‘unstoppable progression’ of a ‘global civil war’.77 Although Agamben does
¶
not explain what he means by this in State of Exception, he does flesh the
¶
idea out in Means Without Ends in two different directions. The first of these
¶
is the emergence of the ‘sovereign police’.78
Modern political philosophy has
¶ historically distinguished between the state’s right to use coercive violence
¶ against its citizens and the sovereign right to go to war against enemy states.
¶
This was accompanied by a distinction between the legal regulation of violence within a state’s territory and the regulation of war between states through
international law
.79 Within the contemporary political horizon,
¶
however, states no longer declare war against one another, and war is disguised as a police operation , in which the ‘outright invasion of a
¶ sovereign state’ is
‘presented as an act of internal jurisdiction’
.80
This
, for ¶ Agamben, confirms
Carl
Schmitt’s assertion that ‘every war
in our time has
¶ become a civil war’
.81The second sense in which
Agamben deploys the idea of ‘ global civil
¶ war’ pertains
not to the exercise of state violence, but to contemporary forms
¶
of social regulation : state power is
, he argues, now principally founded on
¶ the ‘control of appearance’, and as a result social life has become the site of
¶ a ‘global civil war’ whose ‘storm troopers are the media, whose victims are all the peoples of the Earth’
.82 In this sense, ‘ civil war’ does not refer to a
¶ military conflict being waged between two parties vying for control of the
¶ state, but to contemporary forms of biopolitical regulation that seek to control the forms of life within the state through the manipulation of ‘public opinion’ .
While this description of contemporary social regulation as a civil
¶
war is rather metaphorical, what is at stake in it is the attempt to mobilise,
¶ for radical political ends, the language of threat and war that so dominates
¶ contemporary political discourse.
¶
Agamben argues that ‘the voluntary creation of a permanent emergency
¶
… has become an essential practice of contemporary states , including
the socalled
¶ democratic ones’
.83 Here, the state of exception operates as a
¶
‘ technique of government’ in that the production and manipulation of a sense of emergency is used as a tool of socio-political regulation
.
The
¶ generalisation of actual combat through the development of the ‘sovereign
¶ police’ plays a crucial role in the normalisation of the state of emergency as
¶ a technique of government. War plays an extraordinarily useful political role , as it helps to rally support for the state and to quell opposition, and can
¶ aid in justifying policies and legal

measures that would not be acceptable without the sense of an immediate and pressing danger .
84
Invoking the
¶ language of warfare for political problems that fall far short of actual warfare
¶ can
also help to produce
many of the same political effects as the threat
¶ posed by combat, allowing for the ‘total mobilisation of social forces for a united purpose that is typical of warfare’
.85 Indeed, since the period of total
¶
war, there has indeed been a continued and extensive militarisation of political discourse
, from the Cold War through to other so-called
‘wars’ (on
¶
poverty, drugs, terror and so on), and the language of existential threat and emergency is such extraordinarily common political currency that it is deployed to frame all kinds of social and economic problems
, from football
¶ hooliganism to famine, flood and child abuse.86
¶
Agamben’s description of contemporary social regulation as a form of
¶
‘civil war’ is an attempt to reappropriate this kind of political language. The
¶ media spectacle of war
( and war-like states of emergency
) presents the
¶ existence of a threat that authorises state action to protect the population
. For Agamben, however, the major threat that we face is the political and economic status quo: the contemporary ‘spectaculardemocratic’ form of world organisation ‘ actually
runs the risk of being the worst tyranny that ever materialized in the history of humanity, against which resistance and dissent will be practically more and more difficult – and all the more so in
¶ that it that is increasingly clear that such an organisation will have the task of
¶ managing the survival of humanity in an uninhabitable world’
.87
The
¶ decisive conflict of our time is
thus not that between states or ideologies, or
¶
between state terrorism and the terrorism of non-state actors; rather, it is the conflict between the forces preserving the political and economic status quo
¶
( the state, ‘mercantile economy’ and media
) and a global populace whose common interest in an inhabitable world is being profoundly endangered
.
¶
This rather lopsided ‘ civil war’ is being waged by
those forces interested in
¶ the preservation of the current order through modes of biopolitical regulation that perpetuate prevailing forms of life and close down the possibility of the alternatives emerging.
The state of exception leads to the creation of the camps – genocide becomes justified in the name of the sovereign
Agamben, 96 [Giorgio, PhD in philosophy and professor of philosophy at the European
Graduate School, University of Minnesota Press, “Means without End: Notes on
Politics”, Theory out of Bounds Volume 20 p.47-55, 1996, http://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Agamben_Giorgio_Means_without_end_notes_on
_politics_2000.pdf, 7/19/15]JRO
WHAT HAPPENED in the camps exceeds the juridical concept of crime to such an extent that the specific political juridical structure
within which those events took place has
often been left
simply unexamined.
The camp is the place in which the most absolute condition ln anana ever to appear on Earth was realized: this is ultimately all that counts for the victors as well as for posterity. Here I will deliberately set out in the opposite direction. Rather than deducing the definition of camp from the events that took place there, I will ask instead: What is a camp?

What z:r its political-juridical structure? How could such events have taken place there? This will lead us to look at the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly that-though admittedly still with us- belongs nonetheless to the past,
but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nonos of the political space in which we still live. Historians debate whether the first appearance of camps ought to be identified with the campos de concentraciones that were created in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba in order to repress the insurrection of that colony's population, or rather with the concentration camps into which the English herded the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century. What matters here is that in both cases one is dealing with the extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a colonial war. '" in other words the camps
,
, were not born out of ordinary law
~ and even less ·were they the product-as one might have believed-of a transformation and a development of prison law; rather
, they were born out of the state of exception and martial law.
This is
even more evident in the case of the Nazi Lager
, whose origin and juridical regime is well documented. It is well known that the juridical foundation of internment was not ordinary law but
rather the Schutzhaft (literally, protective custody), which was a juridical institution
of Prossian derivation that Nazi jurists
sometimes considered a measure of preventive policing inasmuch as it enabled the
"taking into custody" of individuals regardless of any relevant criminal behavior and exclusively in order to avoid threats to the security of the state.
The origin of the Schutzhaft, however, resides in the Prussian law on the state of siege that was passed on June 4, 1851, and that was extended to the whole of Germany (with the exception of Bavaria) in 1871, as well as in the earlier Prussian law on the
"protection of personal freedom
" (Schutz der persiinlichen Freiheit) that was passed on February 12, 1850. Both these laws were applied widely during World War I
. One cannot overestimate the importance of this constitutive nexus between state of exception and concentration camp for a correct understanding of the nature of the camp
. Ironically, the "protection" of freedom that is in question
in the Schutzhaji
: is a protection against the suspension of the law that characterizes the state of emergency
. What is new here is that this institution is dissolved by the state of exception on which it was founded and is allowed to continue to be in force under normal circumstances. The camp
is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule
. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that
, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law
.
When fIimmler decided, in March 1933, on the occasion of the celebrations of Hitler's election to the chancellorship of the Reich, to create a
"concentration camp for political prisoners" at Dachau, this camp was immediately entrusted to the SS and, thanks to the Schutzhaft, was placed outside the jurisdiction of criminal law as well as prison law, with which it neither then nor later ever had anything to do. Dachau, as well as the other camps that were soon added to it (Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Lichtenberg), remained virtually always operative: the number of initiates varied and during certain periods (in particular, between 1935 and 1937, before the deportation of the Jews began) it decreased to 7,500 people; the camp as such, however, had become a permanent reality in Germany. One ought to reflect on
the paradoxical status of the camp as space of exception: the camp is a piece of territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order
; for all that
, however, it is not simply
an external
space. According to the etymological meaning of the term exception (ex-capere), what is being excluded in the camp is captured outside
, that is, it is included by virtue of its very exclusion
. Thus
, what is being captured under the rule of law is
first of all the very
state of exception
. In other words
, if sovereign power is founded on the ability to decide on the state of exception, the camp is the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realized
. Hannah Arendt observed once that what comes to light in the camps is the principle that supports totalitarian domination and that common sense stubbornly refuses to admit to, namely, the principle according to which anything is possible.
It is only because the camps constitute
a space of exception- a space in which
d1e
law is completely suspended-that everything is truly possible
in them. If one does not understand this particular political-juridical structure of the camps, whose vocation is precisely to realize permanently the exception, the incredible events that took place in them remain entirely unintelligible. The people who entered the camp moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared; moreover, if they were Jews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights by the
Nuremberg Laws and were later completely denationalized at the moment of the "final solution." Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized
-a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation
. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which

politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen.
The correct question regarding
the horrors comn1itted in the camps
, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other
human
beings
; it would be more
honest, and above all .more useful, to investigate carefully how
-that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political deviceshuman beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime
(at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible
). If this is the case, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life
as such, we will then have to ad1nit to be facing a camp virtually every ti1ne that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crirnes co1nmitted in it and regardless of the
denomination and specific topography it might have. The soccer stadium in Bari in which the Italian police temporarily herded Albanian illegal immigrants in 1991 before sending them back to their countr y, the cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities rounded up the Jews before handing them over to the Germans, the refugee camp near the Spanish border where Antonio
Machado died in 1939, as well as the zones d'attente in French international airports in which foreigners requesting refugee status are detained will all have to be considered camps. In all these cases, an apparently anodyne place (such as the flotel Arcade near the Paris airport) delimits instead a space in which,
for all intents and purposes,
the normal rule of law is suspended and
in which the
fact that atrocities
may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but
rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act
temporarily as sovereign
. This is the case, for example, during the four days foreigners may be kept in the zone d'attente before the intervention of French judicial authorities. In this sense, even certain
outskirts
of the great postindustrial cities as well as the gated communities of the U nited
S tates are beginning
today to look like camps, in which naked life and political life
, at least in determinate moments, enter a zone of absolute indeterminacy.
From this perspective
, the birth of the camp
in our time appears to be an event that marks in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity. This birth takes place when the political system of the modern
nationstate
-founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (the state), which was mediated by automatic regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation)- enters a period of permanent crisis and the state decides to undertake the management of the biological life of the nation directly as its own task.
In other words, if the structure of the nationstate is defined by
three elementsterritory, order, and birth
-the rupture of the old nomos does not take place in the two aspects that, according to Carl Schmitt, used to constitute it (that is, localization, Ortung, and order,
Ordnung), but rather at the site in which naked life is inscribed in them (that is, there where inscription turns birth into nation). There is something that no longer functions in the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate this inscription, and new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the orderor, rather, it is the the camp is the sign of the system's inability to function without transforming itself into a lethal machine
. It is important to note that the camps appeared at the same time that the new laws on citizenship and on the denationalization of citizens were issued
(not only the Nuremberg IJaws on citizenship in the
Reich but also the laws on the denationalization of citizens that were issued by almost all the European states
, including France, between 1915 and 1933).
The state of exception
, which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the order
, becomes now a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be inscribed into the order. The increasingly widening gap
between birth
(naked life) and nation-state
is the new fact
of the politics of our time and what we are calling
"camp" is this disparity
. ·roan order without localization (that is, the state of exception during which the law is suspended) corresponds now
a localization without order (that is, the camp as permanent space of exception
). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical norms in a detenninate space; rather, it contains within itself a dislocating localization that exceeds it and in which virtually every form of life and every norm can be captured
.
The camp intended as a dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we
still live
, and we must learn to recognize it in all of its metamorphoses.
1--he camp is the fourth and inseparable element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of nation (birth), state, and territory. It is from this perspective that we need to see the reappearance of camps in a form that is, in a certain sense, even more extreme in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. What is happening there is not at all, as some interested observers rushed to declare, a redefinition of the old political system according to new ethnic and territorial arrangements, that is, a simple repetition of the processes that culminated in the constitution

of the European nation-states. Rather, we note there an irreparable rupture of the old nomos as w·ell as a dislocation of populations and human lives according to entirely new lines of flight. That is why the camps of ethnic rape are so crucially important. If the Nazis never thought of carrying out the "final solution" by impregnating Jewish women, that is because the principle of birth, which ensured the inscription of life in the order of the nationstate, was in some way still functioning, even though it was profoundly transformed. This principle is now adrift: it has entered a process of dislocation in which its functioning is becoming patently impossible and in which w·e can expect not only new camps but also always new and more delirious norm.ative definitions of the inscription of life in the city. The camp, which is now firn1ly settled inside it, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet.
The alternative is to reject the 1ac in order to create the coming community through whatever singularity
Robinson, 11 – [Andrew, is a political theorist and activist at Ceasefire, Ceasefire, “In
Theory Giorgio Agamben: destroying sovereignty”, 1/21/11, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-destroying-sovereignty/ ,
7/26/15]JRO
This imperative leads Agamben to construct an alternative account of
politics. Since sovereign power is based on the separation between bare life
and politically recognised life, its destruction requires overcoming the
division, constituting a form of bare (or biological) life which is also the site
for its own form of political life, or which is wholly exhausted in bare life and
does not require a supplementary political dimension. It must refuse any external decision, any logic which splits bare life from something else, and
thereby take away the sovereign power to decide or ‘ban’. In other words, it requires that bare life be autonomous and self-validating. Bare life must claim the ability to value itself directly, without the mediation of
sovereignty. The overlap of this view with Deleuzian network-based critiques of hierarchies, autonomist ideas of self-activity and self-valorisation, and antirepresentationalist strands of anarchism such as Immediatism is extensive, and helps explain why Agamben’s concepts periodically pop up in insurrectionist texts.
Agamben proposes ‘whatever-singularity’ as an alternative basis for political
action, which escapes the logic of sovereignty. Taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, a singularity is something which is unique and which can’t be
reduced to a measurement or representation. Agamben likes it because it
avoids his having to choose between universality and particularity.
“Whatever” in English has unfortunate overtones of indifference (“whatever, talk to the hand”) which is not at all what Agamben means. Rather, he is referring to
something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is
– as opposed to the sovereign decision to divide life into things which matter
and things which don’t. A “whatever-singularity” is neither reducible to its attributes nor expressible as an abstract generality such as universal
humanity; rather, it is something which has general value as it is, with all of its
attributes (and especially, as potentiality or possibility). It does not depend on any standard of conformity or subjectification or normality, or on belonging to the people or masses. It also denies that there is any particular essence which makes people human – instead, being human is a scattering of
singularities. Whatever-singularity is also a kind of being which people are assumed to already have, which for instance motivates resistance to being normalised. In a sense,
this is a radicalised version of human rights discourse, since anyone, whatever they are and whatever they do, is recognised as having a kind of autonomous
ethical value. This is fundamentally an ethics of ‘letting be’ (with overtones of
‘being who you are’). It entails doing away with normativity as usually defined, with standards of good and evil which declare certain people to be valueless because of some particularly heinous deviant act they’ve committed (in contrast to the more common approach of either contracting normativity to cover a smaller range of acts, or

altering it to focus on oppressive abuses). For instance, Agamben argues that ideas such as guilt and responsibility are derived from legal thought and hence from sovereignty.
The ethical challenge Agamben poses is to still view every person – and, in line with the discussion in The Open, every animal – as fundamentally valuable in their own life, as having forms of life and particularity worthy of respect and autonomous existence, regardless of how ‘bad’ they are or what ‘crimes’ they commit. In effect, Agamben aims to take away, through choices in terms of language, ethics and philosophy, the threat posed by others’ ethical judgements in constituting a person or being as
vulnerable. This does not remove human vulnerability per se, but does
remove the particular risk of being made into homo sacer. It does, however, leave a particular ethical problem: are agents of sovereignty also to be treated as
‘whatever-singularities’, or as the negation of all such singularities?
The ‘coming community’ corresponds on a collective level to ‘whatever-
singularity’. It is related to the ‘people to come’, a concept Deleuze and Guattari borrow from Bergson, and to messianic ideas of a coming liberation. Agamben refers to the coming community as a form of social togetherness which is also a ‘non-state’ and is counterposed to the logic of sovereignty. The coming community is defined in Agamben as a kind of post-consumerist condition, emerging from a passage through current forms of life, such as the indifference of mass media images and of
commodities through which one can reshape one’s identity. It passes through and beyond such forms of life by radicalising their challenge to normativity and
sovereignty. It is not a hybrid space – hybridity is already actualised in homo sacer and the sovereign – but rather, a negation, the ‘un-man’. It is based on ‘whateversingularities’ in their antagonism with the state and sovereignty (hence it cannot seek
to seize state power). Agamben believes that whatever-singularities can form
communities without affirming ‘representable conditions of belonging’ (such as laws, norms, etc). It also does not rest on categories of identity (even the identity of excluded or marginalised groups), which for Agamben, remain trapped
within old forms of politics which reproduce sovereignty (mainly because the recognition of an identity is necessarily separate from the processes of
life which constitute it). In conditions of sovereignty, life has to separate itself from the orders of subjects and objects, to free itself from biopower and
from hierarchical relations with living things, to become whatever-singularity and to attain radical immanence. In Potentialities, Agamben argues for an almost
Buddhist stance of contemplative separation which preserves instead of deciding.
Agamben’s stance also has a revolutionary aspect. Rather than starting from
identity, Agamben’s ethical theory starts from the standpoint of bare life. In
Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben argues that the ethical standpoint from which one should start is provided by the experience of concentration camp
inmates. More precisely, it should start from the standpoint of the most abject sub-group of inmates, the so-called Musselmanner who were near death and
had lost the will to live, who hence embodied directly the idea of bare life. This is because of a particular moment of inversion. The moment of catastrophe is taken also to contain the moment where salvation becomes possible, with passage through the low point of the current expansion of sovereignty acting as a transition to liberation. This is a rather strange argument, but based on a viable observation: that only when the logic of sovereignty is fully unfolded (only when we are faced with a giant tree instead of a sapling) does the nature of the problem – or the nature of what needs to be got rid of – become clear. This also means that, in Agamben’s view, liberation is ambiguously tied to sovereignty, as its negation. In a sense, therefore, Agamben remains within a Marxist

model of historical becoming. Richard Day has expanded Agamben’s argument, claiming that social networks of marginalised groups are already ‘coming communities’, and also that the term should always be kept plural. He views the Marxist element in Agamben’s thought as unhelpful, arguing that post-consumers are not the most likely source of the coming communities. Another aspect of the coming community is that, on one level, it is a very small shift. Inspired by Jewish theology and authors such as Walter Benjamin,
Agamben draws on messianic ideas of a total transformation of the existing world into a different world through a small gesture, the addition of an aura, or a new way of seeing.
In a sense, everything stays as it is, and yet is rendered different by the removal of the transcendent moment of sovereignty.

Their militaristic framing of asteroids as a natural and inevitable enemy turns everything into a possible threat and strengthens the space defense industry – natural technological progression will solve the impact of asteroids for future generations
– Lecturer in Science Communication in the Humanities Department at Imperial
College London (Felicity, “Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and Legitimization of War in
Space”, Sagepub, Social Studies of Science, 499(37), RG)
The asteroid impact threat was
thus articulated
within a narrative context that was closely aligned to science fiction and was shared by both civilian scientists and defence experts
. As Veronica
Hollinger (2000: 216–17) has noted, traditional science fiction is driven by an Aristotelian plot characterized by ‘a valorisation of the logic of cause and effect’. Impact narratives conformed to this traditional narrative logic: asteroids and scientists act by causing a series of events to unfold, from the approach of an asteroid and recognition of the threat through
attempts at technological mitigation to resolution
in salvation.
These narratives configured asteroids as acting agents in human affairs and brought
to asteroid science a structure in which human agents (and their technological proxies) solve the problem posed in the narrative
and in so doing achieve closure.
Allusions to impact narratives implied a
direction and human-centredness
to events that
, once the narratives had been evoked, could not easily be suppressed
. Despite their attempts to distance themselves from the weapons scientists, the civilian scientists experienced a
‘narrative imperative’ that drew them towards the same technologized ends as those promoting SDI. A sense of narrative agency was evoked even in texts that were not primarily narratival. Crucially, signifiers of the mathematically exacting Newtonian system, the asteroids were no longer seen as distant objects moving through
empty backdrop of space
. Rather, they were configured as proximate beasts, acting subjects that could turn against humanity at any moment
. Thus in their many popular books on the subject, the scientists described asteroids as
belonging to a ‘menagerie’ or a ‘cosmic zoo’ (Steel, 2000a: 120); they were ‘ menacing’
(Kring, 2000: 171) and had ‘teeth’
(Clube & Napier, 1990:
154); they were ‘ global killers’
(Lewis, 1997: 209) that could unleash ‘ferocious assaults’
(Steel,
1995: 247) on the Earth; they were the ‘enemy’
(Steel, 2000a: 153). Likewise, in their paper in Nature, Chapman
& Morrison (1994: 33) stated that Earth ‘resides in a swarm of asteroids’.
The construction of asteroids as the enemy was accompanied by a range of
other militaristic metaphors
. In the popular books, asteroids became ‘missiles’, ‘pieces of ordnance’ or ‘stealth weapons’ (Lewis, 1997: 37), which bombard the Earth with a ‘death-dealing fusillade’ (Clube & Napier, 1990: 7). In a technical paper, too, they were construed as ‘astral assailant[s]’
(Simonenko et al., 1994: 929). Where the military and the politicians talked of rogue states, 27 the scientists talked of ‘rogue asteroids’ (Steel, 1995; Ailor, 2004: 3).
This analogy was
further reinforced by the construction of scenarios in which a small impact might be mistaken for the detonation of a nuclear warhead
. One technical paper speculated on what would have happened during the first Gulf War if an atmospheric explosion that had been caused by a meteor burning up over the Pacific had actually occurred over Baghdad or Israel (Tagliaferri et al., 1994). The authors suggested that such an event would have been mistaken for a missile detonation by the opposing state. In such scenarios, the actions of interplanetary bodies were not just compared with those of rogue states but came to be identified with them. With the swarming asteroids filling space, space itself was also resignified. What had been an abstract mathematical space became a narrative place, the location where particular and contingent events occurred.
Although the scientists continued to appeal to the predictability of celestial dynamics – it was this that would enable a survey of near-Earth objects to identify any that might pose a threat
– they also noted that chaotic processes disturbed the orbits of comets and also, to a lesser degree, asteroids (for example, Yeomans &
Chodas, 1994; Milani et al., 2000). The inherent unpredictability of the orbits was enhanced by the current state of scientific uncertainty.
These chaotic and uncertain processes were projected onto

space itself, construed as a place of random violence
. In the popular books, the Solar
System became a ‘dangerous cosmic neighbourhood’ (Sumners & Allen, 2000b: 3), ‘a capricious, violent place’ (Verschuur, 1996:
217), a place of ‘mindless violence’ (Verschuur, 1996: 18) and ‘wanton destruction’ (Levy, 1998: 13). Even in a peer-reviewed paper,
Chapman (2004: 1) described space as a ‘cosmic shooting gallery’. Despite the agency attributed to the asteroids themselves, in the narratives of technological salvation it was the human agents, acting through new technologies, who moved the narratives forward.
Narrative progression was thus generated through an assumption of technological progress.
Through technology, humans intervene in space and become agents of cosmic events
. The scientists’ promotion of the impact threat shared this assumption of technological progress. Like the US Air Force study, their technical papers on mitigation systems considered speculative technologies such as solar sails and mass drivers as well as more established explosive technologies (for example, Ahrens & Harris, 1992; Melosh & Nemchinov, 1993; Ivashkin & Smirnov, 1995; Gritzner & Kahle, 2004).
Even those scientists who warned that it was too early to draw up detailed blueprints of interception technologies accepted the narratival implication that there was a problem that needed addressing, that the problem could be addressed by human action, and that this action would involve a technological solution. Technology, in this picture, was configured as inherently progressive. As
Morrison & Teller (1994: 1137) put it: ‘The development of technology in the past few centuries has been towards increasing understanding and control of natural forces in an effort to improve human life.’
Those scientists who argued against the immediate development of mitigation technology shared
with its proponents a belief in the inexorable progress of technology
.
Future generations
, they argued, would be better equipped than we are at the moment to meet the technological challenge of an impacting asteroid
(for example, Ahrens
& Harris, 1992). In contrast to traditional astronomical systems, which passively watched the skies, asteroid detection systems were to be surveillance systems that actively hunted the skies for objects of human import
. The Spaceguard Survey was predicated on a will to action in a way in which the earlier Spacewatch Survey was not. Similarly, when it fired its impactor at Comet Tempel 1, NASA’s Deep Impact mission took a far more active intervention in space than did earlier generations of probes. This was not far from Edward Teller’s call for
‘experimentation’ with near-Earth objects to test defence technologies (Tedeschi & Teller, 1994; Teller, 1995), an idea dismissed at the time as extreme by some civilian scientists (Chapman, 1998). Likewise, one of the recommendations of the 2004 Planetary
Defense Conference was that deflection techniques should be demonstrated on an actual asteroid (Ailor, 2004: 5). 28 The technologization of space promoted in
both the fictional works and the scientists’ technical proposals
, also formed an integral part of the imagery and rhetoric that surrounded SDI
, as its detractors highlighted when they re-named the project Star Wars.
SDI was always premised on a vision of space as a technologized theatre of war
. In the hands of a technoenthusiast such as Edward Teller, SDI was configured as a space-based technological extravaganza with few limits. 29 In SDI, as in asteroid research and science fiction, space became a dynamic arena through which our technologies would move , in which our weapons would be placed , and across which our wars were to be waged
. 30 As discussed in the introduction to this paper, narrative is an inherently teleological form. In conventional narratives, the action is moved towards closure by the heroes of the story. In the impact narratives, the heroes are technological heroes set the task of saving the world. By drawing on these narratives and following the call for human agency inherent in the narrative structure, the scientists implicitly accepted this role as a necessary one. Having shifted apocalypse from the realm of nuclear politics to that of natural science, the impact-threat scientists were able to position themselves as heroes whose combined far-sightedness and technological know-how would save us all
. Emphasizing the role of the unacknowledged hero in a foreword to a volume of conference proceedings, astronomer Tom Gehrels (2002: xiii) claimed: ‘There is a beauty also in hazards, because we are taking care of them. We are working to safeguard our planet, even if the world does not seem to want to be saved.’ In a paper in another volume of conference proceedings, astrophysicist Eugene Levy was even more explicit about the scientists’ expanded role: In the arms race, the motivating dynamic was a political one. A dynamic in which scientists and engineers provided the technical tools, but, as a group, brought no special and unique wisdom to the table in making judgements about what to do. In the present case, the dynamic is different.
The adversary is not another nation; the calculus is not one of political fears, anxieties, and motivations
, for which we scientists have no special expertise. Rather the ‘adversary’ is the physical world
. In assessing this adversary, we scientists have special and unique expertise. (Levy, 1994: 7; italics in original) Eclipsing the political dimension of the impact threat with their appeals to the natural, the scientists appropriated for themselves a heroic role. This technological hero was a moral hero – he would warn us of the danger and save us despite ourselves. Thus the scientists frequently quoted Representative George Brown’s opening statement to a Congressional hearing when he warned that if we were to do nothing about the impact threat, it would be ‘the greatest abdication in all of human history not to use our gift of rational intellect and conscience to shepherd our own survival and that of all life on Earth’. 31 Through such claims, the issue of planetary defence became a moral frame through which other threats of more human origin could also be addressed
. Increased knowledge and surveillance of asteroids, the scientists insisted, would help stop mistakes by the military decision-makers by preventing the misidentification of asteroid airbursts as enemy nuclear warheads (Chapman &
Morrison, 1994: 39). At the same time, destroying asteroids would provide us with a way

of using up those unwanted bombs
. As John Lewis (1997: 215) put it: ‘The net result of the asteroid deflection is really a twofold benefit to Earth: a devastating impact would be avoided and there would be one less nuclear warhead on
Earth.’ Similarly, Duncan Steel saw the use of SDI technologies in asteroid missions such as Clementine II as ‘a prime example of beating swords into ploughshares’ (quoted in Matthews, 1997).

The 1AC allows the surveillance state to be replaced by corporations and makes populations disposable in the name of security
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
“Deleuze and New Technology” edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
Such techniques of control have the effect of positioning individuals as
continual subjects of risk and suspicion (Campbell 2004: 78-92): every young person is potentially a thug or a criminal, every Muslim potentially a terrorist. Control techniques are used not so much to identify a particular individual, but rather to identify a future risk and to attach this risk to
certain types of individuals. Governments today, for instance, talk about identifying children 'at risk' of delinquency or of posing a potential threat to
society - in some cases before they are even born! New surveillance technology is even being developed which claims to be able to predict crimes and terrorist
attacks on public transport systems before they occur - CCTV recordings of members of people on buses and trains are matched against computer files of
'suspicious' behaviour, triggering an alarm when they correspond. We see here the automatic functioning of control technology - where computers rather than
judges, police and psychiatrists become the arbiters of the norm. Perhaps we could say that whereas disciplinary societies constituted the subject as a fixed identity - defining him according to rigid categories such as normal/abnormal, sane/mad - societies of control seek to define the individual through a series of different, modulated and overlapping states of risk, with indeterminate and shifting borders: being 'at risk' of delinquency, terrorism (we see that the metaphor of the virus is now used to describe the risk of terrorism spreading through Muslim communities, fuelled by those demonic
'radical preachers'), sickness, mental illness, Attention Deficit Disorder, drug abuse, and so on. We are now all positioned as subjects of permanent risk, capable of certain unpredictable and criminal behaviours at any time.
Biopolitics and Global Capitalism
In this paradigm, moreover, the body itself becomes the site of permanent
crisis and, thus, the target of control technologies. The body is policed,
monitored, controlled - and yet is seen as constantly threatened by obesity, smoking, binge-drinking. Health standards such as the BMI (Body Mass Index) are
enforced with all the ferocity of Victorian moral codes. Our bodies - particularly our genes - have become the source of all our pathologies, moral failings and deviant behaviours: it is no longer our sexuality, as Foucault
maintained, but our DNA that is seen as the secret of our being. This obsession with the body would be characteristic of what Foucault himself termed 'biopower' - a new kind of power that functioned at the level of biological life, seeking to control its flows and functions and to harness its vital forces. The emergence of this new political
technology coincided with developments, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the biological, human and social sciences, and governmental

discourses - bodies of knowledge and political rationalities which took the
population and economic life as their proper domain. As Foucault says:
For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere
of intervention. (Foucault 1979: 142)
It is within this paradigm of biopower that governments busy themselves
with health matters, with 'obesity epidemics', for instance; that they take an interest in the health of individuals and the general population; that they
centralise medical information in large national databases. Biopower, and the practice of biopoiitics, in this sense, can be seen as providing a general strategy of coordination for the diffuse technologies of control. To put it simply, the general aim
of power today is the control of life itself. As Foucault showed, politics no longer generally subscribes to the sovereign function of the power to kill,
the power to end life - although as we shall see, this sovereign function has
uncannily reappeared today at the heart of modern power regimes; rather,
power now functions to preserve and sustain life. Yet, as benign as this might
sound, it means that power now reaches deep into life itself , controlling,
monitoring and regulating its palpitations. Moreover, the destruction of life in the name of preserving it functions as biopower's permanent and lethal
underside .4
Deleuze's notion of control as superseding discipline can only be understood against the background of biopower/biopolitics. Already Foucault himself had charted a general shift from disciplinary power to biopower: while disciplinary power was focused on the individual, his body and his pathologies, biopower focuses on the population at large, monitoring its movements, migrations and epidemics; measuring its
birth, mortality and longevity rates; assessing its economic output. It produces a sort of globalising effect. Secondly, where disciplinary power sought to enclose the individual within a physical or discursive space, biopower
presupposes a certain freedom of movement and choice - therefore requiring a free-floating and modulated form of regulation and control (Foucault 2003). The superseding of disciplinary power by biopower - a process accompanied by a frequent overlapping between the two paradigms - seems to directly prefigure De1euze's description of the emergence of the control society. Control societies seek an all- encompassing control over life - both at the global level of populations, and
at the infinitesimal level of our biological substratum.
Moreover, the logic of biopolitical control coincides with and sustains the spread of global capitalism and the unchallenged hegemony of the neo-liberal economic model.
Economic liberalism, as Foucault showed, was not a withdrawal of the state from economic life - as traditional laissez-faire notions would have it - but rather a much more complex interaction whereby the market is discursively constructed as an entity to be shaped and guided through certain governmental rationalities and strategies (Foucault
2004; Gordon 1991 ). Moreover, within this paradigm, individuals are seen as subjects to be regulated and policed through the market. In modern control societies, this occurs through the construction of the subject as a consumer

who has a certain number of 'choices' defined by the market; and who is subjected to constant advertising. The individual is thus policed through the market. As
Deleuze points out, control today takes place through marketing, and the individual is no longer the individual but the 'dividual' who is inserted into an endless series of samples, data and markets: 'marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces an arrogant breed who are our new masters' (Deleuze 1995: 181).
This new breed of masters is none other than the corporation : an entity which now has a global reach and achieves a planetary colonisation, turning the world
into a giant market. The corporation is the 'soul', as Deleuze would say, of
modern control societies. However, what we see is not simply the corporation taking over from the government and displacing its traditional role of service provider, but rather the corporation and the government melding
together and becoming indistinguishable. Public/private sector 'partnerships' increasingly manage what were traditionally public services and infrastructure; governments and government institutions today are run like corporations, introducing private sector management techniques and free market mechanisms, and subjecting employees to continual performance reviews.
Moreover, the economic and social dislocations wrought by neoliberal economic policies require a more sophisticated form of social control: the workforce must be disciplined, and industrial and political militancy must be discouraged - the only acceptable form of freedom in modern neo-liberal societies is the narrow consumerist freedom of the market. The destruction of traditional working-class identities and communities due to retrenchment, downsizing
and outsourcing must be patched over with a new ideological conservatism - one that stresses the dangers posed to community and family life from crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour and the breakdown of discipline. The communitarian discourse of
New Labour in the UK - with its almost hysterical focus on 'law-and-order' issues - would be an example of this, functioning as nothing more than a flimsy disguise for its ruthless pursuit of Thatcherite economic policies. The spectre of crime or terrorism serves
as an ideological scapegoat here: society needs its enemies, as Foucault would say, and the enemies of the control society - those who endanger our 'safety' and 'security' - are constituted as the 'other' in opposition to which society achieves an uncertain cohesion.

Cyber war and our conceptions of it rely on a state of exception. We see them as non-political wars. You can’t see who attacks, and the attackers can’t see what they do. The wars are waged from the shadows. Sanctioned by the law, but carried out beyond the law.
Gregory 11
The everywhere wargeoj_426 238..250 DEREK GREGORY Department of Geography, University of
British Columbia, 217-1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 E-mail: derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca
This paper was accepted for publication in May 2011 The Geographical Journal, Vol. 177, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 238–
250, doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00426.x
♥
Tina
It is virtually impossible to determine how far the US was involved in the attack, though Gross (2011) believes there is now ‘vanishingly little doubt that the United States played a role in creating the worm’. In any event, although Stuxnet spread virally far beyond its presumed target, its operational precision shows that cyber warfare has developed far beyond the capacity proposed for the United
States by a USAF colonel who once urged the development of ‘the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace’
. ‘Not every attack has to be made with a laser-guided bomb’, he argued, and since ‘area bombing’ against the Taliban had been so successful (sic) in Afghanistan he could not see what was wrong with its equivalent in cyber- space (Williamson 2008). He clearly had DDS attacks in mind, but he saw these as a deterrent – a defensive capacity – and recommended the staging of ‘live-fire exercises on the Internet’ to demonstrate the effect.
His model of deterrence assumed that it is possible to identify the source of an attack, however, whereas the problem of attribution combines with the practice of outsourcing to make such a strategy in cyberspace at best ineffective and at worst misdirected.
Conven- tional notions of neutrality are compromised in cyber- space, and presumably for those reasons the United States has preferred to develop alternative modes of cyber defence
. US Cyber Command was activated on 1 May 2010, and endorsing
Williamson’s insistence that ‘the time for fortresses on the Internet has passed’, US Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn accepted that ‘a fortress mentality will not work’. Cyberspace is ‘an offense-dominated environment’, he explained, and ‘the United States cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls, or it will risk being overrun’ (Lynn 2010, 97–8). Public statements have emphasised
CYBERCOM’s role in protecting digital infrastructure as a ‘strategic national asset’. The US military operates more than seven million computer devices on 15 000 networks, and every hour there are hundreds and thousands of unautho- rised probes of Pentagon and associated computer systems, but Lynn assured his audience that the Department of Defense had in place robust and layered cyber defences that could detect, rebut and repair intrusions across the .mil domain (Lynn 2010). He floated the possibility of applying these capabili- ties beyond the .mil and .gov domains to protect .com domains in the US defence industry. The com- mander of CYBERCOM has continued to maintain that ‘this is not about efforts to militarize cyberspace’ – any more, I imagine, than the United States is mili- tarising its southern border – but for Hersh (2010) the prospect raised questions about ‘where the battlefield begins and where it ends’: ‘If the military is operating in cyberspace, does this include civilian computers in American homes?’ The question is a good one, but it needs to be directed outwards as well as inwards. For the United States is also developing an offensive capacity in cyberspace, and the mission of CYBERCOM includes the requirement ‘to prepare to, and when directed conduct, full-spectrum military cyberspace opera- tions in order to enable actions in all domains’. This is a programmatic statement, and there are difficult con- ceptual, technical and operational issues to be resolved. The concept of the ‘cyber kill-chain’ has already made its appearance: software engineers at Lockheed Martin have identified seven phases or ‘border-crossings’ in cyberspace through which all advanced persistent intrusions must pass so that, con- versely, blocking an attack at any one of them (dislo- cating any link in the kill-chain) makes it possible ‘to turn asymmetric battle to the defender’s advantage’
(Croom 2011; Holcomb and Shrewsbury 2011).
The issues involved are also ethical and legal.
Debate has been joined about what constitutes an armed attack in cyberspace and how this might be legally codified
(Dipert 2010; Nakashima 2010), and most of all about how to incorporate the protection of civilians into the conduct of cyber warfare
.
In
the ‘borderless realm of cyberspace’
Hughes (2010, 536) notes that the boundary between military and civilian assets – and hence military and civilian targets – becomes blurred, which places still more pressure on the already stressed laws of armed conflict that impose a vital distinction between the two
(Kelsey 2008). Pre- paring for offensive operations includes developing a pre-emptive precision-strike capacity, and this is – precisely – why Stuxnet is so suggestive and why Shakarian (2011) sees it as inaugurating ‘a revolution in military affairs in the virtual realm’. Far from ‘carpet bombing’ cyberspace, Gross (2011) describes Stuxnet as a ‘self-directed stealth drone’ that, like the Predator and the Reaper, is ‘the new face of twenty- first century warfare’.
Cyber wars will be secret affairs
, he predicts, waged by technicians ‘none of whom would ever have to look an enemy in the eye. For people whose lives are connected to the targets, the results could be as catastrophic as a bombing raid but would be even more disorienting. People would suffer, but [they] would never be certain whom to blame
.’ I have argued elsewhere that the American way of war has changed since 9/11, though not uniquely because of it (Gregory

2010), and there are crucial continuities as well as differences between the Bush and Obama administrations: ‘The man who many considered the peace candidate in the last election was transformed into the war president’ (Carter 2011, 4). This requires a careful telling, and I do not mean to reduce the three studies I have sketched here to a single interpretative narrative. Yet there are connections between them as well as contradictions, and I have indicated some of these en route. Others have noted them too. Pakistan’s President has remarked that the war in Afghanistan has grave consequences for his country ‘just as the Mexican drug war on US borders makes a difference to
American society’, and one scholar has suggested that the United States draws legal authority to conduct military operations across the border from Afghanistan (including the killing of bin Laden, codenamed ‘Geronimo’) from its history of extra-territorial opera- tions against non-state actors in Mexico in the 1870s and 1880s (including the capture of the real Geronimo) (Margolies 2011). Whatever one makes of this, one of the most persistent threads
connecting all three cases is the question of legality , which runs like a red ribbon throughout the prosecution of late modern war
. On one side, commentators claim that new wars in the global South are ‘non-political’, intrinsically predatory criminal enterprises, that cartels are morphing into insurgencies, and that the origins of cyber warfare lie in the dark networks of cyber crime; on the other side, the United States places a premium on the rule and role of law in its new counterinsurgency doctrine, accentuates the involvement of legal advisers in targeting decisions by the USAF and the CIA, and even as it refuses to confirm its UAV strikes in Pakistan provides arguments for their legality.

Their extinction impacts are narcissistic and a myopic view of the finitude of death – it is nothing more than another phase in the process of generation – instead, we should expand our focus on zoe
Braidotti 7 [Rosi Braidotti is a Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht. “BIO-POWER AND NECRO-POLITICS”,
2007, http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1928&lang=en, msm]
Speaking from the position of an embodied and embedded female subject
I find the metaphysics of finitude to be a myopic way of putting the question of the limits of
what we call » life
«. It is not because Thanatos always wins out in the end that it should enjoy such conceptual high status.
Death is overrated
.
The ultimate subtraction is
after all only another phase in a generative process . Too bad that the relentless generative powers of death require the suppression of that which is the nearest and dearest to me, namely myself , my own vital being-there. For the narcissistic human subject
, as psychoanalysis teaches us, it is unthinkable that Life should go on without my being there . The process of confronting the thinkability of a Life that may not have
» me
« or any human
« at the centre is actually a sobering and instructive process. I see this postanthropocentric shift as the start for
an ethics of sustainability that aims at shifting the focus towards the positivity of zoe .

Democratic governance normalizes a state of exception and reduces subjects to bare life
MCGOVERN 11 [Mark McGovern is a Program on the Global Demography of Aging Fellow at the
Department of Global Health and Population, and the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from University College Dublin. “The Dilemma of Democracy:
Collusion and the State of Exception”, Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 213-230, 2011, msm]
The State of Exception
¶
The Significance of the State of Exception
¶
For Agamben the state of exception is crucial for understanding the paradigm of
¶ modern governance and fundamental to the western political and legal tradition
¶ upon which the character and practice of contemporary “ so-called democracies” are based
(Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Indeed,
Agamben’s argument is specifically designed
¶ to challenge liberal conceptions of
the origins and nature of the legitimacy of
¶
contemporary democratic states
in late capitalism; namely that such legitimacy
¶ derives from a tradition of adherence to
a set of legal norms that are certain,
¶
predictable and guarantee a range of minimal freedoms in opposition to the
¶
The Dilemma of Democracy 217
¶
Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011
¶ arbitrary exercise of governmental power. Rather than a genealogy of the
¶
contemporary liberal democratic state that foregrounds the role of the social
¶
contract and of rights,
Agamben sets out to explore
what (following
Carl Schmitt)
¶
is understood as the basis of sovereignty
, “ the sovereign is he who decides on the
¶ state of exception
” (Carl Schmitt, 1922, quoted in Agamben, 2005, p. 1).
¶ For Agamben the state of exception
is one that involves the suspension of law and of legal norms and the exercise of arbitrary decision
. He argues that it is pivotal for
¶ understanding the nature of contemporary state practice and of “lifting the veil” on
¶ the
“ambiguous zone
…
[the] no-man’s land between public law and political fact”
¶
(Agamben, 2005, pp. 1-2) for two main reasons.
¶
First, Agamben (2005) argues that the state of exception is the “original structure
¶ in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension”
(p. 3).
¶
For Agamben this is
deeply historically embedded in the western political tradition.
¶
Following Foucault, Agamben suggests this represents
a form of bio-political
¶ power but, unlike Foucault, he finds its origin predates the modern. Rather, “ the
¶ inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original
—if concealed—
¶ nucleus of sovereign power
… the production of a bio-political body is the original
¶
activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 6).
¶ What is distinctive about the modern state
is that it places the regulation of biopolitical life as explicit to its purpose and in so doing
“bring[s] to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life”
(Agamben, 1998, p. 6). In many ways identifying this
¶
lineage from the ancient to the modern is one of the key genealogical tasks of
¶
Agamben’s work. It also provides the logic for his exploration of apparently
¶
obscure figures and archetypes (such as homo sacer and the iustitium) found in ¶ ancient (particularly Roman) law as a means to explore the contemporary.
¶ Second,
Agamben holds that the state of exception as the “voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency
(though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) ¶ has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including socalled
¶ democratic ones
” (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Writing against the backdrop of
¶
the “Global War on
Terror” Agamben contends that the state of exception is
¶ increasingly the “dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics”
¶
(Agamben, 2005, p. 3).
¶
Crucially too, while he is at pains not simply to conflate the two, the increasing
¶ reliance on the state of exception as a technique of governance calls into question
¶ the
(all too politically and

ideologically significant) juxtaposition of totalitarianism and democracy as distinct constitutional forms. The space between “public law and
¶ political fact” opened up
, for example, by the
status of the detainee in Guantanamo
¶
Bay, and his reduction to the condition of “bare life,”
is one in which the “state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism”
(Agamben,
2005, p. 3).
¶
The “State of Exception,” the “State of Necessity” and the Intensification of
¶
State Power
¶
The state of exception
is also significant because it is the limit of the juridical
¶ order. Rather than being identified as either “inside” or “outside” the juridical order
¶
(as different legal traditions would have it) Agamben wants to deconstruct this ¶ 218 Mark McGovern ¶ Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011 ¶ “simple topographical opposition” and to argue instead that the state of exception
¶
should be conceived as a “threshold, or a zone of indifference… where inside and
¶ outside
… blur with each other
. The suspension of the norm does not mean its ¶ abolition and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not… unrelated to the ¶ juridical order” (Agamben,
2005, p. 23). This characterization of the state of
¶
exception as a “zone of indistinction,” an “anomic space” and a “void of law” can
¶
provide a language through which to capture and represent state practices (such as
¶
that of collusion) that lie at one and the same time apparently beyond and yet ¶ inextricably bound up with the juridical order.
¶ As well as providing an evocative conceptualization of the fluid and indistinct
¶
character of the anomic space that is the state of exception,
Agamben’s analysis of
¶
two strands within western legal traditions, and their interaction with the changing
¶
character of the state through the twentieth century, also provides important ¶ insights. One tradition (prevalent in France and
Germany) makes specific
¶
constitutional or legal provision for the regulation of the state of exception. The
¶
other (evident in “England” and the USA) consists of states “that prefer not to
¶
regulate the problem explicitly” (Agamben, 2005, p. 10).
¶
That said, Agamben (2005, p. 10) contends that the distinction
between the two,
¶
“clear in principle but hazier in fact” has done
little or nothing to prevent
¶
“something like a state of exception” developing in
all of the
identified
western state order s
since the early twentieth century. Indeed, the term state of exception,
¶
readily found in French and German legal traditions has its direct equivalent in the
¶
“English tradition”; “martial law” or “emergency powers.”
¶
Justification for the state of exception and the suspension of legal norms is
¶ invariably founded on arguments of necessity ; that exceptional powers must be
¶ introduced, and rights suspended, so that the democratic order may be preserved .
¶
Indeed such an argument can be seen to lie at the heart of the terrorist experts’
¶ democratic dilemma in posing the question - what aspects of democracy must we give up in order to preserve democracy?
¶
Legal concepts of necessity
(that “necessity creates its own law”) can be subject
¶ to a range of critiques.
Perhaps the most persuasive is that, while claims of
¶
necessity tend to be couched in objective terms they are always founded on a
¶
subjective decision. As Balladore-Pallieri notes (as cited in
Agamben, 2005) the
¶
concept of necessity is:
¶
An entirely subjective one, relative to the aim one wants to achieve. It may be said that
¶
necessity dictates the issuance of a given norm, because otherwise the existing juridical
¶
order is threatened with ruin; but there must be agreement on the point that the existing
¶
order must be preserved. (p. 30)
¶
Necessity was presented as the underlying logic justifying the intensification of
¶ state power through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This involved powers
¶ previously evident only in a “real state of siege”
(for example, an actual condition ¶ of war) becoming a paradigm of governance in peacetime where a “fictitious state of siege” has been enacted
(Agamben, 2005, p. 17).
Agamben sees the great
¶ conflagrations of the twentieth century, particularly the two world wars, as pivotal
¶ in this build up of state power.
Based on the needs of wartime economies and
¶
characterized by the ever-encroaching power of the state over civilian life, the
¶
The Dilemma of Democracy 219
¶
Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011
¶ transference of wartime conditions to peacetime governance results in the normalization of the state of exception
(Agamben, 2005, p. 18).
¶
To illustrate the crucial role of wartime conditions in generating this move toward ¶ the permanence of “exceptional measures” in the British case Agamben specifically ¶ cites the
Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). The DORA was introduced in August
¶
1914 and did indeed massively expand the direct power of the state over the lives
¶
of citizens. It also provided the template for the emergence of such “exceptional
¶ measures” as a norm in peacetime Britain. This was even more obviously the case ¶ in Ireland.

Democracy requires a form of bare life to function. A body that is subjected to the sovereign. This is democracy’s greatest contradiction and it must be rejected.
Agamben 95.
Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, © 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore
♥
Tina
The fact that, of the all the
various jurisdictional regulations concerned with the
protection of individual
freedom, it was habeas corpus
that assumed the form of law and
thus became inseparable from the history of
Western democracy
is surely due to mere circumstance. It is just as certain, however, that nascent Europ ean democracy thereby placed at the center of its battle against absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but zoē – the bare, anonymous life that is as such taken into the sovereign ba n (“ the body of being taken
. . . ,” as one still reads in one modern formulation of the writ, “by whatsoever name he may be called therein”). What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again, the body of homo sacer, which is to say, bare life.
This is modern democracy’s
strength and, at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict
. And the root of modern democracy’s secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will appear later as the bearer of rights and
, according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subject
(subiectus superaneus, in other words, what is below and, at the same time, most elevated) can only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself
. If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of “law’s desire to have a body,” democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body.
This ambiguous (or polar) character of democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns – in its new and definitive form – into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused. Corpus is a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties. This new centrality of the “body” in the sphere of politico-juridical terminology thus coincides with the more general process by which corpus is given such a privileged position in the philosophy and science of the Baroque age, from Descartes to Newton, from Leibniz to Spinoza. And yet political reflection corpus always maintains a close tie to bare life, even in when it becomes the central metaphor of the political community
, as in Leviathan or The Social Contract. Hobbes’s use of the term is particularly instructive in this regard. If it is true that in De homine he distinguishes man’s natural body from his political body (homo enim non modo corpus naturale est, sed etiam civitatis, id est, ut ita loquar, corporis politicipars, “Man is not only a natural body, but also a body of the city, that is, of the so-called political part” [De homine, p. i]), in the De cive it is precisely the body’s capacity to be killed that founds both the natural equality of men and the necessity of the “Commonwealth”:
Totalitarianism and democracy are indistinguishable. They’re simply means of establishing and using bare life. Reject both.
Agamben 95.
Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, © 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore
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Tina
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion.
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 within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves
. "
The 'right' to life
," writes Foucault, explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppres­ sions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this
'right'-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that one and the same affirmation of

bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy , to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions
. And only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted , almost without interruption , into parliamentary democracies
. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life
.
Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left , liberal­ ism and totalitarianism , private and public ) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction
.
The ex-communist ruling classes' unexpected fall into the most extreme racism
(as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansi ng") and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
Democracy has failed. The biopolitical obsession with preserving the population will inevitably converge with Nazism.
Agamben 95.
Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, © 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore page 13
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Tinav
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that
modern democracy
presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoē, and that it is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find
, so to speak, the bios of zoē. Hence, too, modern democracy’s specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place – “bare life” – that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed.
To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy
, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin
.
Modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular societies
(which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of
Guy Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy. Today politics knows no value
(and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism – which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle – will remain stubbornly with us
. According to the testimony of Robert
Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that “calling into question the quality of man provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race” (L’espèce humaine, p. II)

The aff’s visions of climatic disaster inevitably bring about a climate leviathan that has absolute control of a people for the purpose of “saving the planet”
Mann and Wainwright 12.
Joel Wainwright is a professor of geography at Ohio State University Geoff
Mann is professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, “Climate Leviathan,” Antipode Vol. 45 No. 1
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Tina
Why call this “Leviathan
”? In the first place, climate Leviathan is a direct descendant in the line from Hobbes’ original to Schmitt’s sovereign: when it comes to climate, Leviathan will decide, and is constituted precisely in the act of decision. It is the pure expression of a desire for, the recognition of the absolute necessity of, a sovereign—indeed, the first truly planetary sovereign—to seize command, declare an emergency and bring order to the globe. If Agamben (2005:14) is correct that “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”, then the consolidation of climate Leviathan represents the rescaling of the
“normal technique[s]” to encompass planetary security, or the making secure of planetary life. With this achievement the state of nature and the nature of the state would enmesh perfectly
. Geographically at least, climate Leviathan exceeds its lineage, for it must somehow transcend the state-based territorial container fundamental to Hobbes’ and Schmitt’s thought
. Even for those states most committed to national autonomy, it is increasingly clear that independent regulatory regimes are inadequate to the global challenge of sharply reducing carbon emissions. This contradiction—rending deep fissures in the UNFCCC process—may lead, as with other “public good” collective action problems, to the construction of a nominally “global” frame which is in fact a political and geographical extension of the rule of the extant hegemonic bloc, ie he capitalist global
North
. But this is by no means certain, partly because climate change has broken the surface of elite consciousness at a moment of global political- economic transition. Any realizable planetary climate Leviathan must be constructed with the approval of a range of actors formerly excluded from global governance— China and India most notably, but the list could go on. Ensuring China’s support for any binding carbon regulation complicates the role of capital in the Leviathan.5 We conjecture that Leviathan could take two forms. On one hand, a variety of authoritarian territorial sovereignty, arguably truer to Hobbes’ own vision, could emerge in nations or regions where political economic conditions prove amenable. We name this possibility “climate Mao”, and discuss it below. On the other hand, we could see Leviathan emerge as the means by which to perpetuate the extant rule of northern liberal democratic capitalist states. Arguably the most likely scenario here is that sometime in the coming decades the waning US-led liberal capitalist bloc will endeavor to impose a global carbon regime that, in light of political and ecological crisis, will brook no opposition in defense of a human future for which it volunteers itself as the last line of defense
.
The pattern of mobilization will likely be familiar, in which the United Nations or other international fora serve as a means of legitimizing aggressive means of surveillance and discipline
. This could make the construction of climate Leviathan a key means by which to salvage American international hegemony—a prospect that, if anything, only increases the likelihood of its consolidation.6 One might find, for example, the personification of this effort in John Holdren, Harvard physicist and
National Science Advisor to President Obama. Since his 2008 appointment, right-wing media have derided Holdren as a harbinger of a climate police state. One website claims he has called for “forced abortions and mass sterilization” to “save the planet”.7 Paranoid hyperbole, certainly, but the underlying critique is not entirely misplaced. Holdren was an early visionary of what we call climate Leviathan. Consider these lines from the conclusion of Holdren’s (1977) textbook on resource management, in which he outlines a new sovereignty he calls “Planetary Regime”: Toward a Planetary
Regime:...Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be

developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment.
Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources . . . Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. T he Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The
Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits
(Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren
1977:942–943).

Hegemony is dead and we know it. Attempts to mask our weakness through global power inevitably lead to violence and domination
Gulli 13.
Bruno Gulli is a professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New
York, “For the critique of sovereignty and violence,” http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence,
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Tina
I think that we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The sovereign everywhere, be it the political or financial elite, fakes the legitimacy on which its power and authority supposedly rest
.
In truth, they rest on violence and terror , or the threat thereof. This is an obvious and essential aspect of the singularity of the present crisis. In this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the struggle for dominance is at one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the lack of hegemony. This is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with respect to the greatest power on earth, the United States, whose hegemony has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called ‘the
West,’ of which the US has for about a century represented the vanguard.
Lacking hegemony, the sheer drive for domination has to show its true face, its raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological justifications for dominance (such as bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have now become very weak because of the contempt that the dominant nations
(the US and its most powerful allies) regularly show toward legality, morality, and humanity
. Of course, the so-called rogue states, thriving on corruption, do not fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously and against the dictates of ‘the West,’ the specter of punishment, in the form of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a clear limit, a possibility. Not so for the dominant nations: who will stop the United States from striking anywhere at will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the Gaza
Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa
? Yet, though still dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical, weakness.
All attempts at concealing that weakness
(and the uncomfortable awareness of it)
only heighten the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance.
Although they rely on a highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of this) and on an equally sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations and global policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom)
, they know that they have lost their hegemony
.

Human rights are the platform for the destabilization of the resistance against state violence – they are intrinsically tied with security
Goldstein 7 [Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, where he has taught since 2005. A political and legal anthropologist, Prof. Goldstein studies the global meanings and practices of security, democracy, and human rights. “Human rights as culprit, human rights as victim: rights and security in the state of exception”, msm]
The discourses of security and human rights
, in many ways perceived
¶
as inherently at odds with one another, thus share a fundamental
¶ principle in the state of exception. At the heart of both of these
¶ paradigms
– each
in a sense seeking to define the permissible at the
¶ conjuncture of state and civil society
– we find
not the rule of law but
¶ an exception to the rule, a back door through which limitless state
¶ violence and the abrogation of basic rights re-enter supposedly democratic
¶ society uncontested
. And while ‘‘human rights’’ has received
¶
considerably more anthropological attention than ‘‘security,’’ both
¶ paradigms constitute a set of practices and discourses that – in an era
¶ of global terrorism, preventive war, and the consolidation of neoliberal
¶ democracy – are distinctly transnational in scope and effect, transcending
¶ the territorial and discursive space of the nation-state and jointly
¶ serving to define the landscape of political domination and resistance
¶ within and across nation-states
today. But, as the ethnographic discussion
¶
below suggests, the discourse of rights is vulnerable to critique
¶
from the security paradigm: given the state’s practical failures to
¶ defend rights equitably across social groups and classes, and the fear
¶
and insecurity generated by the permanent state of exception found within neoliberal democracy, rights themselves come under scrutiny,
¶
and in
‘‘security’’ the quest for the ability of ‘‘human rights’’
to serve as a
¶ platform for resistance against state violence becomes debilitated.
The legal defense of human rights is bankrupt- action through the government breaks the body down into its “rights”, thus stripping away their humanity. They become subjects of the sovereign.
Amoore 08.
Louise Amoore is with the Department of Geography at the University of Durham, “Risk Before
Justice: When the Law Contests Its Own Suspension,” Leiden Journal of International Law, 21, 2008
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Tina
The claim to rights to privacy , bodily integrity, or human dignity, however, faces particular difficulties in relation to risk technologies that dissect and fragment the person into a series of risk factors
.
What happens to the legal subject when risk visualizations
– extending from imaging devices such as Backscatter to the screened visual displays of risk scores – specifically divide and subclassify the body into differential traits, characteristics, behaviours
? What are the limits of the citizen’s obligation to reveal the elements, the prosaic daily intimacy of their lives? As Engin Isin has argued compellingly, the ‘neurotic citizen’, once reduced to a ‘species body’, actively strips herself down in order to ‘calibrate itself’ to the anxieties and dangers of the border.54 Thus, the very category of legal subject, or indeed of citizen, is exposed in its full fragility.
What happens to the body that cannot be verified, that does not calibrate to the mobile norm, or is not recognized or is misrecognized under international law? In the contestation of risk technologies such as Backscatter, then, the law once more confronts the making of its own categories. If it recognizes only a ‘a non- substantial, a thin personality, a public image that seriously mis-matches people’s self-image’,55 then legal intervention risks mirroring the stripping-down and denuding strategies of the homeland security state itself: Human rights break down the body into functions and

parts and replace its unity with rights
. . .
Encountering rights annihilates and dismembers the body : the right to privacy isolates the genital area and creates a ‘zone of privacy’ around it; free speech severs the mouth and protects its communicative but not its eating function, while free movement does the same with legs and feet, but offers no right of abode
.56 Put simply, the abstractions that are made in the defence of people’s rights to privacy, just as in the digitized imaging of the body, risk recognizing only a facsimile of a person. The reduction of a person to their rights recognizes, as Douzinas puts it, only ‘the man of the rights of man’, who appears ‘without differentiation or distinction in his nakedness and simplicity, united with all others in an empty nature deprived of substantive characteristics’.57
Certainly the nakedness of the stripped- down man in the rights of man is not recognized in its full political difficulty by the continual redrawing of a legal boundary.
It is this redrawing that runs through most of the current legal appeals to privacy: ‘ the infringement on privacy must be proportionate to the security threat’; ‘the collection and use of personal data must be transparent’; ‘subjects must be informed if they are on a no-fly list’.58
Where someone is left to make a claim for recognition based on corporeal difference – ‘I am pregnant’; ‘I have a prosthetic limb’; ‘I have a mastectomy’ – they are rendered invisible, slipping away from the juridical domain
.

Language was the first and a permanent state of exception, dividing the semantic and the meaningless. Reject it.
Agamben 95.
Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, © 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore
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Tina
Hegel was the first to truly understand the presuppositional struc­ ture thanks to which language is at once outside and inside itselfand the immediate (the nonlinguistic) reveals itself to be nothing but a presup­ position of language.
"Language," he wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit, "is the perfect element in which interiority is as external as exteriority is internal" (see Phanomenologie des Geistes, pp. 527-29). We have seen that only the sovereign decision on the state of exception opens the space in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and in which determinate rules can be assigned to determinate territories. In exactly the same way
, only language as the pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from every concrete instance of speech, divides the linguistic from the nonlinguistic and allows for the opening of areas of meaningful speech in which certain terms correspond to certain denotations. Language is the sovereign who , in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself . The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named
. To speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to
"speak the law," ius dicere

The 1ACs belief in law based solutions simply perpetuates and props up the state of exception
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
“Deleuze and New Technology” edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
How are we to understand the political nexus that allows this intersection to take place?
First, the discourse of 'security' itself must be rigorously analysed. 'Security' is the word on everyone's lips today, from media outlets and politicians across the political spectrum. The ability to provide security from terrorism is now the single
stamp of legitimacy for any government, and is considered the overriding responsibility of the modern state. However, as Agamben shows - referring to
Foucault's work on eighteenth-century governmental discourses - 'security' consists not in the prevention of crises and catastrophes, but rather in their
continual production, regulation and management. Therefore, by making security central to modern governance, there is the danger of producing a situation of clandestine complicity between terrorism and
counterterrorism, locked in a deathly embrace of mutual incitement
(Agamben 2002).
It is here also that the logic of the exception must be considered. For
Agamben, as well as for other theorists of sovereignty like Hobbes and Carl Schmitt,
sovereignty is conditioned by the exception - that is, the ability of the
sovereign to stand inside and outside the law at the same time. In other words, in order to guarantee the law, the sovereign is not bound by the law but stands outside it, having the power to suspend it through a unilateral
decision. In the words of Schmitt, the sovereign is 'he who decides on the state
of exception' (Carl Schmitt, cited in Agamben 2005: 1). The hidden secret of
sovereignty, then, is this radical indistinction between law and lawlessness, between politics and violence. However, what was once the secret of political philosophy has now become explicit. The state of the exception has become the rule. That is to say, the intensification of control and surveillance techniques, coupled with practices of extra-judicial detention and governments thumbing their nose at constitutional checks and human rights norms, suggests a
normalisation of the state of exception. Governments in socalled liberal democracies are operating in an increasingly extra-judicial way; the state of
exception is becoming the dominant paradigm of politics today (Agamben
2005: 1-31). However, we should be clear here that it is not simply that governments are acting illegally or outside the law as such: rather sovereignty and law enter into a
'zone of indistinction' in which their limits become unclear - a kind of grey zone in which sovereignty appears as law and law appears as sovereignty. For instance, the practice of extra-judicial detention is still authorised through legislation - but here the law appears in the form of its withdrawal. At the same time, we see the excessive production of petty laws and restrictions that characterises the societies of control, with governments working frenetically on their 'legislative
agendas'. Both instances signify a kind of crisis of the law - marked

simultaneously by its absence and its overabundance: the law , in other words,
can no longer protect us from sovereign power and operates today simply
as a vector for it.
The 'war on terrorism', then, has the effect of intensifying social control measures, as well as revealing the sovereign state of exception through which they are authorised. The 'war on terrorism' has to be seen as a kind of
total and permanent war: a war whose real purpose is not the defeat of some shadowy terrorist enemy - the figure of the terrorist is itself constituted through
this war - but rather the global control and regulation of populations. 8 Capitalist globalisation demands control, and this control is now articulated and intensified through a permanent state of war. Here the promised freedom and deregulation of the global free market find its ultimate answer in
increased restrictions and surveillance. As Jean Baudrillard says:
To the point that the idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from minds and mores, and liberal globalisation is coming about in precisely the opposite form - a police state globalisation, a total control, a terror based on 'law-and-order' measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to a fundamentalist society. (Baudrillard 2002: 32)
Therefore our understanding of the society of control should include not
simply the subtle technologies that Deleuze speaks of, but also the whole panoply of control measures we see today: everything from the permanent detention of terrorist suspects, to the heightened policing of national borders, forms a new paradigm of power and a new logic of politics that
must be critically analysed.
Appeals to the law authorize a militaristic world that culminates in necro political destruction. Our only hope is mass movement to rise up collectively against an oppressive government.
Gregory 11
The everywhere wargeoj_426 238..250 DEREK GREGORY Department of Geography, University of
British Columbia, 217-1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 E-mail: derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca
This paper was accepted for publication in May 2011
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Tina
The invocation of legality works to marginalise ethics and politics by making available a seemingly neutral, objective language: disagreement and debate then become purely technical issues that involve matters of opinion, certainly, but not values. The appeal to legality – and to the quasi-judicial process it invokes – thus helps to authorise a widespread and widening militarisation of our world.
While I think it is both premature and excessive to see this as a transformation from governmentality to ‘militariality’ (Marzec 2009), I do believe that Foucault’s (2003) injunction –
‘Society must be defended’ – has been transformed into an unconditional imperative since 9/11 and that this involves an intensifying triangulation of the planet by legality, security and war. We might remember that biopolitics, one of the central projects of late modern war, requires a legal armature to authorise its interventions, and that necropolitics is not always outside the law
. This triangulation has become such a common- place and provides such an established base-line for contemporary politics that I am reminded of an inter- view with Zizek soon after 9/11 – which for him marked the last war of the twentieth century – when he predicted that the ‘new wars’ of the twenty-first century would be distinguished by a radical uncertainty: ‘it will not even be clear whether it is a war or not’
(Deich- mann et al. 2002). Neither will it be – nor is it – clear where the battlespace begins and ends
. As I have tried to show, the two are closely connected. For this reason I am

able to close on a less pessimistic note. As I drafted this essay, I was watching events unfold
on the streets of
Cairo and other Egyptian cities, just weeks after similar scenes in
Tunisia. I hope that the real, lasting counterpoint to 9/11 is to be found in those places, not in
Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq
. For those events show that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ cannot be limited to the boastful banners of military adventurism, hung from the barrels of guns or draped across warships, and that ordinary people can successfully rise up against autocratic, repressive and corrupt regimes: including those propped up for so long by the United States and its
European allies. Perhaps one day someone will be able to write about ‘the nowhere war’ – and not from Europe or North America.
Attempts to balance security and privacy only serve to justify the state. The
Law and legal reforms are constantly transformed and will always articulate normative assumptions about the world.
Krasmann 12
Law’s knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters Susanne
Krasmann University of Hamburg, Germany Theoretical Criminology 16(4) 379 –394 © The Author(s) 2012 sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav p380-381
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Tina
Traditional
problems in the relationship between law and security government within this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations; emergency government today, rather than facing the problem of gross abuses of power
, has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional becoming normal
(see Poole, 2008: 8).
Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as
‘necessary’
.3
Hence, law not only constrains, but at the same time also authorizes governmental interference
.
Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try to balance security and liberty are rarely able, or willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative presuppositions: ‘[T]he metaphor of balance is used as often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them’
(Zedner, 2005:
510). Finally, political responses to threats never overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events.
To ignore this uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent.
Institutional arrangements
that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes establish political spaces political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They of dispute and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a ‘culture of justification’,
as David
Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be
‘justified by law’, in a fundamental sense of a commitment to ‘the principles of legality and respect for human rights’
(2007: 137).
Nonetheless, most of these accounts
, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and institutional arrangements that are well known to us.
To frame security as a public good and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example demand, is a promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be ‘civilized’, though, once again echoes the truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality and a political
‘culture of justification’ (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the following section. Those normative endeavours will be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice. Contrary to the idea that law can be addressed as an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to normative aspirations, the present account renders law’s reliance on forms of knowledge more discernable.
Law is susceptible,
in particular to security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms itself and, notably, articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of knowledge brought into play
. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this perspective enables us, on the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law in a way that goes largely unnoticed.

The use of nuclear discourse constitutes a construction of exceptional power to be used only by the sovereign for their own ends.
Masco 12.
Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, “The
Ends of Ends,” Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012, pg.
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Tina
Today we can see that in addition to the new weapons systems built at the end of the 1950s, there was also an important political discovery crucial to the evolving cold War: namely, the universal utility of threat pro- liferation in US security culture.
The raw political value of existential threat as a motivating narrative became a well-worn domestic strategy
in the Us, one linking the “missile gap” of the 1950s to the “window of vulner- ability” of the 1970s, to the “strategic defense initiative” of the 1980s to the “space based Pearl Harbor” narratives of the 1990s to the terrorist “WMD” discourses of the 2000s
as illustrations of a nuclear culture. In each of these cases, we can see how the bomb
(as a consolidated form of existen- tial threat)
has been good for Americans to think with, becoming the basis for building a nuclear state and a global military system but also for trans- forming raw military ambition into a necessary form of “defense.” but if the bomb has been crucial to constituting US “superpower” status, it has also produced a complex new domestic affective political domain, allowing images of, and appeals to, existential threat to become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Peace has become the exception, not the norm. The aff’s nuclear rhetoric reinscribes this state of exception and guarantees that peace remains and
“extreme”, ensuring that one day we’ll push the big red button and succumb to an atomic end.
Masco 12.
Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, “The
Ends of Ends,” Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012,
♥
Tina
The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and failure are now well established in an American political culture. The cultural history of cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why. Derrida (1984), working with the long running theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death (which links Kant, Freud, and benjamin), describes the problem of the nuclear age as the impossibility of contemplating the truly “remainderless event” or the “total end of the archive.” For him, nuclear war is “fabulously textual” because until it occurs all you can do is tell stories about it, and because to write about it is to politically engage in a form of future making that assumes a reader, thus performing a kind of countermilitarization and anti-nuclear practice. In the early 1960s, the
US nuclear war policy was officially known as
“overkill,
” referencing the redundant use of hydrogen bombs to destroy targets (rosenberg 1983). This
“overkill” installs a new kind of biopower, which fuses an obliteration of the other with collective suicide. The means to an end here constitutes an actual and total end, making the most immediate problem of the nuclear age the problem of differentiating comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute assessment of crisis. This seems to be a fundamental problem in Us national security culture—an inability to differentiate the capacity for war with the act itself, or alternatively to evaluate the logics of war from inside war
. Today, space is filled with satellites offering near perfect resolution on the surface of the earth and able to transmit that data with great speed and precision to computers and cell phones, as well as early warning systems, missiles, and drones.
What we cannot seem to do is find an exterior viewpoint on war itself—a perspective that would allow an assessment not only of the reality of conflict but also of the motivations, fantasies, and desires that sup- port and enable it. Indeed expert systems of all sorts—military, economic, political, and industrial—all seem unable to learn from failure and instead in the face of crisis simply retrench and remobilize longstanding and obviously failed logics. War,
for example, is not the exception but the norm in

the US today—which makes peace “extreme.”
so what would it take for Americans to consider not only the means to an end—that is, the tactics, the surges, the preemptions, and surgical strikes—but also to reevaluate war itself? What would it take to consider an actual end to such ends?

Reactionary policies and “revolutions” reaffirm the state – distinctions are made and lines are drawn
Agamben, 96 [Giorgio, PhD in philosophy and professor of philosophy at the European
Graduate School, University of Minnesota Press, “Means without End: Notes on
Politics”, Theory out of Bounds Volume 20 p.42-43, 1996, http://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Agamben_Giorgio_Means_without_end_notes_on
_politics_2000.pdf, 7/19/15]JRO
Hence the contradictions and aporias that
¶ such a concept creates every time that it is invoked and
¶ brought into play on the political stage. It is what always
¶ already is, as well as what has yet to be realized; it is the
¶ pure source of identity and yet it has to redefine and purify
¶ itself continuously according to exclusion, language,
¶ blood, and territory
. It is what has in its opposite pole
¶
the very essence that it itself lacks; its realization therefore
¶ coincides with its own abolitio n; it must negate itself
¶
through its opposite in order to be. (Hence the specific
¶
aporias of the workers' involvement that turns toward
¶
the people and at the same time aims at its abolition.)
¶
The concept of people- brandished each and every time
¶ as the bloody flag of reaction and as the faltering banner
¶ of revolutions and popular fronts
- always contains
¶ a more original split than the one betw·een enemy and
¶ friend, an incessant civil war that at once divides this
¶ concept more radically than any conflict and keeps it
¶ united and constitutes it more firmly than any identity
.
¶
As a matter of fact, what Marx calls class struggle -which ¶ occupies such a central place in his thought, even though ¶ he never defines it substantiallyis nothing other than
¶ this
internecine
war that divides every people
and that
¶
shall come to an end only when People and people coin¶ cide, in the classless society or in the messianic kingdom, ¶ and only when there shall no longer be, properly
¶
speaking, any people.

The drive for security results in the creation of threats to legitimate the surveillance state
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
“Deleuze and New Technology” edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
The reterritorialising effects of global capitalism also have a paradoxical effect on the state itself. The modern state is undergoing a kind of convulsion, whereby on
the one hand its sovereignty is undermined - at least with respect to its control over economic life - and yet on the other hand we have also seen an aggressive reassertion of state sovereignty and power with the so-called 'war on
terrorism'. In the wake of September 1 1, and with the emergence of this permanent global state of war, we have seen hitherto unthinkable control and surveillance measures being implemented in the dubious name of
'security'. Liberal democracies have been taking on the characteristics of
totalitarian police states. While governments assure us that they are trying to
'strike the right balance between liberty and security', they have been
introducing legislation that undermines even the most basic civil liberties such as the right to due process. The usual techniques and practices of control have been intensified and given new impetus and consistency in the 'war on
terrorism'. The sophistication of technologies of control and surveillance find their strange counterpart in a rediscovery of torture and the practice of permanent detention;5 the mise-en-scene of the control society is now to be found in the torture chambers of
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Is it still reasonable, then, to talk about the control society - have we not gone back to a disciplinary or even a pre-disciplinary sovereign power; do the barbed wire
of the prison camp, and the electric shocks delivered by the military torturer
(now privately contracted of course), now not serve as the dominant symbols of power in the twenty-first century? Has not the 'softness' of control been replaced with the hardness and brutality of a now unlimited sovereign
power? I would argue instead that the two modalities of power have intersected, and that the off-shore prison camps and extra-legal spaces of detention that have now become emblematic of the 'war on terrorism' are actually a kind of obscene excrescence of the society of control, symbolising - in an extreme form - the constraints and controls that are already characteristic of contemporary society.6 And if Guantanamo Bay is closing down, this is only because the techniques of detention, discipline and control employed in such spaces are already infused - in more subtle ways - throughout the rest of society'? Control and sovereign exceptionalism become indistinguishable in the 'war on terrorism'.
How are we to understand the political nexus that allows this intersection to take place? First, the discourse of 'security' itself must be rigorously
analysed. 'Security' is the word on everyone's lips today, from media outlets and politicians across the political spectrum. The ability to provide security from terrorism is now the single stamp of legitimacy for any government, and is

considered the overriding responsibility of the modern state. However, as
Agamben shows - referring to Foucault's work on eighteenth-century governmental discourses - 'security' consists not in the prevention of crises and catastrophes, but rather in their continual production, regulation and management. Therefore, by making security central to modern governance, there is the danger of producing a situation of clandestine complicity between terrorism and counterterrorism, locked in a deathly embrace of
mutual incitement (Agamben 2002).

Their terror discourse normalizes a state of exception – we are no longer citizens but detainees of the war on terrorism – kills agency and turns the case - public discourse is militarized and replicates a violent pedagogy that reinforces the death drive and causes extinction
GIROUX 3-30-15 [Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting
Professorship at Ryerson University. “Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness”, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/30/terrorism-violence-and-the-culture-of-madness/, msm]
Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which “ violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma,” legitimizing war as a permanent feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics
.[1] Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose
the values of a militarized
neo liberal regime on everyone, shattering
viable modes of agency
, solidarity, and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism , danger and war
now fuel a war on terrorism “that represents the negation of politics —since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction , not only to the adversary but also to one’s side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent.”
[2]
Human barbarity is
no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak
. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror.
¶ In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media, and conservative and liberal pundits that history as we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly continued to appear to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists’ attacks, democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later, the historical rupture produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate
. The script is now familiar.
Security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities
. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq, created a torture state, violated civil liberties, and developed new antiterrorist laws
, such as the USA PATRIOT ACT.
It imposed a state of emergency that justified
a range of terrorist practices, including extraordinary rendition and state torture
, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions.[3] ¶ Under the burgeoning of what James Risen has called the “homeland security-industrial complex,” state secrecy and organized corporate corruption filled the coffers of the defense industry along with the corporate owned security industries— especially those providing drones– who benefited the most from the war on terror.[4] This is not to suggest that security is not an important consideration for the United States. Clearly, any democracy needs to be able to defend itself, but it cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for abandoning civil liberties, democratic values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility. Nor can it serve as a pretext for American exceptionalism and its imperialist expansionist goals. The philosopher Giorgio
Agamben
has suggested
rightly warned that under the
so war on terrorism, the political landscape is changing and
that “ we are no longer citizens but detainees , distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by an indifference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated— or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft
.”[5] ¶
The war on terror morphed into a legitimation for state terrorism as was made clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to pardon the CIA

torturers, create a “kill list”,
expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use drones to indiscriminately kill civilians—all in the name of fighting terrorists
.
Obama expanded the reach of the militarized state and
along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and state terrorism
.
The war on terrorism extended the discourse
, space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and ubiquitous making everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a domestic as well as foreign location
, a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue.
Obama has become the master of permanent war seeking to increase the bloated military budget
—close to a trillion dollars–while “turning to lawless violence….
translated into unrestrained violent interventions
from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq,” including an attempt “to expand the war on ISIS
in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine.”[6]
Fear became total and the imposition of punitive standards included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug interdictions, the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools, and the increasing criminalization of a range of social behaviors that extended from homelessness to violating dress codes in school.
¶
Under the regime
of neoliberalism with
its war-like view of competition,
its celebration of self-interest, and its disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, any notion of unity has been contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred of the other now privileged as an enemy combatant
, and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism and the faux safety of gated communities.
With the merging of militarism
, the culture of surveillance, and a neoliberal culture of cruelty, solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display of violence and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space
.[7] ¶
The war on terror has come home as
poor neighborhoods are transformed into war zones with the police resembling an occupying army
. The most lethal expressions of racism have become commonplace as black men and boys such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are repeatedly beaten, and killed by the police.[8] As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, one index of how state terrorism and lawlessness have become normalized is evident not only by the fact that the majority of
Americans support torture, even though they know “it is totally
¶ ineffective as a means of intelligence gathering,” but also by the American public’s growing appetite for violence
, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization and incarceration of black and brown youth, adults, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable.[9] It should come as no surprise that the one issue the top 2016 GOP presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in America, a
“bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big wants and shouldn’t have.”[10] Guns provide political theater for the new political extremists and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the second amendment than willingness to maximize the pleasure of violence and building a case for the use of deadly force both at home and abroad. As Rustom Bharacuha and Susan Sontag have argued in different contexts, “There is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence,”[11] one “that dissolves politics into pathology.”[12] ¶ Notions of democracy increasingly appear to be giving way to the discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11 increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that are being largely set by the jingoistic right wing extremists, the defense department, conservative funded foundations, and fueled by the dominant media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy.
This surrender to the pleasure of violence is made all the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious fundamentalists, and others who exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness exhibit a kind of political and theoretical helplessness, if not corruption, that opens the door to the wider public’s acceptance of foreign and domestic violence.
¶ The current extremists dominating Congress are frothing at the mouth to go to war with Iran, bomb Syria
into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of the American empire through its over bloated war machine to any country that questions the use of American power. One glaring example can be found in the constant and under analyzed televised images and stories of

homegrown terrorists threatening to blow up malls, schools, and any other conceivable space where the public gathers.
¶ Other examples can be found in the militarized frothing and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Network, made concrete by the an almost fever pitched bellicosity that informs the majority of its commentaries and reactions to war on terror. Missing from the endless call for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence is the massive lawlessness produced by the United States government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil liberties, and the almost unimaginable human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Also missing is a history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up by the United States.
¶
Capitalizing on the pent up emotions and needs of an angry and grieving public for revenge
, fueled by an unchecked Islamophobia, almost any reportage of a terrorist attack throughout the globe, further amplifies the hyped-up language of war, patriotism, and retaliation
. Similarly, conservative talkingheads write numerous op-eds and appear on endless talk shows fanning the fires of “patriotism” by calling upon the United States to expand the war against any one of a number of Arab countries that are considered terrorist states. For example, John Bolton
, writing an op-ed for the New York Times insists that all attempts by the
Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran is a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to deal with Iran is to launch an attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb
Iran.”[13] ¶ In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness seems to be winning the day. This is a discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that democratic values and social justice must play in a truly “unified” rationale response, so as to prevent the further killing of innocent people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of occupancy in the world. Instead of viewing the current crisis as simply a new and more dangerous historical conjuncture that has nothing to learn from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy at a time when democracy is not only viewed as an excess, but as a liability to the wishes and interests of the new extremists who now control the American government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the fog of political and cultural amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, and ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged authoritarian ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.[14] ¶ At stake here is the need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under siege. Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the discourse of revenge, demonization, and extreme violence.
¶ Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of
September 11
within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation, and war. Nostalgia is
now used to justify and fuel
a politics of in-security , fear , precarity , and demonization
.
The dominant media
no longer functions in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream media support ed Bush’s fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq
and never apologized for such despicable actions. It has rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey
Sterling, and others.[15] ¶ Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state policy.
Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries
extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash biochemical agents on the American population
.
The increased fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize
a host of anti-democratic practices at home-including “ a concerted attack on civil liberties
, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press,”[16] and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by
American foreign policy should not be allowed “to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even make a speech at a college.”[17] ¶ This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned America’s policies in the Middle East and the government’s support of the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians.
Language itself has become militarized fed by an onslaught of extreme violence
that now floods Hollywood films and the violence that dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such as American Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing views of Islam.[18] Television programs such as Spartacus, The Following, Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic violence appears to provide one
of the few outlet s for Americans to express
what has come to resemble what could be construed as
a spiritual release
.
Extreme violence, including the sanctioning of state torture
, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American

people to feel alive , to mark what it means to be close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that deadens every possibility of life
. Under such circumstances, the reality of violence is infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce and legitimate a carnival of cruelty .
The privatization of violence does more than maximize the pleasure quotient and heighten macho ebullience, it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence takes on the form of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and neoliberalism “into a criminal system and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered.”[19] ¶
The extreme visibility of violence
in American culture represents a willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence in
American society and to legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of common sense
. Moreover, war making and the militarization of public discourse and public space
also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hyper-masculinity that operates from the assumption that violence
is not only the most important practice for mediating
most problems
, but that it is also central to identity formation
itself.
Agency is
now militarized and
almost completely removed from any notion of civic values
. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in frat houses across America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities.
Violence has become the DNA of war making in the U nited
S tates, escalating under Bush and Obama into a
kind of war fever that embraces a death drive
. As Robert J. Lifton points out, ¶
Warmaking can quickly become associated with
“war fever,” the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic
, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one’s nation
, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people. ..War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroad–and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq.[20] ¶
The war on terror is the new normal
.
Its adoration and intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism reach into every aspect of
American life
. Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy and moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000 New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that as Thom Hartman points out is “bigger—that the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya,” and a number of other countries.[21] At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to local police forces all over America. Is it any wonder, that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and women.
¶
Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public space as the “sinister abode of danger, death and infection” and fueled the collective rush to “patriotism on the cheap”, it has also buttressed a “fear economy” and refigured the meaning of politics itself
.[22]
Defined as “the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown
,”[23] the fear economy promises
big financial gains for
both the defense department, and the anti-terrorist-security sectors
, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer goods for the hysterical war mongers and their acolytes in the media while making politics and extension of war.
Fear
is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that functions as “the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and
often leads to poor decisions
.”[24] But the culture of fear
does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent, as Don Hazen points out, it also: “ breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers’ rights, and much more. Pervasive fear
ultimately paves the way for
an

accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression
, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.”[25] ¶
Fear and repression reproduce rather than address the most fundamental anti-democratic elements of terrorism
. Instead of mobilizing fear, people need to recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be understood
apart from
the crisis of democracy
itself. The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take place, as President Obama’s policies will tragically affirm, by shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent. Engaging terrorism demands more than rage and anger, revenge and retaliation. American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to violence and a culture of permanent war.
¶
The war on terror institutionalizes a permanent state of exception – that normalizes bare life among the population and justifies endless interventions in the name of security – turns the case van Munster 4 [RENS VAN MUNSTER is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Southern
Denmark. “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule”, ARTICLE in INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW · JANUARY 2004, http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rens_Van_Munster/publication/226766473_The_War_on_Terroris m_When_the_Exception_Becomes_the_Rule/links/00b7d5385a862d6ad2000000.pdf, msm]
1. INTRODUCTION
¶
Building upon the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben,
¶
this article argues the semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a
¶ significant shift in United States’ discourses on security
. This shift is ¶ best described as a move from defence to prevention or as a move ¶ from deterrence to risk management. Whereas defence and the politics
¶
of threat are closely related to the rule-governed realm of war,
¶
this article claims that the ‘war’ on terrorism takes place
largely
¶ outside the framework of
domestic or international law and seems to
¶ consolidate
something akin to a permanent state of exception , in
¶ which distinctions such as inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy¶ and rule/exception are blurred to the point of indistinction .
Indeed,
¶
this article argues that the United States’ war on terrorism is a
particular
¶ form of governing an emergency , in which the United
States
¶ constitutes itself as the sovereign of the global order by exempting itself from the
(international) framework of law
. In this process, the
¶ sovereign power reduces the life of
(some) people to that of homo sacer: life that can be killed without punishment .
¶
The argument will proceed in four stages. The next section will
¶
discuss Agamben’s essay Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life ¶ (1998) in some detail, since it seems key to understanding the ¶ exceptional mode of operation of the war on terrorism. Picking up on
¶
this, Section 3 will apply the framework of
Agamben to the war on
¶
terrorism, arguing that the United States’ security response to terrorism
¶
institutionalises the state of exception as a permanent condition ¶ of the global order. Due to a shift in US politics of security, now ¶ informed by a discourse on eventualities rather than actual events,
¶
the United States calls for a permanent military policing through the
¶
mechanisms of prevention and pre-emption. Section 4 will argue that
¶
in this permanent state of exception, the
‘other’, the ‘enemy’ is
¶ encountered
mainly as homo sacer
. Section 5 concludes this paper.
¶
2.
ZONES OF INDISTINCTION: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE
¶
This section seeks to elaborate Agamben’s treatise on sovereign
¶
power and bare life as it seems key to grasping what is currently at
¶
stake in the war on terrorism. It will begin with a discussion of the ¶ relation between sovereignty and the camp, arguing that the camp ¶ is characterised by a permanent state of exception in which law
¶
142 RENS VAN MUNSTER
¶
and chaos enter into a zone of indistinction. In this zone of
¶
indistinction, the central figure one encounters is that of homo
¶
sacer, bare life stripped of all its value in the sense that violence
¶
against him/her remains unpunished. Agamben’s writings on sovereign
¶
power, bare life and the camp are based on his reading of
¶
Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty. According to Schmitt, the
¶
kernel of sovereignty lies in declaring the state of exception. The
¶
state of exception is constitutive of the juridical order in the sense
¶
that no rule exists without an exception: ‘‘Order must be established
¶
for juridical order to make sense. A regular situation must
¶ be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation
¶
is actually effective.’’3
¶
Schmitt thus inverses the

traditional Hobbesian definition of
¶
sovereignty as the juridical sanctioned power to rule. Sovereignty is
¶
not established after the state of nature; rather, the sovereign
¶
declaration of the state of exception simultaneously creates the
¶
state of nature and the rule of law through the abandonment of
¶
life, reducing (some) subjects to bare life.4 Sovereign power thus
¶ constantly reproduces what it claims to presuppose. That is, the ¶ social contract that brings the sovereign into being masks the fact
¶
that sovereignty essentially operates through a ban: ‘‘The originary
¶
relation of law to life is not application but abandonment.’’5 First,
¶
the sovereign is characterised by the fact that he can exempt
¶
himself from the law. Second, in doing so sovereign power
¶
excludes sacred life from the human-made juridical order in the
¶
sense that the latter can be killed without punishment. Thus, the
¶
sovereign and homo sacer are the mirror images of the sovereign
¶
operation: ‘‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men
¶
are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with
¶
respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.’’6 To put it simply: if ¶ the sovereign is defined by his capability to exempt himself from
¶
the law, homo sacer is defined as the bearer of this sovereign ban. Hence, for Carl Schmitt sovereignty shows itself not in a normal
¶
situation (or more accurately: it shows itself only in its potentiality)
¶
but in the state of exception, which is the authentic self-definition of a
¶
political community in the sense that it both constructs and delimits
¶
political space.7
Although Agamben finds Schmitt’s definition of
¶
sovereignty useful, he identifies a third variation of order and localisation ¶ besides the rule of law and the state of exception: ‘‘To an ¶ order without localization (the state of exception, in which law is
¶
suspended) there now corresponds a localization without order (the
¶
camp as the permanent space of exception).’’8 For Agamben, the
¶
camp exemplifies the space that is opened up when the state of
¶
exception finds a more permanent location: ¶ The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception – the possibility of ¶ deciding on which founds sovereign power – is realized normally…[It] actually
¶
delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which
¶
whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on the law but on the civility
¶
and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.9
¶ Originally, the camp was an exclusive, secret, space surrounded by ¶ walls that divided social life within the political community from the
¶
bare life in the camps. However, according to
Agamben the space of
¶
the state of exception has transgressed the spatiotemporal boundaries
¶
of the camp. The exception has become the rule: ‘‘Today it is not the
¶
city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm
¶
of the
West.’’10
¶
Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that
¶ the sovereign right to take life has become supplemented and
¶ permeated by a right to make life
. In modern societies the sovereign
¶ threat of death has been complemented with a concern to take
¶ charge of biological life in order to make it more productive, fertile, healthy, etc
.11 Instead of threatening with death, biopolitics
¶
is a form of power that is concerned with the correction, administration
¶
and regulation of populations. Seeking to take charge of
¶
life, ‘‘it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies
¶
of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions
¶
around the norm.’’12 The inclusion of pure life in politics, then,
¶
also marks a shift from law to the (statistical) norm in the sense
¶
that bare life is not only, or not even first and foremost, produced
¶
in the sovereign process of taking life, but through the process of
¶
making life, i.e. through the distribution of human life around a
¶
norm with the purpose of reducing life’s distance to this norm.
¶
Although the incorporation of bare life in the political realm has
¶
made it possible to reduce, amongst others, famine and mortality ¶ in the West, it has also given rise to ‘caring’ practices such as ¶ racism and eugenics: ‘‘What follows is a kind of bestialization of
¶
man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques.
¶
For the first time in history…it becomes possible both to protect
¶
life and to authorize a holocaust.’’13
¶
Agamben’s rendering of sovereign power and bare life is driven
¶ by an ethical drive to lay bare the juridico-political mechanisms of
¶ power that make it possible to commit acts of violence that do not
¶ count as crime
.14 While not denying the uniqueness of the suffering
¶
in the
Nazi concentration camps, Agamben discovers similar structures
¶
in contemporary society. He points out that camp-like structures ¶ such as detention centres for illegal migrants, airport holding ¶ zones and humanitarian relief camps all produce bare life in the
¶
sense that decisions on the life of people can be taken outside the
¶
normal framework of rule, but which nevertheless are not completely
¶
illegal and without connection to that law. In the context of this
¶
paper, the
Guantanamo Bay detention centre for suspected terrorists
¶
is another case in point.15 However, as Edkins has noted,
Agamben
¶
has not inquired deeper into the politics of emergency or the politics
¶
of the ban in which the sovereign and homo sacer are constituted as each other’s mirror image.16 Therefore, the following sections aim to
¶
provide insight into the ways in which the American governance of
¶
the emergency of 9/11 constitute global American sovereignty on the
¶
one hand and reduce political subjects to the naked life of homo
¶
sacer.
¶
3. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE
PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN
¶
SOVEREIGNTY
¶
A direct parallel
, then, can be drawn between
Agamben’s notion of
¶ the camp as a zone of indistinction and the
logic that informs the
¶
United States’ war on terrorism
. In addition to the physical emergence
¶
of camp-like structures such as the detainment centres for suspected
¶
terrorists, it can be said that the war on terrorism operates through the
¶ sovereign ban in the sense that it blurs the distinction between inside/ outside, domestic politics/international relations, order/anarchy, trust/fear police/military and friend/enemy.
This section argues that
¶ the blurring is brought about by a fundamental change in the United
¶
States’ politics of security.
Contrary to the pre-9/11 period, the
¶
starting point of post-9/11 security politics is prevention rather than
¶ the defence against an actual threat: ‘‘We must adapt the concept of ¶ imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries…To ¶ forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, ¶ the United States will
, if necessary, act pre-emptively
.’’17
¶
The semiotic shift from defence to prevention takes its point of
¶
departure in

the behavioural potentialities of states rather than their
¶
actual behaviour: ‘‘[T]he United States can no longer solely rely on a
¶
reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a
¶
potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be unleashed by our adversaries’
¶
choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let ¶ our enemies strike first.’’18 Whereas anticipatory self-defence as it is ¶ understood in international law still operates with an image of ¶ reactive violence, the war on terrorism replaces this picture with that
¶ of proactive intervention:
‘‘We must deter and defend against the
¶
threat before it is unleashed.’’19
As such, prevention entails a move from danger to risk
.20
The aim is no longer to confront a concrete
¶ danger, but to intervene before threats have fully emerged
.
Thus,
¶ preventive security is virtual security: it is one step further away from
¶ danger in its potentiality, but at the same time it is real, for the future
¶ increasingly determines present security choices.
21
¶
The shift from defence to prevention, re-action to pro-action,
¶ deterrence to intelligence, and events to eventualities is to be considered
¶ mainly on an ontological level
. Contrary to defence, prevention takes insecurity rather than security as the underlying value of security politics : ‘
‘We are today a nation at risk to a new and
¶
changing threat.
The terrorist
threat to America takes many forms,
¶
has many places to hide, and is often invisible
. Yet the need for
¶
homeland security is tied to our enduring vulnerability.’’22 While
¶
defence implies protection, safety and trust, prevention operates on ¶ the basis of permanent feelings of fear, anxiety and unease.
Security
¶ discourses,
in other words, are
increasingly dominated by the logic of
¶ risk management
, a logic which calls for the management and government
¶ of potentialities of ‘risky’ populations by means of
(statistical) ¶ calculations and proactive management
rather than through the
¶
reactive management of real events and threats.
¶
The war on terrorism cannot be pinpointed in spatiotemporal ¶ terms. The time and place of terrorism are of the terrorist’s choosing.
¶
The success of terrorism lies in the provocation of fear and anxiety
¶
that result from the uncertainty regarding the time and place of the
¶
next attack. Hence, all perceived dangers
(anthrax, serial killers,
¶
illegal immigration, etc.) can be
and are linked to terrorists
.
Fear is the rationale of the war on terrorism
in which, in the end, everything
¶
can become suspicious. The National Security Strategy (2002) summarises
¶
it nicely: ‘‘Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the
¶
methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now
¶
spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off
¶
without warning.’’23 Victory is remote and to protect the local
¶
homeland, security politics
has to operate on a global level: to be safe
¶ here means that the world has to be freed from terrorists everywhere .
¶ In terms of its effects on the contours of the global order, the
¶ prevention doctrine lays the basis for the United States’ exemption
¶ from international law and other norms that govern conduct in
¶ international society.
In this sense, prevention invalidates the law without declaring international law openly obsolete
. Faced with a
¶
non-localisable and open-ended threat, the war on terrorism effectively institutionalises a permanent state of exception in which the United States reserves for itself the right to act unilaterally, while simultaneously demanding compliance with the law from the other states .
As Hardt and Negri argue:
‘‘
Here therefore, is born, in the
¶ name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is
¶ really a right of the police [that] is inscribed in the deployment of
¶ prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction
¶ of the social equilibrium.’
’24 As such, the war on terrorism
¶ replaces the current order with a smooth, infinite space of endless
¶ surveillance, detection and prevention
.
Prevention produces
American
¶ sovereignty
, but it
is also produces bare life
, life that is abandoned ¶ in the process of constituting global American sovereignty.
¶
4. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF BARE LIFE
¶
In the war on terror, the figure of the terrorist embodies the bare life
¶ that is the

bearer of the sovereign ban
. While the language of war
¶
might seem to elevate terrorism from the realm of criminal justice
¶
(low politics) to that of war and international security (high politics),
¶
a closer look reveals that terrorists are in fact not considered a
¶ legitimate party in the war
. Rather, they are criminalised and referred
¶ to as unlawful combatants .
The distinction between enemy combatant
¶
and unlawful combatant has much in common with the Schmittian distinction between enemy and foe.
While the first refers
¶
to the concrete other that constitutes an existential threat to the self,
¶
the foe refers to the criminalised and morally degraded other, who ¶ should not only be defeated but utterly destroyed. Perhaps, it is in this ¶ sense that one should make sense of the comment by
the American ¶
Secretary of Defence
, Donald
Rumsfeld, that the goal of the war in
¶
Afghanistan was to kill – rather than defeat
– as many Taleban as
¶ possible.
25 At any rate, the framing of the war on terrorism as a war
¶ on behalf of civilisation itself denies that such values are presented in
¶ the other
.26 Thus Zˇizˇek argues that in the war on terrorism ¶ ...we cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organization like the Red Cross
¶
mediating between the warring parties, organizing the exchange of prisoners, and so ¶ on: one side of the conflict (the US-dominated global force) already assumes the role ¶ of the Red Cross
– it perceives itself not as one of the warring sides, but as a
¶
mediating agent of peace and global order crushing rebellions and, simultaneously,
¶
providing humanitarian aid to the ‘local populations’. Perhaps the ultimate image of
¶
the treatment of the ‘local population’ as Homo sacer is that of the American war ¶ plane flying above Afghanistan – one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food
¶
parcels.27
¶
As noted earlier, a second aspect in which the transformation of
¶
life into bare life is visible in the war on terrorism concerns the status
¶
and treatment of detained suspects of terrorism. Although many of ¶ the detainees have been taken into American custody during the ¶ armed conflict in Afghanistan, they are not granted the prisoner of
¶
war status in the way it is required by the Geneva Conventions.
¶
Speaking of unlawful combatants, the United States successfully
¶
keeps their detainment outside the realm of international regulation.
¶
In a parallel movement, the fate of the detainees is also kept outside
¶
the jurisdiction of the national American criminal justice system as a
¶
result of the extra-territorial location of the Guantanamo base where
¶
many detainees are held. While the suffering of these detainees
¶
obviously is not comparable to the atrocities faced by inhabitants of
¶
the concentration camps, it is nevertheless possible to detect the
¶
juridico-political structure of the state of exception (the camp) in
¶
detainment centres such as the Guantanamo base, as detainees are stripped from all legal rights, while they remain subjected to the
¶
power exercised over them.28
¶ However, the biopolitical production of bare life does not just take ¶ place in the camp or the immediate conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, ¶ the production of homo sacer is made possible through bureaucratic
¶ techniques of risk management
, enabled by new laws such as the
¶
Patriot Act, that apply well beyond the theatres of military conflict.
¶
These techniques of bureaucratic surveillance subject life to statistical
¶ methods by which norms of behaviour are identified within the
¶ population according to the laws of probability
.29 In risk management,
¶ the subject is not encountered as a unique person with some
¶ sort of indispensable inner singularity, but as an aggregate of risk
¶ factors, a modulation that can be managed and tamed through
¶ continuous monitoring.
As Rose argues, risk management ¶ …is not a question of instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under
¶
the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising individualizing surveillance. It is not a
¶
matter of apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct is ¶ continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all networks of
¶
practice. Surveillance is ‘designed in’ to the flows of everyday existence.30
¶
Turning individuals into ‘dividuals’, risk management reduces life to
¶ the naked life of biographic profiles on the basis of which new collective
¶ identities or risk classes are created
.31 The aim of the Computer
¶
Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system, for
¶ instance, is to gather data about all passengers flying to the United States. On the basis of information about name, age, address, passport,
¶
credit card number and previous travels, CAPPS classifies the
¶
potential dangerousness of all travellers. It constructs three different
¶
risk classes/identities: green, yellow and red, with green meaning
¶
non-dangerous and red meaning very dangerous. Muslim visitors
¶
from the Middle East are automatically assigned the yellow identity.32
¶
However, surveillance is not just limited to foreigners entering the
¶
United States. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a joint initiative
¶
of the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the
¶
Intelligence Community, the FBI and the State Department, seeks to
¶
install surveillance and data collection as a routine of every-day life
¶
within and outside the United States. As Attorney General Ashcroft ¶ argues: ‘‘The Terrorist Screening Center will provide ‘one-stop ¶ shopping’ so that every federal anti-terrorist screener is working off
¶
the same page – whether it’s an airport screener, an embassy official
¶
issuing visas overseas, or an FBI agent on the street.’’33 The result is
¶
that the differences between inside/outside, police/military and
¶
FBI/CIA become increasingly blurred. On the one hand, there is an
¶
increasing internalisation of external security in the form of ‘domestic
¶
spying’ and data collection within the United States. On the other
¶
hand, externalisation of internal security (policing beyond borders) is
¶
taking place in remote places such as
Afghanistan. Hence, Tom ¶ Ridge’s (Secretary of Homeland Security) remark, that the Terrorist ¶ Screening Center will make it possible to put intelligence to immediate
¶
use at the front lines of the battle against terrorism misses the
¶
crucial point that there are no clear front lines in the war on terror.
¶
Rather, the front is everywhere and no one can expect to be exempted
¶
from the network of surveillance and inspection. In a sense, everybody
¶
is a suspect.
¶
The administration and classification of biographical risk profiles
¶
does not work as an immediate exclusion (monitored subjects can
¶
freely move around), but as a form of ‘inclusive exclusion’. That is, ¶ prevention does not perform its exclusive function in simple binary
¶
terms of friend/foe, but fabricates the ‘foe’ within the social order as
¶
potentially dangerous. The aim of

intervention is no longer the
¶
exclusion of dangerous elements, but to interfere on the actuarial basis of risk factors in order to anticipate and prevent groupings from
¶
becoming dangerous. Through the inclusion of risk classes in a system
¶
of control, the life of legal subjects is not reduced to that of homo
¶
sacer. Rather, the reverse is happening: the figure of homo sacer
¶ dwells in everybody in the sense that all life is bare life until class
¶ credentials prove otherwise – the elevation from homo sacer to an
¶ autonomous subject is only a secondary move.
¶ 5. CONCLUSION ¶ Following Agamben, this paper has argued that the centrality of the
¶ state of exception and the sovereign ban as the non-localisable
¶ foundation for the political order are crucial for understanding the
¶ war on terrorism, the production of American sovereignty and the
¶ production of bare life
. Due to its emphasis on prevention, the war on
¶ terrorism institutionalises the state of exception as a permanent aspect of the global order . In it, American sovereignty is constituted
¶
in a Schmittian sense as much as bare life is subjected to technological processes of risk identification, administration and assessment .
¶
Indeed, in the sense that prevention calls for a system of social
¶ control that envelopes the entire globe, it is best understood as a
¶ blurring of the boundaries between inside/outside, domestic/international and peace/war .
The dispersion of surveillance throughout
¶
domestic and international society implies that heterogeneous factors
¶
and events such as place of birth, religion, travel records, reading ¶ records, visa applications and immigration all become part of a ¶ cybernetics of control in which risk information is intrinsic to all
¶
decisions made on these issues. Prevention, then, is not concerned
¶
with the production of something good. Its aim is to repress anxiety
¶
through the development of new and better technologies of risk. It
¶
does not work towards some utopian goal, but is guided by the
¶
principle of apocalypse: ‘‘Risk society is a catastrophic society. In it
¶
the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.’’34 The
¶
semiotic shift from defence to prevention in American security discourse, ¶ to conclude, implies that the freedom of human beings is in ¶ constantly constrained, restricted and assessed. Hence, while the
¶
battle against terrorism is fought in the name of freedom and
¶
democracy, risk management neutralises real democratic participation
¶
by classifying groups in categories that affect the chances and choices of people in every-day life. To quote Agamben: ‘‘A state ¶ which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile ¶ organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself
¶
terroristic.’

Their political education to create particular skills for a particular purpose reduce us to particular roles within the political economy – that denies ontological indeterminacy and destroys our freedom to be
LEWIS 14
[Tyson E. Lewis is Associate professor of art education in the Department of art education and art history,
College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas. “THE POTENTIALITY OF STUDY: GIORGIO AGAMBEN
ON THE POLITICS OF EDUCATIONAL EXCEPTIONALITY”, symploke Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2 (2014), http://media.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/media/pq/classic/doc/3578313101/fmt/pi/rep/NONE?hl=&cit%3Aauth
=Lewis%2C+Tyson+E&cit%3Atitle=THE+POTENTIALITY+OF+STUDY%3A+GIORGIO+AGAMBEN+ON+THE+POLITI
CS+OF+EDUCATIONAL+EXCEPTIONALITY&cit%3Apub=Symploke&cit%3Avol=22&cit%3Aiss=1%2F2&cit%3Apg=275
&cit%3Adate=2015&ic=true&cit%3Aprod=ProQuest+Research+Library&_a=ChgyMDE1MDcyMDAxMDAxNTIyNzozND
MyMTgSBTk1NjYzGgpPTkVfU0VBUkNIIg0xNDEuMjExLjQuMjI0KgU0MzAzMjIKMTY1MDg3NjY4MToNRG9jdW1lbnR
JbWFnZUIBMFIGT25saW5lWgJGVGIDUEZUagoyMDE1LzAxLzAxcgoyMDE1LzEyLzMxegCCASlQLTEwMDc5MDEtMT
Q2NjctQ1VTVE9NRVItMTAwMDAwMjUtNDA5MTU1M5IBBk9ubGluZcoBeU1vemlsbGEvNS4wIChNYWNpbnRvc2g7IEl udGVsIE1hYyBPUyBYIDEwXzEwXzIpIEFwcGxlV2ViS2l0LzUzNy4zNiAoS0hUTUwsIGxpa2UgR2Vja28pIENocm9tZS80
My4wLjIzNTcuMTM0IFNhZmFyaS81MzcuMzbSARJTY2hvbGFybHkgSm91cm5hbHOaAgdQcmVQYWlkqgIoT1M6RU1T
LVBkZkRvY1ZpZXdCYXNlLWdldE1lZGlhVXJsRm9ySXRlbcoCD0FydGljbGV8RmVhdHVyZdICAVniAgDyAgA%3D&_s=
FzWvhCT9vzzGrZ%2BEvzyxh2V0eD4%3D#statusbar=1&zoom=110, msm]
Potentiality of Study
¶
To begin, I will offer a brief overview of Agamben’s theory of potentiality.
¶
This initial introduction will provide the necessary backdrop for
¶
understanding the ontology of study. From De Anima, Giorgio Agamben
¶
argues that Aristotle enables us to think two kinds of potential: generic and
¶
effective. A generic conceptualization of potentiality explains how a child ¶ is able to grow up to be a particular type of person with a particular role in ¶ society (a statesman for example).
Through education, the child suffers an
¶
“ alteration
( a becoming other
) through learning
” (Agamben 1999, 179) where
¶
“the passage from the act implies an exhaustion and destruction of potential ”
¶
(Agamben 2005, 136). It is precisely this model of potentiality
that currently
¶ informs discourses of what has been called the learning society
(Masschelein
¶
and Simons 2008)— a social apparatus that emphasizes investment into potentiality in order to fully actualize this potential in the form of performance outcomes and human capital development.
Here the ontology of the child is structured according to the strict logic of “not yet”: not yet an adult, not yet a citizen, not yet a productive member of society
.
Thus the child must suffer an alteration through learning that destroys the “not yet” in order to fully actualize a latent potentiality for adulthood, citizenship, or productivity
¶ (i.e., transform the
“not yet” into the necessity of the “must be” of the
¶
professional, employable adult).
To fully actualize potentiality is to destroy
¶ it, transforming a contingency into a necessity
. In this schema, potentiality
¶ becomes subordinate to actuality
—it is in some senses what makes the actual ¶ possible but also what must be eliminated in order for the passage to the ¶ act to be complete and for the child to rightfully take his or her place within
¶
allotted order of things (either in relation to the economic, the political, or
¶
the social).
To fulfill potentiality is to destroy it in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, commanding and controlling the possibilities offered by potentiality .
¶
The contingencies of potentiality are what must be sacrificed in order for the child to learn x skills for x purposes predetermined in advance by the social norms, traditions, and values which inform educational practices .
¶
The result is a notion of the human as capable of only a select few behaviors, skills, and actions easily assignable to a specific function within the overall division of labor .
In other words, the logic of

education as socialization is anchored in an ontology of generic potentiality as a “not yet” that “must be” made manifest in measurably determinate, socially useful, and economically manageable skillsets .
Education
, in this sense, concerns deadlines
—or lines
¶ that end with the death of potentiality
.
Tests are therefore grave markers
—
¶
not markers of what has passed out of actuality but rather of what has passed
¶
into actuality. Indeed, potentiality
in this framework is
more or less reduced
¶ to
a series of possibilities that can either be actualized or not actualized
. The
¶
logic in such cases operates through the function of the “or” which separates
¶
and divides potentiality into a series of discrete, functionally oriented, and
¶
exclusive possibilities (“you will either go to vocational school or college“).
¶
278
¶
Opposed to the reductive notion of generic potentiality underlying ¶ learning, Agamben argues that there is a second notion of potentiality in ¶ Aristotle’s work that can be referred to as “effective potentiality” in that
¶
it represents a “conservation of potential in the act and something like the
¶ giving of potentiality to itself” (2005, 136). This is the type of potentiality
¶
that interests Agamben the most. Those who have knowledge are in potential,
¶
meaning that they equally have the capability to bring knowledge into
¶
actuality and not bring knowledge into actuality. Agamben then gives the
¶
example of an architect who “is in potential insofar as he has the potential
¶
to not-build, the poet the potential to not-write poems” (1999, 179). By
¶
conserving itself, potential remains impotential (impotenza). Im-potentiality
¶
(which indicates the symbiotic relation between potential and impotential) is
¶ not simply impotence, but is an active capability for not-doing or not-being.
¶
Agamben summarizes: im-potentiality is the
“capability of the act in not realizing ¶ it” (1998, 45) and thus “permits human beings to accumulate and freely ¶ master their own capacities, to transform them into ‘faculties’” (2011b, 44).
¶
Rather than a stumbling block that must be continually denied, repressed,
¶
or overcome, Joanne Faulkner argues that Agamben’s theory of im-potential
¶
“refers not simply to incapacity but rather to a being-able that abstains from
¶
doing” (2010, 205) that permits a new relation to one’s own impotency.
¶
Rather than a simple lack or defi cit, im-potentiality is a privation in the sense
¶
that im-potentiality means one has potential but prefers not to actualize it
¶
in any specifi c form. Thus, all theories of potentiality must also and equally ¶ be theories of the impotential, for it is im-potential that enables freedom to ¶ fl ourish—not the freedom of “I will” as a power of self-production according
¶
to economic imperatives or socially predetermined norms so much as an
¶ ontological openness to new possibilities.
¶
In fact, it is the giving of potentiality to itself that is the experience of freedom.
¶
Agamben writes, “Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is
¶
to be found in the abyss of potentiality…. To be free is, in the sense we have
¶
seen, to be capable of one’s own impotentiality…” (1999, 183). What makes us
¶
human, according to Agamben, is precisely the capability to not be, to remain ¶ im-potential. It is this paradoxical existence that opens history to contingency—to
¶
the potential to act otherwise or to be otherwise. Evil in this sense
¶
is derivative of a fl ight from an indetermining im-potentiality into the logic
¶
of pure or complete actualization for a predetermined end (transforming a
¶ contingency into a necessity). It is a denial of the constitutive link between ¶ growth and impotence. Citing Agamben, “Evil is only our inadequate reaction
¶
when faced with this demonic element [our impotential], our fearful retreat
¶
from it in order to exercise—founding ourselves in this fl ight some power of
¶
being” (1993, 31-32). Thus to enable students to experience their potential ¶ means that they must be given the chance to experience their impotence, ¶ their capability not to be.
Education
as mere socialization through learning
¶ measures what someone can do in order to fulfill a particular role within the economy
, yet for Agamben, this obsession with assessment and verification
¶
Tyson E. Lewis The Potentiality of Study
¶ symplokeˉ 279 ¶ of actualization in the learning society is
itself a form of evil that destroys our freedom to be rather than precisely because it denies our ontological indeterminacy .
¶ His theory of im-potentiality enables us to think potentiality against ¶ the logic of educational socialization
, which reduces potentiality to a “not yet”
¶ that actualizes itself in a “must be.”
Indeed, impotentiality does not simply
¶
separate potentiality from impotentiality (thus sacrifi cing contingency for
¶
necessity, possibility for impossibility), rather it recognizes that the subject
¶
emerges precisely in the gap that separates and binds together opposite
¶
forces in the atopic space existing between desubjectifi cation (an unnamed
¶
subject position) and subjectifi cation (recognizable within the order of things
¶ and the partitioning of the sensible). Instead of separating potentiality into a
¶
series of mutually exclusive possibilities (to be or not to be), potentiality holds
¶
possibilities together, returning them to a more primordially indeterminate
¶
state (to be and not to be simultaneously).
¶
While
Agamben draws our attention to the centrality of im-potentiality
¶ within politics, ontology, and literary theory
, he only makes a passing
¶ gesture toward the theme of education. Yet this does not mean that education
¶
is unimportant for Agamben. Indeed, we could think of education
¶ as the unthought potentiality of his own thinking.
The unthought briefly
¶
manifests itself in the aphorism “On Study” from the book The Idea of Prose.
¶
Briefl y summarized, studying is an “interminable” and “rhythmic” activity
¶ that not only loses a sense of its own end but
, more importantly,
“does
¶ not even desire one”
(Agamben 1995,
64).
The studier seems suspended in
¶ a state of oscillation between sadness and inspiration, of moving forward
¶ and withdrawing from certain aims, subjectification and desubjectification.
¶
Studying emerges as a
kind of

impotential state of educational being that
¶ interrupts any notion of educational “growth” or educational “realization” of
¶ latent potentialities.
Indeed, Agamben points out that studying and stupefying
¶
are closely connected. Stupidity here is not simply a lack of knowledge
¶
but rather the experience of bewilderment in the face of the interminable or
¶
indeterminate manifestation of im-potentiality as such.
If we think of education
¶ as oriented towards the measurability of determinate, reliable skillsets,
¶ studying suddenly appears to be a “useless” activity, devoid of quantifiable
¶ significance in the life of the student.
To use Heideggerian language, study
¶ suspends any one “in-in-order-to” or
“for-the-purpose-of” which orient
¶
Dasein toward practical coping.
Studying is a paradoxical state between
¶ education for subjectifi cation and for desubjectifi cation, between possibility
¶ and impossibility, between contingency and necessity
. To study is to undergo
¶
a certain inoperativity where we are, to appropriate a phrase from Thomas
¶
Carl Wall’s insightful study of Agamben, “exposed to all its[thought’s] possibilities
¶
(all its predicates)” and yet are “undestined to any one or any set of
¶
them” (1999, 152). Without a destiny or destination, the studier is a precarious,
¶ risky, and indeterminate kind of life.
Policy Simulation is fake and neglects the actual process of policy implementation
Claude, 88 – Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of
Virginia (Inis, “States and the Global System,” 1988, pgs. 18-20)
This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch, presiding over his kingdom.
Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state
, its monopoly of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice
.
Thus, France wills
, Iran demands,
China intends
, New Zealand promises and the Soviet
Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies
intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national interest. We thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationally conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy
-directed behaviour may have importance– alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour.
Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the execution of policy . We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of
policy is the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration
, taking as my text the passage: ‘
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light’
. I suspect that, in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably from policy statement
. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those denizens of William S. Gilbert’s Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as done and might as well be declared to have been done.
In the real world, that which a state decides to do is not as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what

states do, they may never have decided to do. Governments are not automatic machines
, grinding out decisions and converting decisions into actions.
They are agglomerations of human beings
, like the rest of us inclined to be fallible
, lazy, forgetful, indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and likely to fail to get the word or to heed it.
As in other large organizations, left and right governmental hands are frequently ignorant of each other’s activities, official spokesmen contradict each other, ministries work at cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of government often gives the impression that no one is really in charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely to the fact that I am an American–one, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously complex, disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable.
The United States does not, I suspect, have the least effective government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world.
Here and there
, now and then, governments do
, of course perform prodigious feats of organization and administration: an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful hostage-rescue operation.
More often, states have to make do with governments that are not notably clear about their purposes or coordinated and disciplined in their operations.
This means that, in international relations, states are sometimes less dangerous, and sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their threats nor their promises are to be taken with absolute seriousness.
Above all, it means that we students of international politics must be cautious in attributing purposefulness and responsibility to governments. To say the that the
United States was informed about an event is not to establish that the president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard about it.
To say that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all intruders into Soviet airspace; one wants to know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the representative of
Zimbabwe voted in favour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of
Zimbabwe’s policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one in the national capital has ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak for and act on behalf of their states, but
it is essential that we bear constantly in mind the reality that governments are never fully in charge and never achieve the unity, purposefulness and discipline that theory attributes to them–and that they sometimes claim.
Framework alone is a reason to vote neg – their approach side-steps decision-making and kills deliberation – only a new form of debate can reclaim the political
Ian Beier MA in Communication Studies @ UNLV 2010 “Cascading Simulation: A
Critical Perspective On Barack Obama‘s Foreign Policy During The 2008 Presidential
Election” thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of
Arts in Communication Studies Department of Communication Studies Greenspun
College of Urban Affairs Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas August 2010,
SHOUT OUT TO DR. IAN BEIER
This universal frame helps determine how the audience comes to understand their campaign‘s platforms because voters find value-laden claims more persuasive than pragmatic considerations.45 This exclusionary function is an important component of political rhetoric because it reveals one of the most important traits of persuasion. That is, it is easiest to influence the opinion of others when they perceive that there are no viable alternatives.
¶ Rhetorical scholar Keith Erickson‘s piece ―Presidential Spectacles: Political Illusionism and the Rhetoric of Travel ‖ is a prime example of presidential rhetoric as spectacle. For Erickson, travel spectacle should be analyzed differently because the presentation is what grants the speech act rhetorical power, not the content of the speech itself. Robert Schmull suggests visually absorbing images capture the public‘s imagination better than lengthy speeches, making it much more likely that the audience remembers what they saw rather than what they heard.46 Here, the travel spectacle is the text or rhetorical artifact. In this sense, Erickson suggests that form supersedes content, as the images of the presentation function as ―ideological forms of pictorial power that possess the capacity to persuade, deceive, or otherwise influence spectators . . . to justify and maintain certain forms of collective conduct.
‖ 47 Understanding spectacle as primarily presentational rhetoric is quite significant to rhetorical scholarship on presidential address and presidential campaigns. If speeches are only given to heighten the rhetorical power of the image, then the words used in these speeches only retain rhetorical significance when they add to the public‘s collective
¶ memory
of the speech. Thus, presidential addresses, even when discussing particular policies, are largely ceremonial in nature because ― reliance on images, as opposed to
informed dialogue, discourse, or debate enables administrations

to side-step the public forum, avoid interactive decision making, and to address spectators epideictically
.
‖ 48
The speaker is merely attempting to align themselves with the values of the audience rather than call them to action through active deliberation
, as ―travel spectacles merely gratify affectively; in general, they do not resolve issues because their reassurances are but substitutes for achievement
.
‖ 49 The idea that travel merely glosses over controversy is particularly important in the context of presidential campaigns, as it further signifies the notion that campaign orations are a hybrid of deliberative means and epideictic ends.
¶ Obviously, the idea that spectacle creates rhetorical opportunities for manipulation pays homage to media criticism. However, Erickson‘s work is important because it demonstrates how presidential scholarship reverses the presumptive agent-object relationship between the media and the president prevalent in Baudrillard‘s analysis. For Erickson, the president is the agent rather than the object of manipulation.
¶ Indeed, there is quite a bit of doubt among rhetorical critics who question whether the media truly interrogates the content of its reports, as media pundits see ―travel spectacles [as] not only newsworthy‘ but functionally convenient, cost-effective visual attention- getters that simplify complex political information.
‖ 50 In essence, the
travel spectacle does the leg work of constructing the story for the media.
Here, the media ―coverage [of the travel spectacle] . . . fails to interpret or identify nascent signs of White House manipulation ‖ 51 because correspondents are rarely invested in the story enough to ―sit around Air Force One asking why they‘re writing these stories.
‖ 52 Recent scholarship on the Bush administration demonstrates this claim, arguing that the passivity of the media allows outright manipulation. As Kellner notes, ―in addition to cultivating right-wing media that broadcast their messages of the day and intimidating the mainstream corporate media, the Bush administration has created fake media and bought conservative commentators to push their policies.
‖ 53 Examples include the administration‘s distribution of videos that are presented as local broadcasting54 and the administration‘s planting of fake reporters who asked loaded questions at White House Press Conferences.55
¶ Limiting the text to include only the presentation of the speaker and their attempts to frame media coverage ignores the fact that the media does not simply replicate the event. On its own, Erickson‘s method does not account for the dynamic relationship between the public, the media, and the candidate during a presidential campaign because it presumes a static media that merely regurgitates the entirety of the event as directed by the candidate. Taken to its logical extreme, this would mean that every media account would represent every picture and a full transcript of the entire speech. However, there is no ―universalized media conglomerate.
‖ 56
Newspapers
and reporters have political preferences that, no matter how hard they try, appear in the way that they
―report the news
.
‖ In effect, the idea that the public receives the entirety of the message is bizarrely incomplete
because the only part of the public that has a ―pure representation ‖ of the event are those taking the pictures and writing the stories. Not only is this a dangerously myopic way to view travel spectacle in
presidential speech es, but it becomes far less applicable in the context of
campaign rhetoric where there is an active and ongoing discursive exchange
between the public and the candidate. In presidential campaigns the candidate‘s attention is on persuading the public to vote for them. In this discussion, the media acts as a mediator between the two parties and not the primary target of rhetorical influence.
¶
As a result of what Erickson sees as the media‘s inability to interrogate its own messages
, he suggests that it is up to the rhetorical critic to reveal the inadequacies of travel spectacle whenever they emerge in order to limit presidential abuses of power and sustain a constructive relationship between the public and the president.57 While
I do not find Erickson‘s demand that critics enact their research as social actors
particularly compelling, his comments are still insightful because they highlight readily observable elements of travel spectacle that critics should be able to identify. Erickson suggests there are five core elements of the travel spectacle that are worthy of interrogation, arguing that critics should examine how spectacles: favor visual over verbal eloquence, simplify complex political issues, narratively interpret presidential agendas, synoptically reify presidential personae, and construct political realities.
¶ In all, political spectacle
emerges from scholarship that sees
the presidency as a rhetorically powerful position that can control public opinion through defining political reality in terms of common beliefs and values
. These appeals are largely metaphorical in nature, where the persuasive value of presidential speech is largely determined by the speaker‘s ability to align their position within historical narratives that denote leadership. This is particularly important in the context of presidential campaigns, as candidates utilize these deliberative arguments as an ingratiation strategy based on potentialities that appeal to voter perceptions. Often times, this simulation of presidential leadership acts as a substitution for the candidate‘s actual experience because the visual enactment resonates within the mind of the public. Within this interaction between the candidate and the public, the media acts as a passive transmitter of messages that the candidate can manipulate in order to maximize their appeal. Thus, the ―sound-byte ‖ culture creates an rhetorical environment where the candidates framing of the issue invites criticism and interpretation. The next section outlines a rhetorical hybrid between media and political spectacle grounded in the idea that both have significant roles in creating meaning in contemporary political culture.
Our approach is key to understanding the state of exception. The aff is a blind acceptance of the law, but our Framework is key to generating public knowledge about sovereign brutality.
Kamalnath 13.
Anthea J. Kamalnath, JD from the University College London, the first Advocacy Chair for the
United States National Committee for United Nations Women, first Choate Rosemary Hall Fellow of Rhetoric, tutor for the Los Angeles Public Library’s Adult Literacy Program, shares awards for her public speaking with former President Bill

Clinton, [this may be on a blog, but our author is so qualified] “United States of Exception,” http://antheakamalnath.wordpress.com/tag/agamben/
♥
Tina
The only explanation for the sheer lack of discourse, let alone intelligent discourse, in relation to the topic of the Obama administration’s gross expansion of executive powers and its support of unconstitutional provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act 2012 (NDAA) is that we are in a “state of exception”,
characterized by anomie at best and idiocy at worst. Cicero said, “There can be war without tumult, but no tumult without war.” President Obama signed the NDAA into law Dec 2011. The NDAA is not a simple extension of the Patriot Act. The NDAA allows for indefinite detention of any person suspected of terrorism or posing a threat to the executive, both American citizen and foreign national, without probable cause and with zero promise of due process.
Although the NDAA secures the end of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, it allows the executive to literally sign off on death warrants – shoot-to kill lists of suspected terrorists, some American, some under 18
. In the 1920s, German legal theorist Carl Schmitt coined the term “state of exception”, a moment in government when there is a “suspesion of the entire existing judicial order”. Following the September 11th attacks, the subsequent Patriot Act of 2001 and Guantanamo Bay , Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben elaborated on this historical phenomenon with his books “Homo Sacer” and “The State of Exception.” I read the latter in college and it changed the way
I saw the world. For Agamben (and the tradition that produced him Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida
), a
“state of exception” is neither internal nor external to the juridicial order, and the problem of defining it concerns a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. It introduces a zone of anomie into the law in order to make the effective regulation of the real possible.
Agamben argues that this “state of exception” was already codified in Roman law; the Roman iustitium, literally “the suspension of the law”, was an archetypal state of exception. “Iustititium” gave the Roman Senate expansive powers in the face of threats to the Republic.
Iustitium was declared following the death of the sovereign, a legal manifestation of grief through suspension of the order:
Durkheim’s anomie. Grief is arguably dehumanizing; a state of exception is the reversal of the human to the non-human, the fate of enemy combatants captured and detained in Guantanamo Bay with no legal identity and no legal rights
. The
National Defense Authorization Act is the final act of the “state of exception”: the no man’s land of Guantanamao Bay has been done away with, only to be brought home. The NDAA FY 2012 allowed the executive to kill an American citizen without due process, without charging him with a crime, and to hide behind the shield of executive powers. And he did.
At any previous time in American history, a summary execution by the executive without due process would have been considered cold-blooded murder and an act of tyranny. Yet no one blinked an eye. This indifference is not a normal condition for society; it is a pathological psychological state, a social “state of exception”.
I will never understand the vocal enthusiasm of those who claim they are proud of our President, the NDAA undoes every decent thing President Obama has achieved in office.
The politcians will pontificate, the lawyers will legislate, but the people should always pay attention.
Their framework is an attempt to put our movement in a camp. The sovereign despises our mobility and uncontrollability
Parker 12.
Simon Parker, professor in the centre for Urban Research (CURB) at the University of York, “Between
Between the Reservation and the Camp: Neoliberal Governmentalities of Exceptional Urban Space,” http://academia.edu/3750825/Between_the_Reservation_and_the_Camp_Neoliberal_Governmentalities_of_Exceptio nal_Urban_Space, Paper originally presented to the University of Manchester, Urban Rights GroupSeminar, 29 May
2012,
♥
Tina
As James Scott argues in Seeing Like a State, it is important to understand why the state has always been the enemy of “people who move around”
. ‘
Nomads and pastoralists...hunter gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people,

itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states’, and to this list one should certainly add enemy combatants affiliated to non-state ‘terror organisations’, refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants
. ‘
Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples
(sedenterization)’, Scott continues, ‘ seemed to be a perennial state project—perennial in part because it so seldom succeeded’
(Scott 1998, 1). While this is true of certain counter-publics who needed to be contained because they could not be expelled (for example indigenous peoples in the colonised territories of the ‘New World’), for those with weak or repudiable claims to territorial residence
a biopolitics of repulsion and expulsion has come to structure the exceptional spatiality of an increasingly supra-national state security apparatus
(Graham et al. 2007). As
Foucault reminds us, policed bodies have always been the subject of physical separation and removal from the healthy body politic
— a process that gave rise to the physical, permanent institution of the prison, the clinic and the asylum
(Foucault 1977, 2001). In these heterotopic spaces, the suspension of civic rights gave rise to a disciplinary order in which the state enjoyed qualitative and quantitative control over the abject which had as its end the intensification and extension of ‘bare life’
(Agamben, 1998) and where law and moral order, these most essential and fundamental aspects of the civic community, are indefinitely suspended
(Parker 2010).
The camp therefore represents a controlled space of the ‘social dead’
— the deferment of whose physical death is merely a question of expediency or technical-administrative exigency (Goldhagen 1996).
But its manifestation and recombination extends beyond annihilationist regimes of biopolitical extinction and 'ethnic cleansing' into the banal spaces of the everyday urban world where the twin space of controlled exceptionality and exclusion
--'the reservation'--also features strongly within more familiar landscapes of abjection.
We need analysis from the extremes to produce radical self-critique of the
American security state.
Masco 12.
Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, “The
Ends of Ends,” Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012
♥
Tina
An anthropology of extremes requires a non-normative reading of culture and history, an effort to push past consensus logics to interrogate what alternative visions, projects, and futures are left unexplored at a given historical moment
. The rapidly evolving historical archive provides one opportunity for this kind of critique: our understanding of the 20th century American security state is changing with each newly declassified program and document, dramatically reshaping what we know about US policy, military science, and threat assessments since World War II
. The corona photographs are a compelling illustration of the power of the evolving national security archive.
As the enormous military state apparatus that constitutes the core of the American political and economic machine is grudgingly opened to new kinds of conceptual interrogation, Americans should seize the opportunity to learn about their own commitments, political processes, and security imaginaries. Indeed, the national security archive is one place where we can formally consider how the 20th century
“balance of terror” has been remade in the 21st century as a “war on terror”—following the affective politics, technological fetishisms, and geopolitical ambitions that have come to structure US security culture.
The declassified cold War archive allows us to pursue an extreme reading of US security culture, one committed to pushing past official policy logics at moments of

heightened emergency to consider how threat, historical contingency, technological revolution, propaganda, and geopolitical ambition combine in a specific moment of extreme risk. T he first corona images, for example, constitute a moment when administrators of the national security state had their own logics and fears negated in the form of direct photographic evidence, opening a potential conceptual space for radical reassessment of their own ambitions, perceptions, and drives, powerfully revealed in black and white photos as fantasy.
We might well ask why
the corona imagery (and any number of
similar moments when existential threat has objectively dis- solved into mere projection
—most recently, the missing weapons of mass destruction used to justify the
Us invasion of Iraq in 2003)— did not pro- duce a radical self-critique in the US.

The affirmative’s use of the law and connection to the state makes it impossible for us to kritik the state. We’ll equate the state with goodness, and support it regardless of how oppressive it is.
Hasnas ’95
John, Hasnas Ph.D Philosophy Duke University Senior Research Fellow Georgetown University, 1995,
The Myth of the Rule of Law, Wis. L. Rev. 199
♥
Tina
The problem with this suggestion is that most people are unable to understand what it could possibly mean.
This is chiefly because the language necessary to express the idea clearly does not really exist.
Most people have been raised to identify law with the state. They cannot even conceive of the idea of legal services apart from the government. The very notion of a free market in legal services conjures up the image of anarchic gang warfare or rule by organized crime.
In our system, an advocate of free market law is treated the same way Socrates was treated in Monosizea, and is confronted with the same types of arguments.
The primary reason for this is that the public has been politically indoctrinated to fail to recognize the distinction between order and law. Order is what people need if they are to live together in peace and [*225] security. Law, on the other hand, is a particular method of producing order
. As it is presently constituted, law is the production of order by requiring all members of society to live under the same set of stategenerated rules; it is order produced by centralized planning. Yet, from childhood, citizens are
taught to invariably link the words "law" and "order." Political discourse conditions them to hear and use the terms as though they were synonymous and to express the desire for a safer, more peaceful society as a desire for "law and order." The state nurtures this confusion because it is the public's inability to distinguish order from law that generates its fundamental support for the state. As long as the public identifies order with law, it will believe that an orderly society is impossible
without the law the state provides. And as long as the public believes this, it will continue to support the state almost without regard to how
oppressive it may become . The public's identification of order with law makes it impossible for the public to ask for one without asking for the other. There is clearly a public demand for an orderly society. One of human beings'most fundamental desires is for a peaceful existence secure from violence. But because the public has been conditioned to express its desire for order as one for law, all calls for a more orderly society are interpreted as calls for more law. And since under our current political system, all law is supplied by the state, all such calls are interpreted as calls for a more active and powerful state. The identification of order with law eliminates from public consciousness the very concept of the decentralized provision of order.
With regard to legal services, it renders the classical liberal idea of a market-generated, spontaneous order incomprehensible.

The impact is bare life in a state of exception- the construction of places where the law no longer applies, and where lives are nothing more than things to be sacrificed.
Federman and Holmes 11.
Cary Federman, professor of justice studies at Montclair State University and
Dave Holmes, professor of health sciences at the University of Ottawa, “Guantanamo Bodies: Law, Media, Biopower,”
MediaTropes eJournal Vol III, No 1 (2011):
♥
Tina
Agamben asks, regarding Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction: what is the structure of sovereignty that it “consists in nothing other than the suspension of the rule
?” (Agamben, 1998,
17). For Agamben, the state of exception is not a state of chaos. The state of exception is the “situation that results” from the suspension of the rules (Agamben, 1998, 18).
What defines chaos is not excess but its existence within a state
. With the suspension of the law, the “juridical order’s validity” (Agamben, 1998, 18) is suspended, withdrawn, and abandoned; the outside and the inside collapse on each other.
The sovereign has now created and defined “the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity
” (Agamben, 1998, 29). But the validity of the juridical order is, at the same time, ambiguous
.
What is outside and what is inside now exist in a “zone of indistinction”
(Agamben, 1998, 19). Under these conditions, the state of exception moves to the forefront of politics, redefining norms along the way
.
And in this process of redefinition, the meaning of life for Agamben is clarified: the status of the enemy is one of bare life .
The state of exception “implicated bare life within it”
(Agamben, 1998, 83). What is bare life? Agamben writes that in Roman law, homo sacer is the one who is both sacred and damned. Homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in its sphere. (Agamben, 1998, 83; italics in original)
In a world bereft of nature, history, and a deity as a ground for ethics, life loses its meaning as a thing-in-itself
. The sovereign is the “guarantor” of the situation of life (Schmitt, 2005, 13).
But what does Schmitt mean by life? Agamben locates two meanings for life in modernity. “The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life’” (Agamben, 1998, 1). They used two distinct terms for life: zoe, “which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” and bios, “which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (Agamben, 1998, 1). For Agamben, the central image (and producer) of life during a time shrouded in the friend/enemy distinction is the concentration camp.
The camp is a “no man’s land between coma and death”
(Agamben, 1998, 161).
The camp comes into existence as a political concept when the state of exception is normalized. The camp is not a temporary camp, a displacement camp for refugees on their way to someplace else, but a permanent feature of the modern world, modern politics, and of modern thought
(Agamben, 1998, 174). It is a place to house the zoes of the world
(Agamben notes that in Greek, zoe has no plural; 1998, 1).
Because it houses the exceptional, it is a space of exception. When Heinrich Himmler created “a concentration camp for political prisoners,” Agamben writes, he placed it “outside the rules of penal and prison law”
(Agamben, 1998, 169).

Sovereign exception guarantees racist destruction of all life.
Gulli 13
. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New York,
“For the critique of sovereignty and violence,” http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence,
♥
Tina
It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says, “first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide” (1997: 257). From its first development, we then get to a situation where, as I noted at the outset of this paper, racist violence becomes a global and biopolitical regime of terror , a war between two main classes: the war of the political and financial elites against the class of those who have been dispossessed to various degrees
– once again, the violence of the 1% against the 99%
. As Foucault says, this is a question of the technique of power, more than of ideologies
(as it was the case with the traditional type of racism), because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of the urgency of the struggle, the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw use of the violence
that, as Walter Benjamin (1978) says, informs the law, domination without hegemony
. Especially at the present stage of the world, where information and knowledge make it unnecessary and thus impossible for the General Intellect or common understanding and reason to be governed, brutal domination and potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be the only instruments left to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class
. Then, “ the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism
” (Foucault 1997: 258).
Foucault makes the example of Nazi
Germany
, where “murderous power and sovereign power [were] unleashed throughout the entire social body
” (p.259) and “ the entire population was exposed to death
” (p.260). But this is today a common and global paradigm
:
The
“sovereign right to kill
” (ibid.), from cases of police brutality in the cities to war atrocities throughout the world, has become the most effective way to deal with a ‘population’ that refuses to recognize the false legitimacy of the sovereign, the sovereign right to govern .
What Foucault says of the Nazi
State
–but he acknowledges it applies to “the workings of all States”
(ibid.)—shows the terminal stage of sovereign power: a desperate will to absolute domination no longer able to count on hegemony:
“We have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State
”
(ibid.). This certainly shows the crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly, in a globalized world, it shows the crisis of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final solution
. No one can blame them.
Their unintelligent worldview is bound to that
.
The hope is that they will not destroy everything before they are gone
. Yet, they will not go by themselves, without the workings of an altering power, bound to inherit the earth
. This is the power of individuation, the dignity of individuation, whose workings are based on disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the age of biopolitical terror, have “nothing to sell except their own skins,” (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the history of racist violence, of
“conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder” (ibid.).

Violence is increasing, and the aff is part and parcel with that system. The impact is biopolitical cleansing on a global scale.
Gulli 13.
Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New York,
“For the critique of sovereignty and violence,” http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence,
♥
Tina
We live in an unprecedented time of crisis
.
The violence that characterized the twentieth century
, and virtually all known human history before that, seems to have entered the twenty-first century with exceptional force and singularity
. True, this century opened with the terrible events of September 11. However,
September 11 is not the beginning of history
. Nor are the histories of more forgotten places and people, the events that shape those histories, less terrible and violent – though they may often be less spectacular.
The singularity of this violence, this paradigm of terror, does not even simply lie in its globality
, for that is something that our century shares with the whole history of capitalism and empire, of which it is a part.
Rather, it must be seen in the fact that terror as a global phenomenon has now become selfconscious
. Today, the struggle is for global dominance in a singularly new way, and war –regardless of where it happens—is also always global.
Moreover, in its self-awareness, terror has become, more than it has ever been, an instrument of racism
. Indeed, what is new in the singularity of this violent struggle, this racist and terrifying war, is that in the usual attempt to neutralize the enemy, there is a cleansing of immense proportion going on
.
To use a word which has become popular since Michel Foucault, it is a biopolitical cleansing. This is not the traditional ethnic cleansing, where one ethnic group is targeted by a state power – though that is also part of the general paradigm of racism and violence
.
It is rather a global cleansing, where the sovereign elites, the global sovereigns in the political and financial arenas
(capital and the political institutions), in all kinds of ways target those who do not belong with them on account of their race, class, gender, and so on
, but above all, on account of their way of life and way of thinking. These are the multitudes of people who, for one reason or the other, are liable for scrutiny and surveillance, extortion
(typically, in the form of over- taxation and fines) and arrest, brutality, torture, and violent death. The sovereigns target anyone who
, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) shows with the figure of homo sacer, can be killed without being sacrificed
– anyone who can be reduced to the paradoxical and ultimately impossible condition of bare life, whose only horizon is death itself. In this sense, the biopolitical cleansing is also immediately a thanatopolitical instrument.

The alternative is to become minor – this produces a new form of politics that challenges and disrupts the status quo
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
“Deleuze and New Technology” edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
We can take from this that 'the people' is not simply a coherent or consistent identity, but rather one that is highly fractured
- one that contains within it different modes of subjectification, different potential ways of being, and different possibilities for political engagement. It is impossible to speak of
'the people' as a unified entity, or circumscribe it within the contours of a national identity or a particular class or social group - this would only be considering the people as a majority or a macropolitical unity.
As Deleuze shows, we have to explore the micropolitical potential of the people
, its processes of becoming and its 'lines of flight'. T he same people who complain about crime in their 'communities' and call for more CCTV cameras might also,
in other circumstances, demonstrate against the WTO or G8 summits, or against their government's involvement in the war in
Iraq
. These examples are a case in point: one of the interesting things about the anti-war protests in 2003, as well as large antiglobalisation demonstrations, is that they are not identifiable in terms of the traditional models of politics.
They are not necessarily working-class or Marxist movements, for instance, but rather are made up of people from all 'walks of life': white-collar office workers, church groups, anarchists, trade unionists, ecologists, old people, people of different ideological persuasions, and so on. This is
perhaps what Deleuze means by
'becoming-minor': people disengage themselves from their established identities and social roles, and form, in a completely contingent and unexpected way, a new political entity
. Yet this is a political identity that is at the same time beyond representation - becoming something completely new. Minor politics is always an event, and 'the people' is always an unpredictable subjectivity whose potential we can never really know.
¶ A number of contemporary thinkers have explored new ways of looking at radical political subjectivity
. Ranciere, whom we have already discussed, sees 'the people' as a place of political subjectification which emerges through a fundamental disagreement or dispute
(fa mesentente) between an excluded part of society - illegal immigrants or the unemployed
, for instance - and the dominant socio-political order which they claim to be part of, thus representing their struggle as universal, as embodying the interests of the
'whole of the community'.
Ernesto Laclau sees 'the people' in terms of populist struggles, and as emerging in a contingent way through the hegemonic formulation of what he calls 'chains of equivalence' (Laclau 2005). Alain Badiou, in a different way, has tried to see the political subject as emerging through the 'event' of politics - a singular, unpredictable moment of rupture which de stabilises existing conditions and identities
and gives rise to a new, militant conception of truth (Badiou 2003). I do not have time to go into their arguments in any great detail here, but these different ways of seeing politics centre around a number of common themes. First, politics is always an event which emerges in a contingent way, and which cannot be wholly accounted for or determined by pre-existing conditions
.
Second, politics involves a kind of radical subjectification - a disengagement or
, as
Badiou puts it, a 'subtraction' from ordinary everyday social roles, identities and situations
. For Ranciere, politics is a process of 'disidentification' which does not rely on pre-existing identities and interests, but, rather, ruptures and

destabilises them and produces something new
: 'any subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of place' (Ranciere 1999: 36). Third, radical politics constructs a certain universality - it is something that goes beyond the logic of difference and particularity.
However, this universality is understood in a contingent way, and does not rely on essentialist concepts such as the universal class (as in the Marxist notion of the proletariat) or a universal rational consensus (as in liberal discourse).
¶
These themes of the event, dis identification and universality can help us to construct a conception of politics relevant to the society of control
. It is clear, for instance, that a radical politics able adequately to resist the new globalised forms of social control must itself embody some sort of universal or global dimension
. Yet this can be understood in a number of senses. First, radical politics can no longer be confined to specific identities or embody the logic of pure particularity. The model of identity politics prominent in the 1980s has reached its conceptual and strategic limits
: difference - and the assertion of a differential identity - is no longer subversive in itself
, as Foucault showed, and now seems to play into the hands of a fully multicultural and hybridised global capitalism
.10 Rather than a politics that claims to represent a particular identity, Foucault advocated
a localised form of politics, organised around concrete struggles against particular sites of domination
. Rather than a political vanguard speaking for the masses, moreover, the politics of resistance was something to be engaged in directly by those implicated in a specific situation of oppression
- prisoners, homosexuals, students. Deleuze, in a conversation with Foucault, said to him: 'You were the first ... to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others' (Foucault and Deleuze 1977: 209). However, perhaps this model also needs to be transcended
- perhaps localised struggles need to situate themselves on a global horizon, where links with other struggles can form in a
'rhizomatic' fashion
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 9). Indeed, if the disciplinary model of power required a localised contestation of specific power relationships, then the society of contro l - which implies a more globalised and free-floating form of power - requires a different and more globalised mode of resistance
. Moreover, radical political struggles can no longer be confined to national spaces - they can no longer take place solely within the representative institutions of the nation-state: rather, they must appear
(and, indeed, are appearing) on a global terrain - not only spatially,
in the sense of transcending national borders, b ut also conceptually, in the sense of taking globalisation itself as the central political issue
and the central site of contestation.
The anti-globalisation movement presents us with an initial model of this new form of politiCS
.!l This is a form of politics which transcends both the traditional Marxist model of class struggle, as well as the narrow politics of identity; it brings together a variety of different identities and struggles
- which would otherwise have little in common - around the common terrain of contesting capitalist globalisation.
Moreover, this is a movement of 'transversal' struggles which are not confined to national borders - activists not only travel to other countries to take part in demonstrations, but also attempt to highlight, through various forms of direct action, particular situations of oppression and exploitation that might be going on in other parts of the world
.12

The alternative is to embrace “whatever being”
Shimakawa, 04 - [Karen, the Chair of performance studies at U.C. Davis, Penn State
University Press, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18,
Number 2, pp. 149-160 (Article), “The Things We Share: Ethnic Performativity and
‘Whatever Being’”, 2004, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/ v018/18.2shimakawa.pdf, 7/19/15]JRO
Giorgio
Agamben’s “whatever being” offers a
possible alternative way to conceive
¶ of
( communal) subjectivity that does not depend on stable political identity
¶ categories for its integrity, without requiring one to dispense with categories
¶ altogether.
Unlike the common English parsing of whatever,
Agamben’s use of
¶ the term is
differently nuanced: ì[whatever being] is not ‘being, it does not ¶ matter which,’ but rather ‘ being such that it always matters’
” (Agamben 1993, ¶ 1).
3 The impulse to include/be included is retained, though not assigned to
a ¶ particular or stable grounds of inclusion
: such-and-such being is reclaimed
¶ from its having this or that property
, which identifies it as belonging to this or ¶ that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims
)and it is reclaimed
¶ not for another class
nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, ¶ but for its being-such, for belonging itself
(1ñ2, emphasis in original).
¶
Belonging itself
, according to Agamben
, is a state of being that acknowledges
¶ the (social and affective efficacy of the) desire for inclusion while, at the same
¶ time, resisting the concretization of static categories
(defined racially, nationally,
¶ sexually, religiously, or otherwise) that would afford not only inclusion,
¶ but
also exclusion
. What would it mean, Agamben asks, to acknowledge the desire to belong to identity categories as that which binds us across the boundaries ¶ of such categories? To define subjectivity as being as such, that is, at the ¶ level of the impulse to belong (belonging itself), rather than at the point of inclusion ¶ in an established social category/community?4
¶ It is important to emphasize that Agamben does not advocate a dissipation ¶ of belonging per se- his is not a dismantled universalist/humanist leveling ¶ program. It is the Most Common that cuts off any real community,î he writes; ¶ ì[whatever being] is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignationî (10), Instead, ¶ whatever being constitutes a mode of (prospective) subject formation that
¶ achieves some of
Kristevaís dejectís ends
(that is, the rough articulation of a
¶ subject position) without producing a concretized, jettisoned abject; and for ¶ those who might otherwise find themselves on the ìwrongî side of that
(nationalizing/racializing) ¶ abjection equation, perhaps Agambenís conception of ìbeing ¶ as suchî describes a strategic response to abjection that does not ¶ simultaneously reaffirm its logic; that is
, it offers an alternative to abjection that
¶ does not result in simply claiming a place
at the dejectsí table.
¶ Indeed, Agamben articulates ìwhatever beingî in terms that are provocatively ¶ complementary to Kristevaís: whereas Kristevaís abject is ìsimply a frontier,î ¶
Agamben situates whatever being precisely at the border or threshold
¶ between inside and outside, a point of contact with an external space that must
¶ remain empty since, in order to locate a recognized ìoutsideî one must claim
¶ (even if only implicitly
) a particular inside
î the zone/community in/to which ¶ one belongs (and from which an ìoutsideî is distinguishable). Rather, he argues, ¶ ìthe outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space ¶ Ö it is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itselfî (68). By locating subjectís ¶ formation in whatever being, that is, in the impulse to belong, he creates a concomitantly ¶ concretization-resistant zone of not-belonging. That is, just as ¶ Kristevaís abject is less a particular object/concept than a function (i.e., explusion/ ¶ differentiation), so Agamben’s outside is simply that which is implied by ¶ whatever being/belonging itself: the impulse to not-belong otherwise/elsewhere ¶ (always resisting the temptation to locate that otherwise/elsewhere in concrete ¶ terms).
ìWhatever, in this sense,î Agamben writes, ìis the event of an outsideî ¶ (67, emphasis in original).
¶
The problem
, of course, is that we do not (yet) live in the world
Agamben ¶ envisions; ìthe event of an outsideî is affixed inevitably to a geographical/social/political ¶ site, turning that ìeventî into an ìidentity.î How might artists, specifically ¶ Asian Pacific American artists, contribute to Agambenís project of ¶ reconceiving our notions of subjectivity, community, and exclusion? What relation ¶ does that ìevent of an outsideî bear to the identity-stratified culture in which ¶ we find ourselves? As noted above, for Asian Pacific Americans, a simple denial
¶ of the materiality of that stratification results only in erasure/assimilation to
¶ the hierarchies currently in place
(just as an insistence on the significance and ¶ uniqueness of a particular stratum may cement its place in those hierarchies). I want to argue that the contingency, interactivity, and embodiedness of performance
¶ enables it to

negotiate
this apparent impasse by asking: what would it ¶ mean for a subject who is marked as marginal/abject
to perform such an ìevent ¶ of an outsideî?

The apparent neutrality of the law is only a mask for its ability to create its own exceptions—try or die for the alternative to form solutions outside of the law.
Kohn 06.
Margaret Kohn, assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida, “Bare Life and the
Limits of the Law” Theory and Event9:2, muse
♥
Tina
At this point it should be clear that Agamben would be deeply skeptical of the liberal call for more vigorous enforcement of the rule of law as a means of combating cruelties and excesses carried out under emergency powers. His brief history of the state of exception
establishes that the phenomenon is a political reality that has proven remarkably resistant to legal limitations
. Critics might point out that this descriptive point, even if true, is no reason to jettison the ideal of the rule of law
. For Agamben, however, the link between law and exception is more fundamental; it is intrinsic to politics itself
.
The sovereign power to declare the state of exception and exclude bare life is the same power that invests individuals as worthy of rights.
The two are intrinsically linked
. The disturbing implication of his argument is that we cannot preserve the things we value in the Western tradition (citizenship, rights, etc
.) without preserving the perverse ones .
Agamben presents four theses that summarize the results of his genealogical investigation. (1)
The state of exception is a space devoid of law. It is not the logical consequence of the state's right to self-defense, nor is it
(qua commissarial or sovereign dictatorship) a straightforward attempt to reestablish the norm by violating the law
. (2) The space devoid of law has a "decisive strategic relevance" for the juridical order. (3)
Acts committed during the state of exception (or in the space of exception) escape all legal definition
. (4)
The concept of the force-of-law is one of the many fictions, which function to reassert a relationship between law and exception, nomos and anomie
. The core of Agamben's critique of liberal legalism is captured powerfully, albeit indirectly, in a quote from Benjamin's eighth thesis on the philosophy of history. According to Benjamin, ( t)he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must attain a concept of history that accords with this fact. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism
.
(57) Here
Benjamin endorses the strategy of more radical resistance rather than stricter adherence to the law
. He recognizes that legalism is an anemic strategy in combating the power of fascism
. The problem is that conservative forces had been willing to ruthlessly invoke the state of exception in order to further their agenda while the moderate Weimar center-left was paralyzed; frightened of the militant left and unwilling to act decisively against the authoritarian right, partisans of the rule of law passively acquiesced to their own defeat. Furthermore, the rule of law, by incorporating the necessity of its own dissolution in times of crisis, proved itself an unreliable tool in the struggle against violence.
From Agamben's perspective, the civil libertarians' call for uniform application of the law simply denies the nature of law itself. He insists, "From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law. . ." (87) Moreover, by masking the logic of sovereignty, such an attempt could actually further obscure the zone of indistinction that allows the state of exception to operate. For Agamben, law serves to legitimize sovereign power. Since sovereign power is

fundamentally the power to place people into the category of bare life, the law, in effect, both produces and legitimizes marginality and exclusion.

The perm fails – the belief that you can come to political consensus or compromise fails to understand how deeply entrenched the state is in the ideologies of the status quo
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
“Deleuze and New Technology” edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb , mmv)
These developments in the control society signify, I would suggest, a more fundamental transformation in contemporary politics. What passes for democracy in developed capitalist countries today is nothing but a gaudy
mediatised spectacle of spin-doctoring and endless opinion polls - a banal reality show which masks the almost total ideological convergence between the major parties and the lack of genuine political alternatives. Modern politics is characterised by a kind of stifling ideological consensus: the dominant political discourse today is that which announces the eclipse of ideological conflicts between left and right, claiming to be 'post-ideological' and to be about solving society's problems in a rational, 'common-sense' way without the constraints of ideology. The idea of the social-democratic 'Third
Way', which claims to seek a 'middle road' between socialism and capitalism, and which purports to represent the 'radical centre' of political opinion, would
be paradigmatic of the 'post-ideological' consensus. Of course we should recognise that this so-called era of 'post-ideological' consensus simply means that the ideology of the neo-liberal market has become so
entrenched, so sedimented, so accepted as economic orthodoxy on both sides, that we no longer recognise it as ideology as such. The 'post-ideological' consensus is simply a neo-liberal ideological consensus, and the so called
'Third Way' was never really a third way at all, but simply a way of disguising the formal Left's capitulation to neo-liberalism by providing it
with some flimsy social democratic window dressing (Mouffe 2000: 93).
So far from this new consensus style of politics being a sign of the maturity of modern democratic politics, it is a sign of its degradation and imminent collapse. We are dealing here with a new mutation of politics, in which the
triumph of 'democratic consensus' coincides with, and is symptomatic of, the
complete eclipse of real politics. Indeed, Ranciere has suggested that the very term 'consensus democracy' is a contradiction - one can either have
consensus or democracy - and has proposed instead to call it postdemocracy
(Ranciere 1999: 95). According to Ranciere, the global triumph of democracy during the
1990s, which came with the collapse of the Communist regimes, coincided with a kind of shrinking of the political space: democracy has not only given up on the people - on the idea of popular sovereignty - but this has also led, paradoxically, to an erosion of the power of even the formal parliamentary mechanisms of representation. Power in modern postdemocracies increasingly rests with
unelected and unaccountable experts, technocrats and committees.

Policy apparatus fails
Rosenzweig, 12
Copyright (c) 2012 I/S: A Journal of Law & Policy for the Information Society I/S: A Journal of
Law and Policy for the Information Society Fall, 2012 I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 8
ISJLP 393 LENGTH: 7722 words NAME: Paul * BIO: * Principal, Red Branch Consulting PLLC; Carnegie Fellow in
National Security Journalism, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University (2011); Professorial Lecturer in Law,
George Washington University. The author served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of
Homeland Security from 2005-09. Portions of this article will appear in the forthcoming book Cyberwarfare: How
Conflicts in Cyberspace are Challenging American and Changing the World Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012,
♥
Tina
IV. Conclusion
If the question about cyberspace is: "What is our policy making apparatus most likely to misunderstand or get wrong?" the answer, I fear, is quite a lot.
Not because policy makers
in Washington are ill-meaning, or venal, or even unintelligent.
But rather, I fear, because they are confronting a new reality to which they have yet to adapt.
The sausage making process of policy development inside sovereign governments is slow and encrusted with hierarchical restrictions. It lacks the pace and capacity to keep up with the ever-changing environment of the
Internet. Worse, policy makers continue to think of the Internet as just another tool-sort of like a telephone, but quicker. But the things that
"everybody knows" are changing every day. Until we come to grips with the ubiquity and rapidity of the Internet and the fundamental way in which the
Internet creates asymmetries that empower the individual to the disadvantage of the nation-state, we won't really build good cyber policy.
It's a daunting task-but no easier for putting off to the future.
Separating our actions from the political sphere are key to stopping the exceptional construction of bare life that authorizes genocide in the name of the sovereign.
Agamben 05.
Giorgio Agamben is the professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona and author of ten previous books. Chicago University Press 2005 “State of Exception”
♥
Tina
If it is true that the articulation between life and law, between anomie and nomos, that is produced by the state of exception is effective though fictional, one can still not conclude from this that somewhere either beyond or before juridical apparatuses there is an immediate ac- cess to something whose fracture and impossible unification are repre- sented by these apparatuses. There are not first life as a natural biolog- ical given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary
, the very possi- bility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine
.
Bare life is a product of the machine and not something that preexists it, just as law has no court in nature or in the divine mind.
Life and law, anomie and nomos, auctoritas and potestas
, result from the fracture of something to which we have no other access than through the fiction of their articulation and the patient work that, by unmasking this fiction, separates what it had claimed to unite.
But disenchantment does not restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the principle that purity never lies at the origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition.
To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of “politics.” Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between vio- lence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deac- tivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life.
We will then have before us a “pure” law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a “pure” language and a
“pure” violence.
To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure

means, which shows only it- self, without any relation to an end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.

Their impacts are constructed- they’re there to line the pockets of the
Trumanites.
Glennon 14—
Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University Michael
Glennon “National Security and Double Government”, Harvard National Security Journal / Vol. 5, pg 1-114
♥
Tina
The Trumanites’ propensity to define security in military and intelligence terms rather than political and diplomatic ones reinforces a powerful structural dynamic. That dynamic can be succinctly stated:
Overprotection of national security creates costs that the Trumanite network can externalize ; under-protection creates costs that the network must internalize. The resulting incentive structure encourages the exaggeration of existing threats and the creation of imaginary ones
.
The security programs that emerge are
, in economic terms, “ sticky down
”— easier to grow than to shrink. The Trumanites sacrifice little when disproportionate money or
man power is devoted to security
. The operatives that they direct do not incur trade-off costs.152
The Trumanites do
, however, reap the benefits of that disproportionality—a larger payroll, more personnel, broader authority, and an even lower risk that they will be blamed in the event of a successful attack
.153
Yet
Madisonian institutions incur the costs of excessive resources
that flow to the Trumanites. The President must submit a budget that includes the needed taxes. Members of Congress must vote for those taxes. A federal agency must collect the taxes. When it comes to picking up the tab, Trumanites are nowhere to be seen. If national security protection is inadequate, on the other hand, the Trumanites are held accountable. They are the experts on whom the Madisonian institutions rely to keep the nation safe. They are the recipients of Madisonian largesse, doled out to ensure that no blame will be cast by voters seeking retribution for a job poorly done.
In the event of a catastrophic attack, the buck stops with the Trumanites. No Trumanite craves to be the target of a 9/11 commission following a catastrophic failure
.
Thus they have
, as Jeffrey Rosen put it, an
“incentive to exaggerate risks and pander to public fears”
154—“ an incentive to pass along vague and unconfirmed threats of future violence, in order to protect themselves from criticism
”155 should another attack occur.
Indeed, a purely “rational” actor in the Trumanite network might hardly be expected to do anything other than inflate threats
. In this way, the domestic political dynamic reinforces the security dilemma
familiar to international relations students, the quandary that a nation confronts when, in taking steps to enhance its security, it unintentionally threatens the security of another nation and thus finds its own security threatened
when the other nation takes compensatory action.156
An inexorable and destabilizing arms race is thereby fueled by seemingly rational domestic actors responding to seemingly reasonable threats— threats that they unwittingly helped create.

Consequentialism fails, especially in the context of the surveillance/terrorism dilemma
Moscoso 11.
Leopoldo A. Moscoso is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Madrid, “Citizens,
Aliens and Suspects in an Age of the War on Terror: The Question of Emergency Powers in Western Post-Democracies,”
ITALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC LAW - VOL. 3 ISSUE 2/2011
♥
Tina
Concerning the effects now, the study of the new manifestations of political violence requires
, on the one hand, reconsidering the problem of the rationality of action
.
Observers are well aware that suicide-bombers
attempts are not tactic – they therefore cannot be accounted for in terms of the calculation of any utility function
.
The balance account of costs and benefits for the martyr is estimated, so to speak, sub specie aeternitatis – hence the enormous difficulties experts on violence face to predict (not to say prevent) this type of episodes
. On the other hand, terrorist violence brings the observer back to the normative problem concerning the explanation/justification of political action through its consequences.
If some political actions may find a warrant in their consequences, then the same principle might be applied when the time comes for the validation of counter-terrorist measures
.
Provided that its effects turned out to be as expected, would it be legitimate to vindicate the war on terror exclusively on the grounds of its effects
?
The answer is clearly negative as soon as other considerations are introduced, besides the government’s responsibilities with the physical security of its citizens
.
Even under the threat of terror, societies have responsibilities with the humanity of the single activist, with the humanity of the activist’s organizations, and with the humanity of their original communities
.
The use of beneficial effects/legitimate goals as an alibi to warrant the choice for immoral or illegitimate means eliminates whatever restrictions might remain for the party of violence to resort to the same scheme.

No impact- they misrepresent the law it isn’t monolithic or unreformable
Brännström, 08
Leila,Lund University Law Faculty, How I learned to stop worrying and use the legal argument
A critique of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of law, NoFo 5 [April 2008] sage journals
♥
Tina
6. How Agamben creates a terrifying object called law
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. however
The paradoxes that Agamben enumerates are 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 decision-making and in biopolitical matters, is extrajudicial (cf. Agamben 2005, 11, 87–88). NoFo 5 [April 2008] 43 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 bio-power 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 biopower 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 bio-power 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.
41
The State is inevitable and the alt fails- four reasons.
Passavant, 07 [The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben, Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science Ph.D., Wisconsin at Madison M.A., Wisconsin at Madison B.A.,
Michigan, p. Sage Publications]
♥
Tina
I have argued that Agamben has two competing theories of the state in play within his work. His first theory of the state posits the state in a determined relation to the economy
.
From this position, he can more easily describe political change as the economic forces determining the state bear within them the seeds of the coming community. This is a theory, however, that disguises its reliance on a form of power to secure the conditions of possibility for a common relation to communicability, and he does not address the consequences of the possible weakening of that form of power—the globalization of spectacular capital—for the commonality that it enabled. If spectacular capital should weaken, on one hand, or if it produces not commonality but polarities, on the other, then presumably the commonality that it theoretically enabled would either wane with the weakening of this power formation or simply not exist.
Agamben’s second theory of the state posits the state as a determining force over human life.
Agamben establishes the state in this determining position by borrowing from Schmitt’s theory of sovereign decisionism.
Yet, in so doing, he erects a theoretical roadblock preventing passage to the coming community.
Although
I have suggested that he has conceived of three possible ways whereby subjects might decide to act to render this state power inoperative
or perform actions enabling the suspension of sovereign law and messianic passage beyond this sovereign state, each of these three forms of political subjectivity fails to do the theoretical work demanded of it
. Bartleby’s manifestation of a pure potentiality might render inoperative modern state government as Foucault has described it by disrupting the linkages among the series of institutions and subjects that the modern state relies upon to govern, but it is unclear how Bartleby would affect the
Schmittian unitary sovereign decision maker upon which Agamben bases his theory of the state in Homo Sacer. Agamben also points to anomic 168 Political Theory Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 carnivals to suggest that states of emergency can become something more, and his theory of the gesture might contribute to a description of how a carnival might become something politically revolutionary. This would require, however, forcing the gesture into a relation of transcendence with regard to carnivalesque performances—an unacceptable move for a theory that embraces immanence to the extent that Agamben does. It also misrepresents why the carnivalesque harbors emancipatory political potential within it. Finally, Agamben indicates, through the example of the apostle Paul and the remnant of those who faithfully adhere to messianic law, the possibility of active political subjects adequate to the challenge of state sovereignty. This argument, however, contradicts his earlier positions embracing potentiality over the acts emblematic of sovereign decisions, and an experience of being beyond any idea of law. It also, by relying on a determinate situation to create the conditions of possibility for a successful speech act, occludes the forms of power needed to maintain this situation against other ontological possibilities much as his first theory of passage beyond the state of integrated spectacle did. This argument also begs the question of how this messianic community might relate to that which remains other to its situation. That is,
Agamben must address the very questions that his ontological approach to state sovereignty intended to avoid
— questions of power and otherness
.
In sum, Agamben remains haunted by the very problems that motivated not only his critique of the state but also his attempt to remove this inquiry from political philosophy to “first” philosophy.
43
At the end of Agamben’s theory of the state, politics remains.
There are four implications
of this critique for political theory and the state.
First, the modern state is poorly understood
as transcendent, unitary, and sovereign.
The “state” encompasses a variety of institutions
, many of which predate modernity.44 The Foucauldian understanding of government, I suggested, is the practice by which articulations between these institutions are forged— and non-state institutions are joined to this chain—and they are mobilized toward various purposes. The plural nature of this ensemble is precisely what gives extension to the modern state.45
Second, if we treat the state as an ensemble of institutions, then the concept of a state of emergency is poorly suited to understanding our political present .
Agamben rightly criticizes the
USA
PATRIOT Act
in State of Exception.
This law
, like most laws
that are passed in an ongoing legal system, amends a variety of other laws and sits on a foundation created by these other laws
, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The Antiterrorism Act created the possibility of attributing guilt by association since it criminalized the provision

of material support for Passavant / The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben 169 Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 organizations that the administration deems “terrorist”—provisions that the USA
PATRIOT Act builds upon.46 From this perspective, current policies are less “exceptional,” unfortunately, and more a continuing development of a national security state apparatus that has been built through legislation like the National Security Act of
1947, through discourse, and through the creation of stakeholders (the military-industrial complex).47
In other words, another state formation is struggling to emerge through the ruin of liberal democracy in the United States, and this emergence
(and ruin) is hastened by those who seek to enhance
surveillance and presidential powers, while diminishing the power of courts and legislative oversight as a response to
September 11
, 2001.48
Th ird, any social formation is constituted by elements of both contingency and determination . By emphasizing pure potentiality,
Agamben misses this and either cherishes the excessive quality of pure potentiality to the neglect of the exigent needs of the present, or neglects how the active political subjects he does defend are embedded within finite commitments that necessarily persevere through the foreclosure of other possibilities.
Some contemporary political theorists concerned with injustice and the lack of democracy also emphasize contingency, excess, and potentiality over determination, finitude, and acts.49 These theorists correctly seek to disrupt oppressive pattern s.
Since politics—hence political change—would not be possible under conditions of absolute determination, emphasizing contingency or excess makes sense.
Yet reflection upon the retraction of certain state services from places like the Bronx during the late 1970s permits us to see how neither justice nor democracy is served by excessive economic duress or violence. Not only are these contingencies unjust, but also their incapacitating effects prevent democratic practices of government where the latter necessarily presupposes some collective capacity to direct and achieve collective purposes.
State actions that mitigate chaos, economic inequality, and violence
, then, potentially contribute to the improved justice of outcomes and democracy.
Political theorists must temper celebrating contingency with a simultaneous consideration of the complicated relation that determination has to democratic purposes.50
Fourth, the state’s institutions are among the few with the capacity to respond to the exigency of human needs identified by political theorists .
These actions will necessarily be finite and less than wholly adequate, but responsibility may lie on the side of acknowledging these limitations and seeking to redress what is lacking in state action rather than calling for pure potentiality and an end to the state.
We may conclude that claims to justice or democracy based on the wish to rid ourselves of the state once and for
170 Political Theory Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at
UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 all are like
George W.
Bush claiming to be an environmentalist because he has proposed converting all of our cars so that they will run on hydrogen
.51
Meanwhile, in the here and now, there are urgent claims that demand finite acts that by definition will be both divisive and less than what a situation demands.
52
In the end, the state remains.
Let us defend this state of due process and equal protection against its ruinous other.
Agamben can’t explain power relations within the law and no risk of their impacts.
Ross, 12 “
Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons” Alison Ross is Lecturer in Critical
Theory in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Australia, Constellations
Volume 19, No 3, 2012, p. Blackwell Publications
♥
Tina
The difficulty here is that Agamben, given the ahistoricity of his theory, is unable to provide an account of why the state of exception has become a problem at this particular point in time. Similarly, he claims that the law is more likely to bring violence into play now, in the present historical

juncture, than ever before, a claim that pertains to questions of fact.
Agamben, however, cannot draw a link between the thesis concerning law’s
“constitutive violence” and current circumstances because he pays no attention to issues such as historical relationships between political institutions and policing mechanisms, which disciplines like political sociology deal with. Agamben’s ontological theses regarding the “essence” of the law do not help in attending to the historical problem his theory needs to be able to address: namely, to show the process by which “the state of exception has become the norm.” More generally, it is difficult to see how his commitment to such theses sheds any light on the workings of the law.
Agamben sees the purported “legitimacy of law” as a ruse of the liberal state
, which in the social contract narrative claims legitimacy for law on account of its protection of otherwise vulnerable life. This position may usefully be compared with Foucault’s comments on the same topic. Foucault addresses the topic of law’s legitimacy from two different angles. First, he sees in political philosophy’s interest in the question of the features that qualifysovereign power as legitimate a tendency to avoid the crucial question of how “legitimate” power actually operates. In this sense, the account he provides in his work on prisons of how law’s violence manifests in penal institutions is a critique of the adequacy of the theory of sovereignty to form an accurate picture of the complex forces and instruments involved in social organization.32 Second, in his 1978–9 lectures on biopolitics, Foucault argues that liberalism is a government of life rather than the exercise of sovereignty over life and death. His analysis of the policy direction of post-war German intellectuals is premised on the assumption that their activities were strategically meaningful. Their social integration and state building initiatives were based on the goal of economic success. Even their “power politics” were staked on rapid economic growth.33 Foucault’s analysis of liberalism follows an injunction comparable to his focus on reformist manuals and prison plans in Discipline and Punish. Institutional practices do not function independently of what people think about them. They are intelligible precisely because they embody strategically considered ends (even if these ends are not realized or contained by those strategies).34 C _ 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 428 Constellations, Volume 19, Issue 3, 2012
The premise of
Agamben’s analysis, in contrast, renders power senseless. What possible intelligible motives might Agamben’s sovereign have for wanting perpetual and unlimited disposition over the physical existence of its subjects in the manner of a Nazi camp warden? This question cannot be raised in
Agamben’s scheme. Moreover, it is precisely because the law is not – as
Agamben’s analysis assumes – an objective mechanism that could function independently of what people think about it that he obscures how the different ways in which the law is experienced as legitimate (e.g., in its strategic deployment to realize specific ends) can affect its “essential nature.” This renders Agamben’s thesis of the “constitutive violence” of the law, if not unintelligible, at least inscrutable
. Is it the way political institutions are shaped or the way human individuals are conceptualized in legal doctrine that produces this state of affairs?
The deficiencies of this perspective can partly be found in the ontological nature of his framework, which thus has very little to do with an inquiry into institutional features and practices
. It aims to pose questions regarding legal institutions and practices at the “fundamental” level of the forces or elements that drive history.
His fascination with the terminology of the “exception” as the incisive political vocabulary for our times is a case in point
.
His use of this terminology marks out extreme situations not as anomalous, but as if they had general significance. This mode of argumentation necessarily looks past the task of analyzing institutional functioning because it imports the grammar of such functioning from the “exceptional” situation. iii. Agamben treats those subject to law as totally passive “bodies.” His focus on the camp situation is telling because this is the only situation where his doctrine seems to work
: in the extermination camp, action does not meet other actions, but bodies. Foucault insisted that this type of situation was not a relation of power, but one of submission to force.35 Similarly, sociological models of social interaction differentiate the study of social organization defined as actions influencing other actions from situations of crude force.
Since he is so often contemptuous of the assumptions of liberalism, it is worth comparing Agamben’s position on this question of force with that of liberalism
. Classical liberal theory acknowledges the ultimate dependence of order on relations of force; it holds the unification of the aggregate force of society under a single coercive law to be the virtue of the state. The purpose of such force is the protection of the members of its aggregate body. However, there are limits on the capacity of force to decide conflicts internal to this aggregate body. These limits are a central topic in liberal political philosophy, which sees reliance on force to manage social conflicts as a sign of the system’s weakness: such reliance places inflationary pressure on force, thus devaluing it.
“Force” as it is understood and used in liberal political

theory is a differential quantity that has to present itself and be received as a “quality,” as authority, on the pain of dissipation. In The State and the Rule of Law,
Blandine Kriegel reads the history of theories of the state in these terms, emphasizing the perils of naked reliance on force pointed out in such theories. She notes, for instance, that theorists of the state since Bodin have found the state that restrains itself in its use of force and its extension of powers more powerful than one with unlimited powers.36 The question of force can also be approached from the perspective of other mechanisms that are important for social organization and that presuppose the existence of distinct currencies that pertain to the different media of the social system. Liberal theory acknowledges the findings of political sociology that describes how social order is constituted through, for instance, symbolic integration and economic instruments. Social integration and organization take place in multiple dimensions or media: symbolic (cultural, ideological, etc.), C _ 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp:
Alison Ross 429 economic, and political (participation in collective decisions at various levels).37 Talcott Parsons attempted to define the problem of social interaction in terms of “systems of action” that use different “symbolically generalized media of communication” where action influences action. As part of this approach, he maintained the importance of patterns of interaction in establishing and reinforcing expectations for the functioning of such media. When a cultural system changes, this marks the introduction of a new pattern whose meaning is intelligible to and expected by social actors.38 In particular, Parsons was interested to account for the interaction between social, cultural, and personality systems. These relationships are all bidirectional according to him; that is, these symbolic systems are intelligible to agents whose action is susceptible to the “actions” of social and cultural systems of meaning.39 This approach is important not just because of the elements it deploys to explain social organization, but because of the image it produces of such organization. I will return to this point in my concluding remarks to this paper. The economic system is based on interactions in which actors select actions that will optimize their ends. They want to act “in the most profitable way [to achieve] the highest benefits when costs are substantial.” In this system, the symbolic medium of money is ordered according to a specific set of norms for its use and acquisition. Within the system, money is not replaceable by force. For instance, as a legitimate means for acquiring property, the use of money as a symbolic mechanism of exchange forbids as illegitimate “the use of force” for property acquisition.40 Similarly, in the political system, force is understood as an abortive way of managing conflicting goals since it is susceptible to counter-action by the force of others. It thus fails to make decisions that could bind everyone in a social system. The political system uses forms of collective decision-making to maximize the realization of actors’ specific goals. Legitimate political power is a general medium that can make collectively binding and effective decisions in a way that force cannot.41 Insofar as such mechanisms are effective, they are real; and they need to be understood and analyzed in terms of their actual mechanics and dynamics, not dismissed as masks
.42 With these comments I do not intend to mount a defence of liberal political philosophy. Rather, I want to ask whether Agamben’s style of analysis allows things to be seen more clearly than they are in sociologically influenced liberal theory.
Agamben’s criticisms of law are directed to the potential he sees realized in the camps to hold life in a relation of exposure to pure force. Of course, the critical stand he takes on law is explicable in terms of the ontological perspective he adopts, but we need to ask whether adopting this stance helps us illuminate current political circumstances. Why, for instance, does he choose to explain what happens in the camp as a potential of liberal law, rather than as a degradation of liberal protections?
43 Additionally, how useful are categories crafted in the field of jurisprudence, which have their proper register of application within this field, for the purpose of describing what occurs in extreme situations like the camp?
What makes the camp analogy especially unsuitable as a paradigm for understanding the organization of a society is that the “camp population,” unlike society, is not meant to have a future
(and here one needs think of all those things that are required for a society to have a future: from material production to symbolic identity, etc.).
The murderous contempt
shown the camp inmate is simply not a viable option for a state.

Even if predictions in the abstract are wrong, policy debates that predict hypothetical outcomes and weigh evidence of the risk of those outcomes is productive
Tetlock & Gardner 11
Philip Tetlock is a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley, AND Dan Gardner is a columnist and senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen and the author of The Science of Fear, received numerous awards for his writing, including the Michener Award, M.A. History from York, "OVERCOMING OUR AVERSION TO ACKNOWLEDGING OUR IGNORANCE" July 11 www.catounbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-and-philip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-ourignorance/
♥
Tina
The optimists are right that there is much we can do at a cost that is quite modest relative to what is often at stake
. For example, why not build on the IARPA tournament? Imagine a system for recording and judging forecasts. Imagine running tallies of forecasters’ accuracy rates.
Imagine advocates on either side of a policy debate specifying in advance precisely what outcomes their desired approach is expected to produce, the evidence that will settle whether it has done so, and the conditions under which participants would agree to say “I was wrong.”
Imagine pundits being held to account. Of course arbitration only works if the arbiter is universally respected and it would be an enormous challenge to create an analytical center whose judgments were not only fair, but perceived to be fair even by partisans dead sure they are right and the other guys are wrong. But think of the potential of such a system to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, to sharpen public debate, to shift attention from blowhards to experts worthy of an audience, and to improve public policy
. At a minimum, it would highlight how often our forecasts and expectations fail, and if that were to deflate the bloated confidence of experts and leaders, and give pause to those preparing some “great leap forward,” it would be money well spent.
But the pessimists are right, too, that fallibility, error, and tragedy are permanent conditions of our existence. Humility is in order, or, as Socrates said, the beginning of wisdom is the admission of ignorance. The Socratic message has always been a hard sell, and it still is—especially among practical people in business and politics, who expect every presentation to end with a single slide consisting of five bullet points labeled “The Solution.” We have no such slide, unfortunately. But in defense of Socrates, humility is the foundation of the fox style of thinking and much research suggests it is an essential component of good judgment in our uncertain world. It is practical. Over the long term, it yields better calibrated probability judgments, which should help you affix more realistic odds than your competitors on policy bets panning out.
Rejection of expert prediction is a terrible idea.
Mesquita 11
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution B.A. from Queens, M.A. from Michigan, PhD from Michigan, "FOX-HEDGING OR KNOWING:
ONE BIG WAY TO KNOW MANY THINGS" July 18 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/18/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita/foxhedging-or-knowing-one-big-way-to-know-many-things/
♥
Tina
Good prediction
—and this is my belief— comes from dependence on logic and evidence to draw inferences about the causal path from facts to outcomes
. Unfortunately, government, business, and the media assume that expertise—knowing the history, culture, mores, and language of a place, for instance—is sufficient to anticipate the unfolding of events. Indeed, too often many of us dismiss approaches to prediction that require knowledge of statistical methods, mathematics, and systematic research design. We seem to prefer “wisdom” over science, even though the evidence shows that the application of the scientific method, with all of its demands, outperforms experts
(remember Johan de Witt). The belief that area expertise, for instance, is sufficient to anticipate the future is, as Tetlock convincingly demonstrated, just plain false.
If we hope to build reliable predictions about human behavior, whether in China, Cameroon, or Connecticut, then probably we must first harness facts to the systematic, repeated, transparent application of the same logic across connected families of problems
. By doing so we can test alternative ways of thinking to uncover what works and what doesn’t in different circumstances. Here Gardner, Tetlock, and I could not agree more.
Prediction tournaments are an essential ingredient to work out what the current limits are to

improved knowledge and predictive accuracy.
Of course, improvements in knowledge and accuracy will always be a moving target because technology, ideas, and subject adaptation will be ongoing.

Incremental reform is key. Agamben’s theories don’t help at all.
Colatrella, 09
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.9. no.1 Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben,
Steven Colatrella University of Maryland University College, Europe, http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf
♥
Tina
Conclusion: State Transformation without State of Exception In failing to take into account the expropriation of the slave
, the enclosure of the commons
, the expropriation of the peasantry and the burning of the witch
, the occupation of the colonized’s lands, the IMF Structural Adjustment
Program and the repression needed to impose it against resistance
, hasn’t
Agamben also failed to provide his own theoretical framework with the tools needed to explain the survival or death of the Jew in the Nazi camp
, his own paradigmatic example? If we find, as Isabella Clough-Marinaro has34, that the camps for Roma in Italy today are classic examples of homo sacer, right down to publicly exposed showers on concrete enclosures surrounded by barbed wire, needn’t we try to understand what these new horrors have to do with the rolling back of the welfare state in Europe?; with the attack on employment and wages?; with the intensified exploitation that includes that of the undocumented immigrants and the public discourses demonizing them?; with the increased law and order regimes, campaigns against crime that criminalize the Roma, the undocumented and other minorities that have allowed the Italian military to be deployed in the streets to keep an eye on the population; with the creation of such scapegoats to divide the working class exactly at such a time of attack on hard-won social gains?
Agamben
, as Clough-Marinaro demonstrates, is indispensable to help analyze the camps
in the first place, but
I would argue that he is of nearly no help
at all to help us strategize about what to do about them,
because he doesn’t understand what any of it has to do with class relations, relations of expropriation, exploitation and class struggle against these. And that means he can’t understand what the latter has already accomplished and what it has yet to accomplish.
To understand this
, we need to understand the welfare state itself as it has developed. To do that we need to understand democracy
, which
in turn requires us to think about the state, as
Agamben calls on us to do, but to do so in a way that goes beyond the drama of the state of exception to include the historical accomplishments of the class struggle
, particularly those other two categories, democracy and the welfare state. While this is not the place to enter into a full discussion of these issues, which I address elsewhere35, a brief summary of my argument on democracy is useful to make clear my differences with Agamben’s approach. Modern democracy is part of what Polanyi calls the “double movement36” of expropriation and the establishment of the self-regulating market and the efforts by society to defend itself from this process. Modern democracy is born from the English and
French Revolutions37, from the anti-slavery movement in the US, and from the labor and socialist movements in Europe38. Mass democratic movements that have furthered this process have been fought either to retard the separation of the people from the land and access to means of production and subsistence, or to provide new guarantees of meeting these needs and providing livelihood to those already expropriated and now exploited. Put differently, the commitment of ordinary people to democracy comes from their need and desire to use it to do something; democracy is an instrument of popular classes to defend and extend their interests
.
If
, as I have argued, citing various authors’ work to the point, the protection of individual rights
, avoidance of becoming homo sacer, and prevention of the state of exception required material foundations
, those material foundations have, in modern times, required political protection
. The modern democratic class struggle, the establishment of democracy and its extension
, remain
, along with defending or reestablishing control of subsistence and means of production directly in the hands of the people (the commons), the best means of avoiding the fate that Agamben warns us about
.
This means that the too-facile dismissal of all legal, democratic or constitutional protections, hard-won by generations of struggle, that appear in his analysis that the state of exception is already unexceptional but rather the rule, disarms the very efforts needed to protect us from the state power
.
The democratic movements have broken down the sterile and false separation between the oikos and the polis argued for by Hannah Arendt40, and the similar separations between everyday life and social reproduction and public life, between zoe and bios. This is not by chance: slave plantations were private homes; the family enterprise studied by Marx was considered virtually an extension of the owners’ household; the needs of working families for subsistence or health care, or the infant mortality rate, unwanted pregnancies and their impact on women’s lives and the mortality rate of women in childbirth were all considered private affairs, not public or political ones. It was the accomplishment of the modern workers and women’s movements, of modern democracy, to change this state of affairs.
Agamben sneeringly dismisses
, indeed scarily demonizes this accomplishment as “biopolitics”:
What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again, the body of homo sacer, which is to say, bare life. This is modern democracy’s strength, and at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. And the root of modern democracy’s secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will later appear as the bearer of rights, and according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subject…can only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself. If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of “law’s desire to have a body”, democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body.41 39
Agamben provides us with some of the most facile and dangerous thinking
, passing for profundity, imaginable: “
Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions
(such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and their intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction
.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, p.122.
This statement
, with the word “capitalism” replacing the phrase “bare life” could have been written by an adherent of the Third International’s Third Period,

whose disastrous policies helped bring about precisely the states of exception
–
Nazi victories – that Agamben is concerned about
.
Agamben goes on to argue
, incredibly, that the very right of habeas corpus by requiring the sheriff to exhibit the body of the accused undermines the liberty of the accused, an interpretation unique in the thousand-year history of habeas corpus rights whose defense has quite rightly underpinned many oppositions to Bush administration tactics in the War on Terror, and whose history has recently been provided a radical defense and materialist interpretation by Linebaugh
already cited.
The long process of democracy “compelling law to assume the care of the body” instead is the accomplishment of centuries of struggles by ordinary people precisely to move the state out of the business of killing and into the business of providing health care and education.
This is what led Ernest Gellner to state, while overstating the case, “"At the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor… The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than the monopoly of legitimate violence.42” That the European social democratic welfare state coincided with the European Union’s one great accomplishment, the end of wars between the nation-states of Europe should give us pause for thought43. That the abolition of the death penalty followed these developments should make the relationship clear. What seals the argument is that the revived militarism, political repression and demonization of unpopular minority groups in Europe follow upon the efforts directed by the EU Commission and signed on to by every EU member government to privatize, liberalize markets, overcome workers’ resistance to “flexible” work organization, and impose neoliberal globalization44. The relationship between the democratic class struggle to defend subsistence and basic needs and the defense of individual rights and limitation of state power should be clear. That it isn’t should be attributed to an elitist, too-sophisticated by half approach to the state, democracy and class struggle that appears radical but in fact undermines the very foundations of democracy and social welfare by not making these struggles an integral part of its analysis.
The movements for democracy, the class and gender struggles that brought it about and have continued to try to extend it to more spheres of life are, as Marx explained to the First International, not extensions of state power, but partial transformations of the state from a police apparatus and killing machine for the ruling class into a set of functions whose institutions and cadre now concern themselves with caring for the needs of society’s members, with all the contradictions and flaws that studies of the welfare state have demonstrated but with all its benefits too: However, the more enlightened part of the working class fully understands that the future of its class, and, therefore, of mankind, altogether depends upon the formation of the rising working generation. They know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power.
On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts.
Let us look briefly at two examples in which states of exception were declared by democratically elected governments.
In India
, Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency, while arguably “overdetermined,” came at a particular period characterized by a large strike movement by workers and resistance to policies of her son Sanjay involving two forms of enclosure: slum clearance – expropriation of the poor from their housing – and forced sterilization46. The latter explicitly meets Agamben’s criteria for biopolitics in a democracy leading to a state of exception – though strangely he does not cite it as an example to strengthen his argument. This omission is perhaps due to the fact that, despite Indira Gandhi’s government being characterized by some policies favorable to the lower castes and the rural poor at times, it can hardly be seen as a welfare state or an example of social democracy. That is, its entry into biopolitical policies- the forced sterilization campaign – was purely repressive and not also a form of “care of the body” or social needs. It wasn’t democratic enough, in other words, to be demonized by Agamben.
The end of the state of emergency came about through normal democratic means, namely an election that threw Gandhi out of office. Agamben, we might point out, has no theory to address the ending of states of exception.
Marx, again speaking for the First International’s
General Council defined the Lincoln administration as, “the only example on record in which the Government fought for the people’s liberty, against a section of its own citizens.”47 Agamben, quite reasonably lists Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War as one of the historic states of exception declared by western liberal democracies that he sees as a precursor to today’s menaces. He is right, but in fact this goes to the heart of my argument against his approach. Three questions can be asked here: was the declaration of a state of emergency, as it were, or to be more precise, the use of exceptional measures, in the actual and not just declared defense of the interests of the popular classes and democracy rather than subversive of these? Was there a real emergency, in the sense that there was a plausible threat, not just to some lives and property say, but to the whole democratic order and survival of the society and of the interests of the popular classes? And was the declaration temporary and withdrawn after a short time and when the emergency was over? I think that a plausible case can be made that the answer is yes to all three of these, whereas in the case of say, the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, which involved the expropriation of land and property from the victims, the answer would certainly be no to the first two. But isn’t all this just a social democratic argument, one that forgets the long history of proletarian attempts to establish direct democracy through the Paris
Commune, the Soviets, the Workers Councils? Didn’t Marx also argue that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”?
Indeed, is this not why Negri and others have been drawn to a kind of photo-negative version of Schmitt’s state of exception – the revolutionary moment in which the proletariat or the multitude can rewrite both the material and the legal constitutions? The experience of recent and current movements and radical left governments in Latin America challenges the idea that a state of exception is needed to carry out constitutional transformation. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere, major changes are being carried out and new constitutions written48. These experiences, despite great diversity in their proposals, debates and outcomes, as well as of course the national contexts in which they occur, have several common features. First, they involve an alliance between an elected representative government and a mass movement that is itself quite diverse, but which is based on the working majority of the population; second they involve attempts to meld traditional representation using existing institutions and various forms of direct democracy at the workplace, neighborhood, and municipality; third, the new constitutions result from a large-scale discussion with serious input and participation from the grassroots and associations of all types; fourth, constitutional changes have been put to referenda votes, so it is the people, in an expression of Rousseau’s General Will, that can approve changes in which they participated both at the level of their associations and through representatives in drafting; fifth the changes affect the material constitution – the distribution of property, the rights of people to land or subsistence or income, as well as the legal apparatus; sixth, these movements typically involve movements of exactly those groups historically designated as homo sacer: the indigenous people of the continent. These movements and governments are certainly not without their contradictions, particularly regarding the role of the executive and relationship of leader to movement. But it would be a mistake to deny the autonomy, now greater, now lesser, of the movements from the heads of government, even in Venezuela49. No state of exception has been used to impose these changes; rather the only risks of a state of exception have come during the coup attempt by the opponents of
President Chavez of Venezuela, with backing from the Bush Administration, and the recent coup in Honduras, overthrowing President Zelaya. The mass democratic, proletarian movement that has opposed that coup testifies powerfully to the theses in this essay. Similarly, though in a very different context, the mass occupation of the capital Bangkok by pro-democracy demonstrators in
Thailand, largely farmers and urban workers, and the massacre they suffered at the hands of the military, the monarchy and the elites they protect, under martial law, again suggests that the lines are increasingly clearly drawn between one set of class forces demanding democracy so as to use democratic government and their own organized movement to meet the needs of the majority, and those who are willing to destroy civil liberties and democratic institutions if necessary, in order to impose and sustain neoliberal capitalist globalization and the inequalities it creates. Even the examples from the region that do not easily fit this model, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the radical democracy briefly created and crushed in Oaxaca have not been attempts at all or nothing insurrections, but have seen themselves as part of larger processes needed to democratize Mexico. Can these approaches work where both traditional social democracy and the revolutionary tradition of direct democracy have failed to fully transform the state from a machine for killing – from a permanent state of exception – into an instrument of the people to meet their needs under their control?
The struggles of peoples who have resisted expropriation for 500

years deserve our patience as they work out how to deal with conditions that
Agamben has only interpreted for us. The point remains to change them.
The system is self-correcting. Using the law solves.
Cinneide, 08
Colm O’Cinneide, Senior Lecturer in Law, Faculty of Laws, University College London Controlling the ‘Gorgon’ of state power in the state of exception: a reply to Professor Tushnet Colm Cambridge journals
♥
Tina
Are constitutional democracies therefore doomed to repeat a cycle of panic, overreaction, error and repentance over and over, whenever emergencies recur? A pessimistic response would not be unfounded. The suggestion made by Schmitt,
Agamben and others that the liberal constitutional state reveals its true authoritarian face in times of emergency strikes a chord of truth, especially when one considers Guantánamo Bay and the abuses associated with the current ‘War on Terror’
(Schmitt, 1932/2003 ; Agamben, 2005 ).
However, I share
some of
Tushnet’s apparent optimism that it is too easy to write off the resources of liberal democracy in this way.
I would nevertheless put forward an alternative account of how abuses of emergency powers may be controlled in constitutional democracies.
In the argument developed below, I suggest that political controls can prove effective
to some degree in reining in the excesses of emergency powers
, despite their serious limitations, if they play out against the backdrop of a constitutional culture where (a) the potential for abuse of emergency powers is recognised and (b) excessive violations of rights rub sharply against the grain of the normative values embedded in this system. In other words, political processes work best when energised by a surrounding constitutional culture that has absorbed the ‘social learning’ of previous errors, to borrow Tushnet’s phrase. The presence or absence of this culture, and the degree to which it is internalised through the various layers of governance of constitutional democracies, will determine the extent to which the use of emergency powers is controllable in practice. In contrast, the political dynamics discussed by Tushnet are ultimately of less importance. Admittedly, to have any real impact, this constitutional culture needs to be manifested through political processes
: if it is confined to the back corridors of the legal process, or to abstract national or supranational standards, then its impact will be muted and
easily disregarded in times of emergency
.
The political arena will be where the key issues are ultimately determined
. However, if this constitutional culture does not find some expression outside political processes, then this also may not be sufficient: for the reasons already summarised, political resistance to the logic of emergency powers is often too easily marginalised in the temporary panic of a crisis.
However, if this culture is manifested at both the legal and political level, the interplay between political and legal processes may ‘orient’ both towards a more questioning view of emergency powers. In addition, supranational frameworks may play a role, potentially opening up avenues for challenging and ultimately constraining the abuse of special powers.
Taken together, as I argue in detail below, the trace elements of this constitutional culture embedded in various national and supranational processes may limit the
‘horizon of possibilities’ available to governments in times of emergency, and restrict what they can do with their emergency powers .
Therefore, a key flaw in
Tushnet’s analysis is the excessively rigid dichotomy he draws between legal and political processes, with the former largely dismissed as being of marginal impact. This dichotomy is problematic for two reasons. First, legal processes may have more direct ‘bite’ on the use of emergency powers than his analysis admits, despite their serious limitations. Recent
UK experience demonstrates this strongly, as does the experience of other European countries: legal processes on this side of the Atlantic have proven since September 11 to be more than a ‘thin reed’, even if it would be grossly exaggerating to describe them as a mighty oak. Secondly, legal and political processes are inextricably intertwined in contemporary constitutional democracies. Often indirectly, legal processes help shape political processes, and thereby have a greater impact on controlling the use of emergency powers than Tushnet allows for in his conceptual framework. Perhaps
Tushnet’s customary intellectual valorisation of the political over the legal has this time caused him to underplay the potential impact of the latter. The shadow of legal controls plays an important role in shaping the constitutional culture and therefore the horizon of possibilities within which political actors operate. Ultimately, it is the interplay of legal, political and other processes and whether they combine to generate this constitutional culture that governs the ability of constitutional democracies to regulate the ‘state of exception’ opened up by the invocation of emergency powers.