BEYOND BIOPOLITICS

Essays on the Governance of Life and Death

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5003-3

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….viiINTRODUCTION Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse…………………………..11. National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers Brian Massumi…………………………………………………192. Human Security/National Security: Gender Branding and Population Racism Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse…………………463. “The Turban Is Not a Hat”: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling Jasbir Puar……………………………………………….654. Strict Scrutiny: The Tragedy of Constitutional Law Sora Y. Han……………………………………………………………….1065. Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic Eugene Thacker………………………………………………………………..1396. Mnemonic Control Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman…………………………………………………………………………..1637. Thanato-tactics Eyal Weizman……………………………………………………………………………………………..1778. Strange Circulations Ann S. Anagnost………………………………………………………………………………………2139. Necropolitical Surveillance: Immigrants from Turkey in Germany Çagatay Topal……………………………………………….23810. From the Race War to the War on Terror Randy Martin………………………………………………………………………..25811. “Seeing” Spectral Agencies: An Analysis of Lin+Lam and Unidentified Vietnam Una Chung………………………………………….27712. Here We Accrete Durations: Toward a Practice of Intervals in the Perceptual Mode of Power Amit S. Rai……………………………30613. Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe May Joseph…………………………………………………………………………..33214. Blackness and Governance Fred Moten and Stefano Harney……………………………………………………………………..351Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….363Contributors……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….381Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..385

Chapter One

Brian Massumi

NATIONAL ENTERPRISE EMERGENCY

Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers

OF WAR AND THE WEATHER

A leisurely three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush touched down in New Orleans, into the media swirl of a brief but lavishly staged son-et-lumière spectacular from the heart of the French Quarter. His nationally televised address struck the appropriate tone of urgency, in studied contrast to the languor of his practical response. Bush landed on the beachhead of natural disaster not as chief executive of the civilian bureaucracy, but in his post-9/11 capacity as commander in chief. Help, he assured, was on the way “by land, by air, by sea.” National Guard units recently returned from Iraq would spearhead the “armies of compassion” massing. They would be joined by the U.S. Army’s 82nd airborne division, fresh from assignment in Afghanistan.

This transfer from an escalating war half a world away to a storm-beaten home-front mid-America drew a link between war and the weather. Their respective theaters of conflict, geopolitical and socio-climatic, fell into line. The weather, exceptionally figuring as an urban assault force, had taken a prominent place in the spectrum of threat. “This was not a normal hurricane,” Bush reminded us. “Nature is indiscriminate,” a chorus of administration officials had repeated in the preceding days. What was this hurricane if not the full-force expression of nature’s indiscriminateness, amplified to the status of a national emergency? Katrina was the meteorological equivalent of the improvised devices then exploding onto the scene of the U.S. effort in Iraq. This hurricane was to the weather what a terrorist insurgency is to “nation-building.” Each bombing is a self-organized microevent punctually expressing endemic background conditions of instability. Like the fabled flap of the butterfly wing seeding popular accounts of chaos theory with an ebullition of proto-Katrinas, the agitations bubble and build, resonating to crisis proportions. Background conditions of instability can feed up the scale, reaching the level where the security dikes are breached, channels of order swamped, and bulwarks of stability erode and even collapse.

This is the figure of today’s threat: the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat is not only indiscriminate; coming anywhere, as out of nowhere, at any time, it is also indiscriminable. Its continual microflapping in the background makes it indistinguishable from the general environment, now one with a restless climate of agitation. Between irruptions, it blends in with the chaotic background, subsiding into its own preamplified incipience, already active, still imperceptible. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to a churning seed-bed of crisis in the perpetual making. This hurricane may well have been abnormal. But it expressed nothing so much as the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and the weather.

WAR CLIMATE

In his address, Bush reinforced the war-weather continuum while at the same time strategically breaking its symmetry: “In a time of terror threats and weapons of mass destruction, the danger to our citizens reaches much wider than a flood plain.” The generic model of the indiscriminate threat remains, most broadly, the enemy in war. “Most broadly” here means most intensely: more insistently incipient, more everywhere, potentially. Weather conditions are unlikely be major formative factors in an IEd incident, but a large-scale weather-related disruption may well be enemy-agitated. Drought-induced fires in Greece in the summer of 2007 attracted investigation by counter-terrorism agencies. Why? Because no one could say for sure that arson was not involved. Given that uncertainty, “we can say that this is truly constitutes an asymmetric threat,” said the Minister of Public Order “without elaborating.” Uncertainty truly determines a threat, prior to any elaboration, to be a potential national security concern. In a crisis-prone environment, threat is endemic, uncertainty is everywhere; a negative can never be proven. Positive military response must then be ever at the ready. The on-all-the-time, everywhere-on-the-ready military response operatively annexes the civilian sphere to the conduct of war. Civilian life falls onto a continuum with war, permanently potentially premilitarized, a pole on the spectrum. Any domain harboring threats with a potential to disrupt the rhythms of civilian life is similarly annexed, climate included.

The Bush administration formalized this operative annexation of the civilian sphere, in its chaotic interdependence with other self-organizing systemic environments such as the weather, with two reciprocal moves: on the one hand militarizing the National Guard, traditionally defined as a national police force for service in domestic crises, by extending its service overseas to Iraq; and on the other hand overturning the longstanding ban on the deployment of U.S. military forces on domestic soil, extending the military’s reach in the inverse direction, toward active duty among its own civilians. This mutual inverse extension of operations betokened the construction of a civilian-military continuum covering the full spectrum of indiscriminate threat. The operational continuum was laced with potential openings for outright military intervention at any point. The openings came in the form of arbitrarily invokable “exceptions” to such civil guarantees as habeas corpus and the right to privacy.

The aim was to make war response as ubiquitously irruptible as the indiscriminate threats it seeks to counter. The civil sphere would no longer stand outside the military sphere, defined as its opposite. It would become integrally paramilitary, in operative continuity with war powers, on a continuum with them, suffused with battle potential, even in peace.

The continuum, as it expresses itself on the amplified level of government administration, runs between two institutional poles. At one pole stand the many departments and compartments of the U.S. national defense establishment, and at the other pole stands that enduring monument of the Bush administration, the tentacular Department of Homeland Security.

NATURAL SECURITY

That the Obama administration would prove reluctant or unable to fundamentally reverse this full-spectrum recomposition of power, even while distancing itself from many aspects of Bush administration policy, was unintentionally foreshadowed before Obama took office. The announcement to the press of Obama’s national security team contained a telling typo. “In this uncertain world,” the statement read, the continued prosecution of the “war on terrorism” requires a “skillful integration” of American power in all its forms [read: on the full spectrum], enabling immediate response to any potential “catastrophe be it manmade or natural,” as well as to “unconventional” (read: indiscriminate/indiscriminable) threats of any stripe. The public was assured that the future president had assembled the best possible team of “natural security” officers.

It is more than a slip of the keyboard to naturalize the continuum annexing the civilian sphere to the military. The “naturalization” at issue should not be understood in the social constructivist sense, in which the cultural comes to be taken for natural. The formula of the cultural “taken for” natural leaves the opposition between the two intact, attributing any blurring of the boundaries to mystification. Under indiscriminate threat, the opposition is no longer generally tenable and cannot be taken as a starting point. A base redefinition of nature is required outside any categorical opposition to the cultural, social, or artificial. The overall environment of life now appears as a complex, systemic threat environment, composed of subsystems that are not only complex in their own right but are complexly interconnected. They are all susceptible to self-amplifying irruptive disruption. Given the interconnections, a disruption in one subsystem may propagate into others, and even cascade across them all, reaching higher and wider levels of amplification, up to and including the planetary scale. The complexity of the interdependency among the changing climate system, the food supply system, the energy supply system, social systems, national governments, their respective legal systems, and military-security apparatuses is an increasingly preoccupying case in point.

Each subsystem harbors endemic threats specific to its operative domain. Each is also haunted by the exogenous threats represented by flow-over effects from neighboring subsystems. In spite of this diversity and variability, the relation of each subsystem to threat is isomorphic. This means that threat operates analogously regardless of the characteristics of a given domain, the specificity of the domain’s elements, and those elements’ particular functional structuring in the workings of a given system. This is as much a journalistic observation as a philosophical assertion. Let Newsweek speak. “Disease and Terror,” screams a 2009 headline:

The similarities between the swine flu and biological terrorism are not coincidental. In recent years the world has changed in ways that have made the threats of natural and man-made epidemics more and more alike. As we deal with increasing prospects of a bioterrorist attack, we are also struggling with the challenge of emerging diseases…. The way these threats unfold—and the responses they call for—are becoming ever more similar. The central driver is the increasingly interconnected world we live in…. Diseases now … without warning, show up in far-flung towns and cities…. It’s difficult to overstate the threat [of bioterrorist attack] … It is virtually impossible to stop or interdict … organisms [that] would float as an invisible, odorless cloud, driven by breezes.

Threat is as ubiquitous as the wind, and its source as imperceptible. It just shows up. It breaks out. It irrupts without warning, coming from any direction, following any path through the increasingly complex and interconnected world. The longer it has been that a threat has not materialized, the greater the prospects must be that it will: It is difficult to overstate an indiscriminate threat. It is impossible to stop. Absence makes the threat loom larger. Its form is a priori neither human nor natural. Its form is in the looming, as-yet-undetermined potential to suddenly show up and spread. Threat is self-organizing, self-amplifying, indiscriminate, and tirelessly agitating as a background condition, potentially ready to irrupt. The potential of threat is already, in the waiting, an incipient systemic disruption. The world did not wait for swine flu pandemic level five to disrupt daily routines, travel, and trade.

The etiology is always synergistic. In the web of highly interdependent subsystems, the moment a threat has amplified to noticeable proportions it is already fixing to propagate across the web of interconnections, its effects already prospectively felt. Complex nonlinear causation is the rule, between moments of the event (the outbreak already bringing a foretaste of the anticipated outcome) as between systems. The conditions of emergence of swine flu reside as much in the stress of industrial pork farming, the intensive human-pig commerce it necessitates, the globalized capital market it feeds, as in “natural” process of viral mutation. The “cause” of the pandemic is an ultimately untraceable nonlinear microflow that self-amplified and spread across the planet. The fateful interspecies connection between human and swine (with an avian contribution somewhere in the mix) occurred in a zone of indistinction between species, and between systems (genetics, animal husbandry, economics, and the human practices associated with all three).

Global warming is another prominent example. It is intensified by nonlinear feedback between a complex combination of factors. Hardly a day goes by without another “multiplier effect” being discovered. Even if contributing factors, taken separately, may be ascribable as either natural or manmade from the point of view of the classification scheme of a given system, in the synergistic process of their producing an effect they are integrally both and neither. If indiscriminate threat could be categorized as natural, as opposed to cultural or artificial, it would not be indiscriminate.

SINGULAR-GENERIC

Indiscriminate threat is generic threat, in a sense of “generic” that has nothing to do with “general.” So far is indiscriminate threat from a generality that it deserves a name accentuating its difference: singular-generic.

The singular-generic of threat is the unstable holding-together of divergent possible ascriptions as to the form and identity of the threat in an inclusive disjunction. An inclusive disjunction is the either/or of a number of possible terms belonging to different genera copresenting themselves in such direct proximity as to stroboscope into what is effectively a both/and. The instantaneity of generic differences coming together is a singular event. More precisely, it is the just-beginning of an event, an eventfulness suddenly making itself felt. What is felt is more than the possibility of alternate ascriptions. It is the potential for the coming to pass of eventualities answering to those ascriptions.

This incipience of an event as yet to be determined, overfull with really felt potential, carries an untenable tension. It strikes like a force. Its intensely problematic holding-together, of what cannot actually come together, is unbearable. The tension is unlivable. It must resolve itself. It is a life-problem that must play out. The both/and must shake down into one or the other. Foreign infiltrator or “homegrown” terrorist? Arson or climate change? Flu or bioterrorism? Accident or attack? If at the moment of impact an assumption is made as to one or the other, any forthcoming response may well prove to have been misplaced by the event’s subsequent unfolding. On the other hand, if at some point in that unfolding a determination is not made, systematic response will fail to develop.

The singular-generic is a compelling charge of felt potential striking with the full force of an indeterminacy that is not a simple lack of determination, but a determination to be determined of a coming event, welling into formation.

The problem for systems triggering into operation to field the event is that the charge of indeterminacy which is the birthmark of the event carries across systemic determinations of it, emerging out of the far side of the systems’ fielding, in the form of synergetic effects. The both/and returns. Arson encouraged and augmented by climate change: both/and. A copycat terrorist transposing the foreign onto the home front: both/and. Global warming intensified by feedback effects between human industrial activity and climate dynamics: both/and. In every case, there is the irruptive event of a threat just showing up, or noticeably crossing a threshold to another. Each onset and transition hits with the force of an attack, and carries across into flow-over effects indistinguishable from one (“the way these threats unfold and the responses they call for are becoming ever more similar”). What begins with an indeterminacy determined-to-be-determined ends by overspilling any system-specific definitions it may have been ascribed in called-for rapid response. What is born in indiscriminate potential, returns to it. The life cycle of a threat-event is a nonlinear looping, its “cause,” complex and nonlocal. Any ascription earned is pragmatic and provisional, relative to a particular systemic take on the event.

The accident is not one example among others. In today’s environment, given the indeterminacy at impact, every event strikes with the self-overflowing attack-force of the accident. The accident is the general model of the singular-generic of threat. Or rather, since the singular-generic is by nature unamenable to any generality, it is the matrix.

(Continues…)

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