-
From its very inception, the contestation of liberal modernity
has involved the refusal of the biopolitically constituted forms of
peace that liberalizing regimes inculcate within and among the
populations they govern. Subject to the imposition of their zero
time of peace we are compelled to retrieve and create anew the time
of life (Negri: 2003, 123). This is the grand paradox of liberal
modernity that Foucaults original account of biopolitics in The
History of Sexuality first exposed. Founding themselves upon the
challenge of the mastery of war in the name of a commitment to the
promotion and enablement of life, liberal regimes are being shaken
to their core today, animated by a fear and insecurity at lifes
refusal to submit to techniques aimed at its pacification. Founded
as a project based upon the pursuit of peace, liberal modernity
reconstitutes itself in the form of an endless terrorization of
lifes radical undecidability. Lifes aleatory immeasurability
initiates a biometrics of security. The time of life is suborned to
the regulation of a biopolitics that functions in accordance with
the degenerative powers of the norm. Zero time begins, constitutive
time ends. Those institutions, practices and processes of
subjectivation, indivisible from liberal strategies for the mastery
of the problem of war within society, can only be understood in
this context as a form of the terrorization of human dignity, where
time is lived constitutively.
In this paradoxical context, which we might more realistically
describe, after Achille Mbembe, as necropolitical (2003: 11-40), it
is imperative not only to continue to join in the longstanding
critique of the martial strategies of liberal peace but also to
reinvigorate our understanding of the immanent necessity of war to
the limitless movements of life that liberal peace attempts to
block through its incessant pursuit of biopolitics.2 This is the
precise foundation of a counter-strategic response to the
impositions of liberal techniques of discipline, control and
regulation that has empowered a tradition of thought which
stretches back as far as Clausewitz and Nietzsche. This tradition
is most readily identifiable in much of the later works of
Foucault, as well as others who have adapted their own polemologies
against liberal peace from him most notably, Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, as well as Antonio Negri.3 In turn, this is also
the form of argument we see empowering the renewal of radical
democratic traditions of politics as war in response to the current
onslaught of liberal terror defined by the global extension of
biopolitical techniques of control,
Immediate War Immaterial terror 1 Julian Reid
-
shaping the responses of liberal societies to their new
insecurities.4 For a better grasp of what is at stake in this
present conjuncture, we must therefore reverse the terms in which
this struggle is being articulated, and speak of the prosecution of
Terror on War. The concept of war refers here to what is most
material and immanent to the dignity of human life, and the concept
of terror to that which is most abstract from it. Far from
representing a war upon an immaterial abstraction as its discourse
otherwise suggests, this is a conflict incited by an immaterial
regime of biopower dedicated to the terrorizing of lifes most
material instinct war.5
If the discourse of peace was fundamental to the consecration
and development of biopower in the modern nation-state, it has
become as if not more fundamental to the increasingly biopolitical
forms of regime that have now exceeded the traditional form of the
nation-state. These biopolitical forms of regime now function as
the bedrock of a globalizing order, in the name of the extension of
which terror is being conducted today. The global control of
populations via technologies deriving from the molecular and
digital revolutions, the targeting of the natural life of
individual bodies through biometric techniques, hail the formation
of biopolitical regimes that are in the process of establishing new
thresholds of strategic virtuosity.6 Contesting the globalizing
tendencies of those biopolitical regimes which now exceed the
traditional nation-state form necessarily involves not only
refusing their most fundamental value of peace and exposing their
foundation in terror, but also engaging in the further and decisive
act of retrieving the constitutive dignity of war as the font of
life. In this sense it means not only contesting the ways in which
peace has been formulated as a response to the political problem of
war formulations which have themselves been, and continue to be,
constitutive of the failures of modernity to realize in any
tangible sense its foundational ideal of peace but also insisting
on the retrieval of the irreducible force of war that liberal
regimes attempt to capture and put to work in the reproduction of
their docile social orders. The current conflict provides clear
testimony to both these paradoxical features: liberal regimes
propensity to terrorize populations into submission and the
irreducibility of the force of war to the vagaries of terror. If
the current prosecution of Terror on War represents the vainest of
attempts to trap the movements of war within the narrow confines of
a biopolitical account of human being, as well as testifying to the
decrepitude of the liberal ideal of a pacified humanity, it also
bears witness to the indissolubility of the warrior class.
Such idle talk in support of war and its warriors is, of course,
likely to be misconstrued. In preemption of such misunderstandings
we would do well to
-
remind ourselves of a crucial but oft forgotten distinction,
that between warriors and soldiers. Foucault it was who first drew
attention in Discipline and Punish to the military origins of all
disciplinary and biopolitical systems of subjection and regulation.
This biopolitical machine for the production of social civility,
which liberals called into being in the name of peace, has
developed only in the context of a form of regime founded upon the
ability to reduce the warriors dignified immeasurability to the
calculated uniformity of the soldier. Biopolitics was prefigured by
the development of the disciplines, which meant that by the late
eighteenth century, the soldier had become something that could be
made: out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required
could be constructed; posture was gradually corrected; a calculated
constraint running slowly through each part of the body, mastering
it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into
the automatism of habit; in short, one had got rid of the peasant
and given him the air of the soldier. (Foucault, 1991: 135)
Those disciplinary techniques for the reduction of the war
instinct to an aptitude for logistics via the supervision of the
smallest fragments of the bodies of men all derived from the new
military systems of organization that emerged in the eighteenth
century, the development and refinement of which have haunted the
passage of liberal societies from war to terror. It is only slowly,
through the gradual dissemination of civility throughout society as
a whole, that we have become subject in the context of the school,
the barracks, the hospital or the workshop, to this paranoiac
system for the mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the
infinite (Foucault, 1991: 140). I see many soldiers: if only I
could see many warriors! remonstrated Nietzsche (1969: 1974). How
sorry, for old Friedrich, that he did not live to see the gay
denizens of Falluja; they who did not flinch in resisting the
contingencies of the forms of logistical connectivity otherwise
insisted on as universal and objective conditions for the
generation of civil and pacific life forms.
If we must not forget the martial genealogy that accounts for
the upright bearing of our civilities and proprieties, neither must
we surrender that immanent force of
war which biopolitical regimes attempt to martial to extinction.
In answer to this injunction the counter-strategic tradition finds
its voice. Its call to arms is incessant from Foucaults own
exhortation to an ascetic combat of the self (1992: 63-72), to
Deleuze and Guattaris construction of a counter-concept of
philosophy to wage war against past and future wars (1996: 160), to
Hardt and Negris multitudinous intervention in their construction
of a grand civil war of modernity between order and desire (2001:
74-5). As liberal modernity problematizes lifes undecidability as
the source of the problem of war, and as the development of
biopolitical peace takes the form of a terrorization of the very
condition of being alive, we have as often sought an answer in the
return to and an insistence upon war as a condition of possibility
for the expression of life. Faced with the grand paradox of the
experience of a liberal modernity in which the promise of a world
devoid of violent differences forces us in a fundamental sense to
choose sides, we who object have literally followed suit and
attempted to choose sides. The martiality of liberal biopolitics
revealed, the pursuit of a response to the phenomenon of liberal
terror has assumed the form of a war of resistance against the
imposition of this insidious biometric violence. As such the
question rendered is that of how to assume war as a condition of
possibility for the constitution and generation of life. What form
does life take when peace is no longer its foundation but its
enemy? What form does being assume when war is the determinate
condition of its possibility? What is the temporality of war when
the decision for war is lifes aleatory throw of the dice?
Yet are we perhaps tiring of the marshalling we subject
ourselves to when we succumb to such endless polemologies? For some
time the temptation has been to respond to such paradoxes by
inverting the terms in which the problem of war is traditionally
posed by those modern formations of power that have sought peace.
War is nothing other than a political instrument, declared
Clausewitz (1993: 77). His apparent insistence upon the
subordination of war to politics has functioned as the principal
formula for the strategy by which political sovereignty
delegitimizes questions over the terrorizing techniques with which
life is marshaled biopolitically to surrender the autonomy of war
to its protector. In opposition to this strategy of sovereignty,
Deleuze and Guattari have exhorted us to think the concept of war
as the pure form of exteriority that life assumes irrespective of
the sovereigns duress (1996: 354). War is not simply the mythical
condition of a state of nature which legitimates the political
relationship of sovereign to subject and which biopolitical regimes
declare as their basis for the administration of life.
continues
-
remind ourselves of a crucial but oft forgotten distinction,
that between warriors and soldiers. Foucault it was who first drew
attention in Discipline and Punish to the military origins of all
disciplinary and biopolitical systems of subjection and regulation.
This biopolitical machine for the production of social civility,
which liberals called into being in the name of peace, has
developed only in the context of a form of regime founded upon the
ability to reduce the warriors dignified immeasurability to the
calculated uniformity of the soldier. Biopolitics was prefigured by
the development of the disciplines, which meant that by the late
eighteenth century, the soldier had become something that could be
made: out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required
could be constructed; posture was gradually corrected; a calculated
constraint running slowly through each part of the body, mastering
it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into
the automatism of habit; in short, one had got rid of the peasant
and given him the air of the soldier. (Foucault, 1991: 135)
Those disciplinary techniques for the reduction of the war
instinct to an aptitude for logistics via the supervision of the
smallest fragments of the bodies of men all derived from the new
military systems of organization that emerged in the eighteenth
century, the development and refinement of which have haunted the
passage of liberal societies from war to terror. It is only slowly,
through the gradual dissemination of civility throughout society as
a whole, that we have become subject in the context of the school,
the barracks, the hospital or the workshop, to this paranoiac
system for the mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the
infinite (Foucault, 1991: 140). I see many soldiers: if only I
could see many warriors! remonstrated Nietzsche (1969: 1974). How
sorry, for old Friedrich, that he did not live to see the gay
denizens of Falluja; they who did not flinch in resisting the
contingencies of the forms of logistical connectivity otherwise
insisted on as universal and objective conditions for the
generation of civil and pacific life forms.
If we must not forget the martial genealogy that accounts for
the upright bearing of our civilities and proprieties, neither must
we surrender that immanent force of
war which biopolitical regimes attempt to martial to extinction.
In answer to this injunction the counter-strategic tradition finds
its voice. Its call to arms is incessant from Foucaults own
exhortation to an ascetic combat of the self (1992: 63-72), to
Deleuze and Guattaris construction of a counter-concept of
philosophy to wage war against past and future wars (1996: 160), to
Hardt and Negris multitudinous intervention in their construction
of a grand civil war of modernity between order and desire (2001:
74-5). As liberal modernity problematizes lifes undecidability as
the source of the problem of war, and as the development of
biopolitical peace takes the form of a terrorization of the very
condition of being alive, we have as often sought an answer in the
return to and an insistence upon war as a condition of possibility
for the expression of life. Faced with the grand paradox of the
experience of a liberal modernity in which the promise of a world
devoid of violent differences forces us in a fundamental sense to
choose sides, we who object have literally followed suit and
attempted to choose sides. The martiality of liberal biopolitics
revealed, the pursuit of a response to the phenomenon of liberal
terror has assumed the form of a war of resistance against the
imposition of this insidious biometric violence. As such the
question rendered is that of how to assume war as a condition of
possibility for the constitution and generation of life. What form
does life take when peace is no longer its foundation but its
enemy? What form does being assume when war is the determinate
condition of its possibility? What is the temporality of war when
the decision for war is lifes aleatory throw of the dice?
Yet are we perhaps tiring of the marshalling we subject
ourselves to when we succumb to such endless polemologies? For some
time the temptation has been to respond to such paradoxes by
inverting the terms in which the problem of war is traditionally
posed by those modern formations of power that have sought peace.
War is nothing other than a political instrument, declared
Clausewitz (1993: 77). His apparent insistence upon the
subordination of war to politics has functioned as the principal
formula for the strategy by which political sovereignty
delegitimizes questions over the terrorizing techniques with which
life is marshaled biopolitically to surrender the autonomy of war
to its protector. In opposition to this strategy of sovereignty,
Deleuze and Guattari have exhorted us to think the concept of war
as the pure form of exteriority that life assumes irrespective of
the sovereigns duress (1996: 354). War is not simply the mythical
condition of a state of nature which legitimates the political
relationship of sovereign to subject and which biopolitical regimes
declare as their basis for the administration of life.
continues
-
Continued It is the speed of a force of movement that political
sovereignty ceaselessly fails to capture in performing the kinds of
biopolitical manoeuvres upon which forms of civil pacificity are
built. And in response we are necessarily exhorted to pursue the
intensive counter-state of an abstract war without limits, which
Clausewitz evoked in his more sublime moments.7 It is precisely
this heretical reading of Clausewitz which empowered Deleuze and
Guattaris conceptualization of war as antithetical to State power.
And it is in turn they who have inspired the more latter-day
attempts of Hardt and Negri to reground war as a condition of
resistance to post-nation-state formations of Empire.8
Foucaults ultimate significance in this context is, however, of
another order altogether. How long, he asks in Society Must Be
Defended, will it be until we recognize the limits of the
invocations of these imperatives of counter-strategy? How long
until we tire not so much of the old-fashioned demand for
neutrality but of this perpetual parlor game of proliferating
divisions, minor offensives, sieges and snares that enslave the
counter-strategic tradition? Is there no idiom imaginable to life
other than this endless wiring of force relations and incessant
generation of wars limitless potentialities? Regardless of the
challenges to the disciplinary techniques and biopolitical
management for the manufacture of subjectivities that this
insistence upon wars exteriority affords, it is today as necessary
to raise questions about the limits imposed on the potentialities
for life when such an ontological account of being as time of war
is mobilized as politics. If the peace that political sovereignty
sanctions and upholds is a historically and politically contingent
disequilibrium of force relations, then one means to contest that
peace is to disturb its martial genealogy, to pervert its order and
disinter its pathologies. The biopolitical figures in this context
as the residual forms which life assumes once political sovereignty
renders the labour of immanence constituent, conceivable only in
the context of the existence of the insurrection of immanent
struggles against the forms of transcendence that biopolitically
sanctioned forms of life necessarily acquire. In this sense all of
these post-1968 messianic refrains aid ultimately the sustenance of
the regimes of biopolitics they would otherwise claim to undermine.
Forces of immanent war and biopolitical regimes of immaterial
terror exist in the form of a confrontation, yet the development of
biopolitical modernity has only ever functioned as the sign of the
tragic labor of immanence, not simply of the weakening of modern
forms of political sovereignty but of the intensification and
dissemination of the biopolitical imperium produce at all costs.
The commodity of this biopolitical production, which Hardt
and Negri endorse fully, resembles nothing more than the kind of
living death evoked by Keith Farquhars Zone so exactly (see detail
below), and which in turn provokes a grim symbiosis with the mise
en scne of a Musab al- Zarqawi home video (Hardt & Negri, 2004:
94-5).
In attempting to think the temporality of war we subject
ourselves to that same slavish imperium of biopolitics: one can
summarize in the following manner the imperatives of the
immeasurable for the singularities that constitute the multitude:
do not obey, that is be free; do not kill, that is generate; do not
exploit, that is constitute the common. In other words you will be
able to decide the common. (Negri, 2003: 258)
When will the tireless duty of ontological labor, the demand to
know the temporality of war itself, incite the challenge of a
concept of living that exceeds such biopolitical imperia? This is
the ultimate demand of Foucault to his counter-strategic peers. It
is one by which he realizes the essential logic of war, rather as
Hannibal did in enveloping the Romans at Cannae, and destroys those
grounds of enunciation from which virtually everything he had
enabled himself to argue previously had been declared.
It would be wrong, then, to read these final words of Foucault
on the problem of the relation of war to biopolitics as a simple
demand for the reassertion of a pacifist politics. Neither is it a
call merely to clarify the boundaries that define the differences
between a newly legitimate democratic violence and the illegitimate
wars of sovereign powers. Such demands only ever lead, as they do
so perspicuously in Hardt and Negris most recent Multitude, to tame
insistences upon the resubordination of violence to politics (2004:
342). How ironic that such a heartfelt project of the
deterritorialization of the war-instinct should lead to the
adoption of a position in respect of the problem of violence which
pulls precisely the same manoeuvre of delegitimization that
consecrated the sovereign power of the nation-state! And how
demoralizing when the repentance of war provides the discursive
grounds for the constitution of a new race whose accomplishments,
they tell us, must be defended (2004: 356, 344). The problem of war
becomes, at this conjuncture, utterly intractable. Immanent war
begets immaterial terror.
-
Continued It is the speed of a force of movement that political
sovereignty ceaselessly fails to capture in performing the kinds of
biopolitical manoeuvres upon which forms of civil pacificity are
built. And in response we are necessarily exhorted to pursue the
intensive counter-state of an abstract war without limits, which
Clausewitz evoked in his more sublime moments.7 It is precisely
this heretical reading of Clausewitz which empowered Deleuze and
Guattaris conceptualization of war as antithetical to State power.
And it is in turn they who have inspired the more latter-day
attempts of Hardt and Negri to reground war as a condition of
resistance to post-nation-state formations of Empire.8
Foucaults ultimate significance in this context is, however, of
another order altogether. How long, he asks in Society Must Be
Defended, will it be until we recognize the limits of the
invocations of these imperatives of counter-strategy? How long
until we tire not so much of the old-fashioned demand for
neutrality but of this perpetual parlor game of proliferating
divisions, minor offensives, sieges and snares that enslave the
counter-strategic tradition? Is there no idiom imaginable to life
other than this endless wiring of force relations and incessant
generation of wars limitless potentialities? Regardless of the
challenges to the disciplinary techniques and biopolitical
management for the manufacture of subjectivities that this
insistence upon wars exteriority affords, it is today as necessary
to raise questions about the limits imposed on the potentialities
for life when such an ontological account of being as time of war
is mobilized as politics. If the peace that political sovereignty
sanctions and upholds is a historically and politically contingent
disequilibrium of force relations, then one means to contest that
peace is to disturb its martial genealogy, to pervert its order and
disinter its pathologies. The biopolitical figures in this context
as the residual forms which life assumes once political sovereignty
renders the labour of immanence constituent, conceivable only in
the context of the existence of the insurrection of immanent
struggles against the forms of transcendence that biopolitically
sanctioned forms of life necessarily acquire. In this sense all of
these post-1968 messianic refrains aid ultimately the sustenance of
the regimes of biopolitics they would otherwise claim to undermine.
Forces of immanent war and biopolitical regimes of immaterial
terror exist in the form of a confrontation, yet the development of
biopolitical modernity has only ever functioned as the sign of the
tragic labor of immanence, not simply of the weakening of modern
forms of political sovereignty but of the intensification and
dissemination of the biopolitical imperium produce at all costs.
The commodity of this biopolitical production, which Hardt
and Negri endorse fully, resembles nothing more than the kind of
living death evoked by Keith Farquhars Zone so exactly (see detail
below), and which in turn provokes a grim symbiosis with the mise
en scne of a Musab al- Zarqawi home video (Hardt & Negri, 2004:
94-5).
In attempting to think the temporality of war we subject
ourselves to that same slavish imperium of biopolitics: one can
summarize in the following manner the imperatives of the
immeasurable for the singularities that constitute the multitude:
do not obey, that is be free; do not kill, that is generate; do not
exploit, that is constitute the common. In other words you will be
able to decide the common. (Negri, 2003: 258)
When will the tireless duty of ontological labor, the demand to
know the temporality of war itself, incite the challenge of a
concept of living that exceeds such biopolitical imperia? This is
the ultimate demand of Foucault to his counter-strategic peers. It
is one by which he realizes the essential logic of war, rather as
Hannibal did in enveloping the Romans at Cannae, and destroys those
grounds of enunciation from which virtually everything he had
enabled himself to argue previously had been declared.
It would be wrong, then, to read these final words of Foucault
on the problem of the relation of war to biopolitics as a simple
demand for the reassertion of a pacifist politics. Neither is it a
call merely to clarify the boundaries that define the differences
between a newly legitimate democratic violence and the illegitimate
wars of sovereign powers. Such demands only ever lead, as they do
so perspicuously in Hardt and Negris most recent Multitude, to tame
insistences upon the resubordination of violence to politics (2004:
342). How ironic that such a heartfelt project of the
deterritorialization of the war-instinct should lead to the
adoption of a position in respect of the problem of violence which
pulls precisely the same manoeuvre of delegitimization that
consecrated the sovereign power of the nation-state! And how
demoralizing when the repentance of war provides the discursive
grounds for the constitution of a new race whose accomplishments,
they tell us, must be defended (2004: 356, 344). The problem of war
becomes, at this conjuncture, utterly intractable. Immanent war
begets immaterial terror.
-
Endnotes 1 This is an edited transcription of the authors
address to Antonio Negri in June
2004 at Birkbeck College, London. 2 For a different account of
the martial politics of liberalism see Michael Dillon
(2003) Intelligence Incarnate: Martial Corporeality in the
Digital Age. Body and Society.9, 4: 149-68.
3 Most significantly in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1
(1990: 92-102). The strategic model of power that Foucault portrays
derives from his claim that it is one of the essential traits of
Western societies that the force relationships which for a long
time had found expression in war, in every form of warfare,
gradually became invested in the order of political power (102).
See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1999) A Thousand
Plateaus. London: Athlone Press, 351-423; Antonio Negri (2003) Time
For Revolution. London and New York: Continuum, 122-26.
4 See, for example, Miguel Vatter, Politics as war: a formula
for radical democracy,
http//multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=42
5 A much neglected yet valuable discussion of the relation of
war to the instincts is to be found in Edward Glover (1935) War,
Sadism & Pacifism. London: George Allen & Unwin.
6 See Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2001) Global Liberal
Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War. Millennium: Journal of
International Studies.30, 1: 41-66.
7 Clausewitz (1993: 85). While Clausewitz is almost exclusively
remembered for his dictum that war is nothing but the continuation
of politics with other means, his more fundamental definition of
the concept of war was that of an act of force to which there is no
logical limit.
8 On Clausewitzs influence upon Deleuze and Guattari see, A
Thousand Plateaus (1999: 420-21). For a more extensive analysis of
how Deleuze engages with Clausewitz see also Julian Reid (2003)
Deleuzes War Machine: Nomadism Against the State. Millennium:
Journal of International Studies. 32, 1: 57-85.
9 Foucault (2003) Society Must Be Defended. London: Picador. See
especially the first lecture of the series, pp1-19. There can be no
doubt that Foucault understood one of the foundational remits of
the series to be the laying down of a challenge to the
conceptualization of war as a condition of possibility for
resistance to political sovereignty, a point that was developed by
Deleuze and Guattari in their two volumes of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia.
-
References Clausewitz, C Von. (1993) On War. London: Everyman.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1996) What is Philosophy? London
and New York:
Verso. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1999) A Thousand
Plateaus. London: Athlone
Press. Dillon M. & Reid, J. (2001) Global Liberal
Governance: Biopolitics, Security and
War. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, 1: 41-66.
Dillon, M. (2003) Intelligence Incarnate: Martial Corporeality in
the Digital Age.
Body and Society 9, 4: 149-68. Foucault, M. (1990) The History
of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. London:
Penguin. Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish.London:
Penguin. Foucault, M. (1992) The Use of Pleasure: The History of
Sexuality: Volume 2.
London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must Be Defended.
London: Picador. Glover, E. (1935) War, Sadism & Pacifism.
London: George Allen & Unwin. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001)
Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2001. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and
Democracy in the Age of Empire.
New York: Penguin Press. Mbembe, A. (2003) Necropolitics. Public
Culture 15, 1:11-40. Negri, A. (2003) Time for Revolution. London:
Continuum. Nietzsche, F. (1969) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London:
Penguin. Reid, J. (2003) Deleuzes War Machine: Nomadism Against the
State.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 32, 1: 57-85.
Vatter, M. (2002) Politics as war: a formula for radical democracy,
Multutides
WEB. http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=42
Dr Julian ReidLecturer in International RelationsDepartment of
International Relations, University of SussexBrighton, United
Kingdom
[email protected]